A World Without Norms

Historicizing Critique and Postcritique

In May 2019, I attended and spoke at a conference — “Reading in the Age of Trump: The Politics and Possibility of Literary Studies Now” — hosted by Johannes Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany. As the organizers explain, the conference aimed to “historicize the past two decades in literary criticism in order to examine its present politics and future possibility.” [1] Over the course of three days, the conference participants identified many of the twenty-first century’s […]