Critical Credos

ns 71-72 | Winter/Spring 2009

Our precarious times seem a good moment for critics to think about what they believe and why they do criticism. The new issue of minnesota review features nineteen essays by young, old, and in-between critics about what they do and where they think criticism should go.

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Jim Cocola

Jim Cocola, a doctoral candidate in English at University of Virginia, is finishing a dissertation, on the imaginative making of place in contemporary American poetry.

Poetry | Fiction | Interviews & Essays | Provocations | Surveying the Field

Surveying the Field

• Eyes on the University (on Derek Bok, Universities in the Marketplace: The Commercialization of Higher Education [Princeton: Princeton UP, 2003]; Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2, trans. Jan Plug, et al., [Stanford: Stanford UP, 2004]; Ravinder Kaur Sidhu, Universities and Globalization: To Market, To Market [Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2006]; Sheila Slaughter and Gary Rhoades, Academic Capitalism and the New Economy: Markets, State and Higher Education [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004]; and Jennifer Washburn, University, Inc.: The Corporate Corruption of American Higher Education [New York: Basic, 2005].)
  Appears in: ns 67: Intellectualism and the Public

MR BOOKS

Critics at Work
ed. Jeffrey J. Williams.

Critics at Work offers a guided tour through the central, sometimes confusing and frequently controversial developments in contemporary literary and cultural criticism. The tour guides, however, are not distant observers but have been primary participants in those developments, and they report on theory, cultural studies, the literary canon, the recent focus on race, sexuality, and other identities, the state of the univerisity, and the role of the intellectual. Throughout, they consider the not always easy negotiation of politics and culture.

Purchase Critics at Work.