In a queer-theory reading of Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol in the 2004 polemic No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman relied on a narrow concept of reproduction as procreative heteronormativity anchored in heterosexual sex. He left untold the other story of reproduction: our daily reproduction in the service of capitalism. Marxist and materialist feminist theories of reproduction remind us that we all engage in reproductive work and that women have traditionally been considered natural providers of this work. A reading of J. M. Coetzee's Slow Man, in which a male protagonist depends on the domestic labor of a migrant woman, provides a counterpoint to No Future.

Situating Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood in the changing racial geographies of post-World War II Atlanta, this essay argues that Hazel Motes's religious journey toward embracing Jesus as his Savior allegorizes a recuperative fantasy of the white Southern subject's journey from Jim Crowto white flight. Through this journey, Wise Blood offers an astute vision of the racial struggles over Atlanta, out of which neoliberalism emerged in the 1970s and 1980s; thus, we might reconsider O'Connor as a central participant in the aesthetic and political struggles over the making of postwar urban space and politics.

Andrew Marvell's “The Garden” foregrounds the role of subtraction in aesthetic creation and seeks to imagine sameness independent of metaphor, similarity, and relation. The poem employs a subtractive poetics that challenges modern presuppositions about the networked, connected essence of literature. It also points to the critical limitations of recent accounts of surface and formalist reading, both of which still present poetry as productive, especially insofar as it heightens attention. For Marvell, in contrast, the value of lyric resides in the ways in which it challenges the dialectical notion of creative destruction and, instead, conceives of an annihilation that does not transform into its more respectable opposite. “The Garden,” then, shows that we and our students are overburdened with connection—that there is too much relation, not too little—and that the function of poetry is to dismantle these links in the interest of creativity.

The famed French explorer and writer Jane Dieulafoy became a celebrity in the late nineteenth century for the discoveries that she and her husband, Marcel, made on their excursions in Persia. Dieulafoy wore pants during this time and upon resettling in Paris acquired a permit from the Parisian police to wear men's clothing, even as she was embraced by the socially conservative literary and political elite. Recognizing Dieulafoy through the modern notion of transgender allows us to make sense of that seeming contradiction. Two of her long-overlooked novels, Volontaire (1892) and Frère Pélage (1894), can be read as early transgender narratives. Through their gender-crossing protagonists, these texts provide an intellectual framework for understanding how Dieulafoy reconciled her gender expression with the religious and social structures that she held dear.

In 1935 the Dutch scholar Johannes B. Tielrooy argued that Arthur Rimbaud's prose poem “Mystique” (c. 1872) was an ekphrasis, or literary description, of the central panel of Hubert and Jan van Eyck's altarpiece Adoration of the Mystic Lamb (1432). Although this hypothesis was deemed credible for a number of years, it is now thought to be unlikely that the painting inspired the poem or that the poem is an instance of ekphrasis. However, Tielrooy's ekphrastic interpretation can still be used to reveal elements of the poem otherwise hidden to the reader. I demonstrate the potential of Tielrooy's speculative practice, what I call mystical ekphrasis, by juxtaposing Rimbaud's poem with a chromolithographic representation of one of Jean Fouquet's illuminations, with which the poem also has possible but not conclusive links.

Growing interest in the archive as an object of study for queer criticism justifies closer attention to the concept of provenance. For archivists, provenance imparts a fundamental measure of integrity to archival collections by certifying their origin and proper order. Record origin and order, however, rely on authorial identity to establish authenticity, placing provenance in tension with queer theories that describe subjectivity as polymorphous, not fixed. That tension leads Roger Casement's official reports on the atrocities committed against rubber gatherers in South America to use provenance as a credible—rather than strictly authentic—narrative structure for publicizing British investigations of imperial violence. Recognizing provenance as a practice of representation invites reconsideration of Casement's notorious private diaries, which document his sexual interest in large penises. Instead of simply providing evidence of homosexual identity, the diaries show how impersonal fantasy becomes a constituent part of archival practice.

Caroline Levine's Forms has been received as a prototype and a manifesto, a sign of the new formalist times in American literary studies. In the cover endorsements for the hardbound edition, Amanda Claybaugh calls Forms a “book of a generation,” Bruce Robbins “a big, brilliant, necessary book”—large claims for a text of 150 pages. Levine's treatise promises no less than “a way to understand the relations among forms—forms aesthetic and social, spatial and temporal, ancient and modern, major and minor, like and unlike, punitive and narrative, material and metrical” (23). Levine claims to provide “a reading practice that does not fit any familiar formalism,” a practice that instead “draws from all” formalisms (21).

Jeanette Winterson's beautiful memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Is a biography of a reader, a book about reading—reading for your life. In addition to the Bible, there are six books in the Plymouth Brethren Winterson household, and they are all nonfiction. Jeanette's mother, Mrs. Winterson, bans the reading of fiction, so young Jeanette reads in secret, in the outside lavatory or under covers at night, carefully depositing each read book under her mattress until it floats so dangerously high that it threatens to reveal the habit considered so vicious by her mother but that is sustaining Jeanette. Mrs. Winterson reads the Bible; young Jeanette has a memory of Jane Eyre read aloud in her mother's good reading voice, but Mrs. Winterson doctors it (with the skill of a clever reader, an astute stylist) so that Jane marries St. John Rivers and goes off to the mission with him. T. S. Eliot makes her cry in Accrington Public Library because his lines “This is one moment / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy” (from Murder in the Cathedral; qtd. in Winterson 39) give her hope that she will survive the moment she is in, and so does Gertrude Stein saying to Alice B. Toklas: “Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it” (from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; qtd. in Winterson 130). Jeanette Winterson claims that she “puts herself inside books for safe-keeping” and that “a tough life needs a tough language” (36, 40). The people around her have that tough language. She hears lines that she later locates in Shakespeare, a writer she regards as “not part of the alphabet, any more than black is a colour” (115). When she is homeless and living in her Mini, supporting herself at the local sixth-form college by working at the weekend market and the local library, she reads “English Literature A-Z,” in the order in which it is shelved at the Accrington Public Library (115–30). Books are home when she is homeless (61); they are doses of medicine (42), saving people from isolation and the suffering that comes from feeling that nothing about their life is recognizable to others or intelligible to themselves, from being castaways from the tribe of human.

Literary criticism thrives on the distinction between first and second reading, on what is often parsed as absorptive reading versus critical reading, belletristic versus analytic reading. It sets itself against the idea that a irst reading of a text might be the one in which we have “seen [it] well”-on the assumption that critical insight is belated (Emerson 476). “As scholars, we read lengthy texts [such as novels] sequentially; then, in order to write, we inevitably reread recursively,” which has the efect, as the critic Michaela Bronstein goes on to observe, of producing conlicted conceptions of the novel as either “a static object (a form) or an experience in time” (77). One goal of literary criticism would appear to be to keep readers from lingering in that temporal and immersive irst reading in order to arrive at an assessment of the total work. First reading and critique are viewed as largely anathema; second thoughts inspire us to relinquish irst impressions, in a process of questioning and revision infused with a spirit of skepticism and doubt. here is an air of supersession- something vanguardist-about critique, but as Bronstein also points out, “the purpose of rereading need not be to revise the irst reading from an analytic distance. . . . Close reading [can use] the recursive process of analysis to approach, rather than to erase, sequential reading” (78). I take Bronstein's projection of a literary criticism that accounts for rather than dismisses the absorptive aspects of irst reading as an accurate description of Rita Felski's project in The Limits of Critique, a manifesto that calls on literature scholars to recommit to “care or concern for [aesthetic] phenomena” (107). Felski makes the case for a pragmatist phenomenology and calls her method for its achievement “postcritique,” a mode of reading that declines to unmask, demystify, interrogate, subvert, or expose the literary text (the habit of generations of recent critics). Postcritique means to expand the uses of literature beyond that of marking an absence or an insufficiency, returning readers to the values that drew them to the literary work of art in the first place (“aesthetic pleasure, increased selfunderstanding, moral relection, perceptual reinvigoration, ecstatic self- loss, emotional consolation, or heightened sensation” [188]).

Of Franco Moretti's masterworks of literary history and theory, why is it the loosely assembled collection of occasional pieces Distant Reading that has captured the literary critical spotlight? Why now, just when enrollments in the humanities are plummeting, new technologies for storing and distributing information are revolutionizing interpersonal communication and scientific methods, and global is well on its way to replacing interdisciplinary as the descriptor favored by university administrators? Moretti is not alone in attempting to reconfigure a discipline that tends to favor the singular text and national literary traditions for a generation of students who apparently could not care less about either. In his effort to adapt literary history and form to the conditions of globalization that make them seem irrelevant, he asks us to abandon our obsessive focus on canonical texts—to start instead considering how certain forms of literature made the quantum leap from nation to world and what formal changes they underwent in doing so. This project he warns, will require us to “unlearn” how to read a literary text and to question the assumption that “world literature” is an object to be known: “We must think of it as a problem that asks for a new critical method” (46). He famously exposes this problem by staging various encounters between literary form and quantitative analysis.

Marilynne Robinson, the author of Housekeeping, Gilead, Home, and Lila, has garnered attention for her sustained engagement with religious themes. Yet for all its robust participation in the theology of a distinctively Calvinist Protestantism, Robinson's fiction is invested in religious forms that are less propositional than phenomenological. It imagines belief as both a perceptual background and a system of thought that activates concentrated aesthetic attention to quotidian moments of temporal contingency and worldly ephemerality. Consequently, Robinson's work intervenes in the burgeoning critical discourse surrounding religion and literature, offering an alternative to methodologies that prioritize the ontology of belief over the aesthetic modes of perception that belief makes available.

Why did it take so long to start writing the history of close reading? For the best part of a century, close reading has grounded literary studies in the university, structuring assessment, teaching, employment, and publication. A basic proficiency in close reading has long been a professional obligation for faculty members and a course requirement for students. It makes sense, then, that Caroline Levine's Forms begins with a description of our method in action. A reader is settling down to work with a copy of Jane Eyre. She has a lengthy education behind her and a wealth of interpretive techniques for the book in front of her. Still, one thing is certain: our critic will broach the forms of the novel by drawing from “close reading methods” while using “historical research methods to analyze sociopolitical experience.” “But,” Caroline Levine asks, “would our critic be right to distinguish between the formal and the social?” (1).

Those of us working in the american academy have so internalized the grammar of postcolonial theory that we now take for granted interstices, hybridity, slippage, and liminality, among other terms commonplace in the discourse of postcolonialism. Beyond the terms themselves, we have taken to heart, absorbed, and extended the lessons from Homi K. Bhabha's The Location of Culture. Those lessons furnished a stimulative template for analyzing particular power asymmetries. Nevertheless, scholars have not referred as widely as we might expect to Bhabha's work in general and The Location of Culture in particular, especially in some fields for which postcolonial theory was supposed to be a natural fit, such as African literary studies. The index of African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, a 764-page compendium assembling many of the most important interventions in African literature from the 1970s to the early twenty-first century, is an instructive example: it lists only three entries for Bhabha (Olaniyan and Quayson). Given that postcolonial theory and African literary studies share an interest and a language (the aftermath of British colonialism and English) in their research agendas, we might also ponder the frequency with which postcolonial theory in the vein of Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and Edward Said has elicited critique from scholars working with African literary texts and in African studies writ large. Individual persuasion is at work in these critiques but so also undoubtedly are positionality and location. We should read the critiques, then, not for their universal resonance, but for an understanding of debates unfolding in specific locations around the world, as well as in relation to the subject positions of individual scholars and their ideological proclivities.

To judge by debates over distant reading, literary scholars might have something in common with the unadaptable tutor in george Eliot's The Mill on the Floss, the Rev. Mr. Stelling, who applies the same educational method to any boy in his charge: he sees Tom Tulliver's mind as a field to be plowed with the classics, not as a stomach that can't digest them. But if we look more closely at the range of projects in literary studies, from digital humanities to the new formalist poetics, we find few hidebound Stellings. Applying one's favorite method to all sizes and shapes of data is an obvious genre of error, and scholars and critics of all sorts studiously avoid it. In a maxim now popular among practitioners of digital humanities, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. The humorous warning not to become enamored of shiny tools and ply them regardless of object (a schoolboy, all schoolboys) can come from people who use MALLET (MAchine Learning for LanguagE Toolkit) or other software to produce statistical analyses of words or of white spaces in nineteenth-century newspapers. As researchers who are primed to question the prescriptive bias of our doxa, our samples, our models, and our tools, we nevertheless have incentives to overstate the predictable errors of competing approaches.

What are the “limits of critique” in the age of trump? At a time when nationalist and proto-fascist movements are on the rise in many parts of the world? When hate-filled words and actions against the foreign, the racial or religious other, the gendered, and the differently abled are empowered to come out of the shadows and into the public realm, poisoning the atmosphere, spreading fear and despair? When corruption and greed threaten not only the foundations of democracy but also the planet on which we depend? Don't we need critique more than ever—critique of lies, of discourses and their histories, of policies and the power structures they reflect? The answer is both yes and no. Or rather, we do need critique, but we also need so much more than critique. Critique as an end in itself is not enough.