This chapter examines the relationship between “critique” as a mode of literary work and digital literary studies. It provides a brief genealogy of the origins of critique in early modern textual criticism and eighteenth-century disputes over autonomous criticism, and connects that genealogy to contemporary schools of critique. The debates over critique in digital literary studies are surveyed, along with a range of work in feminist, postcolonial, intersectional, Marxist, and other forms of cultural critique. It analyzes the recent turn to work in “postcritique” and allied theoretical modes, and indicates areas of shared interest as well as boundaries between digital literary studies and the cultures of critique.

This chapter considers the relevance of postcolonialism to the discipline of ‘international relations’ (IR). It argues that postcolonialism advances a powerful critique of traditional approaches to IR (see chapters on realism and liberalism) since it calls into question the discipline’s foundational ontological and epistemological assumptions. In particular, it challenges the dominant assumption that states are the basic units of IR and that we should examine the relations between these units in the context of an anarchical system. Postcolonialism refocuses our attention on the constitutive role played by colonialism in the creation of the modern world and sees international relations as hierarchical rather than anarchical. It sees academic disciplines such as IR – and Western rationalist, humanist and universalist modes of thinking in general – as complicit in reproducing colonial power relations and seeks normatively to resist practices of colonialism in its material and ideational forms, whether political, economic or cultural.

How would our understanding of the history of literary theory change if we focused on the seminal essays, rather than the monumental books and monographs? It would surely seem more variegated and provisional, less finished and definitive, more of a process of trying out ideas and defending interests, more motley, confusing, and elusive, a bit like the essay form itself. This chapter examines the rise and fall of theory in the UK inside and outside the academy, beginning with its origins in the British New Left, which looked to continental Europe for intellectual sustenance. It traces the institutional influences and pressures exerted on the essay form as it migrates across the Channel, arguing that while critique could be amenable to the norms of tough-minded knowledge acquisition, the more oblique and personal voice that we associate with essayism has, until recently, often been eschewed in universities.

A radical is one who recommends fundamental reform. Since change of an essential sort can be effected by those who stand on either the right or the left of the political spectrum, radicalism is a diverse calling, descriptive of very different doctrinal positions indeed. However far apart we think these endpoints might be, they also possess certain characteristics in common. In this respect the left/right continuum is not linear, but circular, the extremes bending back like a key-ring to where they lie parallel, though still of course separate and opposed.

The central concern in this chapter is on the place of values and morality in virtue science. Since the advent of psychology, a strict fact–value dichotomy has predominated, with almost all investigators adopting a disengaged observer stance. This dichotomy has been repeatedly critiqued by communitarians, hermeneuticists, philosophers, and psychologists. Few, if any, systematic defenses of the fact–value dichotomy exist. This chapter combines many of the strands of fact–value critique in a neo-Aristotelian position that emphasizes that science is, itself, value-imbued because it aims at a set of goods (e.g., knowledge, human welfare). The chapter concludes by suggesting how values and morality can be included in virtue science and psychology in a frank and illuminating manner. In support of this position, it enumerates four advantages of value inclusion, paramount among them that values can then be explicitly discussed and evaluated. Values can be fruitfully incorporated into virtue and psychological sciences by making the values explicit and including discussions and critiques of those views in open intellectual discourse (e.g., peer review).

This chapter introduces the concept of reparative reading and explains the benefits of reading Sappho and Homer through a reparative lens. It argues that previous scholarship has applied a notion of intertextuality that is competitive and hierarchical, thus missing out on key elements of Sappho’s engagement with Homer. It also introduces the reader to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick as a queer theorist, poet, and fiber artist and anticipates some of the parallels between Sedgwick and Sappho as reparative readers. An overview of Sedgwick’s career, her understanding of queerness and the social and historical contexts for her evolving sensibilities as a reparative reader are provided, as is a preview of the following chapters.

This chapter takes up the mid-century politics of the Australian novel enacted in the terms dictated by the Cold War. Replicating the broader bipolar model of the cultural Cold War, the divide in Australia, mapped between modernism and realism, was complexly transnational, with vaunted stakes in the hot wars of the decolonising Asia Pacific and deconstructive receptions behind the Iron Curtain. The ideological debates of the cultural Cold War in Australia recall a faith in realism as a liberatory mode that is in danger of becoming unreadable. Australian post-war realism reached out to Indigenous issues, new migrants, women and working-class readers in structured and inclusive ways. Blurring into popular genres and facing strict federal censorship, realism’s traditional interest in the quotidian was mediated by its attention to topicality, or to the defining mid-century social issues motivating readers. This chapter is bookended by the scandalous court case of communist Frank Hardy for his Power Without Glory (1950), prosecuted for criminal libel in Australia’s McCarthyite moment, and Gerald Glaskin’s No End to the Way (1965), Australia’s first out gay novel, banned by the censors and marketed as ‘penetrating – honest – telling it like it is’.

Chapter 9 asks how we can critically evaluate competition in this kind of society, particularly from within its own terms of reference - that is, as an ‘immanent critique’. The premise that domesticated competition is a work of human artifice implies that it is something we have some control over and can shape. I argue that the pervasive image of the rule-governed game, and ideas such as ‘the level playing field’, encode the basic cultural resources from which any criticism must be constructed. Moreover, competition works best within certain bounded spheres of practice - e.g. business, democracy, science - and its worst distortions are often a result of competition transgressing these boundaries, as when money interferes with politics. I argue that maintaining such separation and balances of power among distinct institutional spheres, arenas of competition, is critical for liberal society.

Moving beyond Hegel's critique of Kantian general logic and the logic of the Aristotelian tradition, this chapter considers his critique of Kant's transcendental logic: specifically, the Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. It offers an account of Hegel's famed swimming objection, going beyond previous ones by arguing that the objection has a more specific target than is often realized: the Metaphysical Deduction of the Categories. It further explains Hegel's dissatisfaction of the efforts of two of Kant's successors (Reinhold and Fichte) to overcome the dilemma the swimming objection presents. Some attention is given here to Fichte's project of deriving the categories from a version of the cogito, that is post-Kantian rather than the one familiar from Cartesian rational psychology. In my view, it is Jacobi and Romanticism who furnish Hegel with the possibility of deriving the categories from a post-Kantian version of the ontological proof – though he rejects their irrationalism. This explains Hegel's provocative claim that the ontological argument, and its rigorous distinction between the modes of thinking appropriate to finite and infinite entities, constitutes the true self-critique of reason.

This chapter sets out to unpack a number of assumptions and principles on which the mainstream transitional justice approach (normal model) is based. It gives particular attention to Pablo de Greiff’s ‘normative conception of transitional justice’, which provides an important backdrop against which my pluralist reading unfolds in the subsequent chapters. Moreover, this chapter places the book’s argument in relation to larger ongoing critical debates within the field.

The preface describes the research methodology and the writing process that led to this book. It begins by explaining how the author collected information from the relevant sources, verified its completeness and accuracy, and analysed it under a unified framework. It then turns to the issue of storytelling style and to the author’s decision to present his findings in the form of a fictionalized account. In so doing, the preface discusses the problem of verifiability of classified information, the issue of trust between the narrator and the audience, and the promises and pitfalls of literary writing when it comes to informing, reporting, or commenting on real life.

This chapter uses a close reading of The Lancet medical journal, and its radical, charismatic editor Thomas Wakley, to delineate the ‘high-water mark’ of Romantic sensibility as an emotional regime. It explores the ways in which Wakley and The Lancet leveraged the emotional politics of contemporary melodrama to critique the alleged nepotism and corruption of the London surgical elites. More especially, it analyses their campaign to expose instances of surgical incompetence at the city’s leading teaching hospitals, demonstrating the ways in which this strategy weaponised the emotions of anger, pity, and sympathy, and considering its implications for the cultural norms of an inchoate profession and for the ultimate stability of the emotional regime of Romantic sensibility.