W.J.T. Mitchell
         Poetic Justice: 9-11 to Now
         The author, Editor of , discusses our new website
            and the changing face of criticism in the age of terror.
Elias Khoury
         Rethinking the Nakba
         On the representation of the Nakba in regional literature and film.
Meir Wigoder
         The Acrobatic Gaze and the Pensive Image in Palestinian_Morgue
            Photography
         The topic of my essay is Palestinian morgue photography in the wake
            of the Israeli air strikes and the ground invasion of Gaza, during
            Operation Cast Lead. I especially focus on a fashionable angle that
            is prevalent among the local Palestinian press-photographers.  I
            term it the acrobatic gaze: from the heights of the fridges in the
            morgue the photographers try to be omniscient absently-present
            witnesses that are capable of combining in a single composition
            both the faces of the standing relatives and the faces of the
            supine bodies. These photographs raise ethical, aesthetical, and
            political questions about the representation of the dead who are
            displayed to their families and to the photographers for propaganda
            reasons as well.  
Gavin Arnall, Laura Gandolfi, Enea Zaramella, Jacues
            Rancière
         Aesthetics and Politics Revisited: An Interview with Jacques
            Rancière
         In this interview, Jacques Rancière describes the character of the
            aesthetic regime and the relationship between politics and
            aesthetics in his work, along with the role of artistic practices,
            technological innovations, and the institution of the museum in the
            redistribution of the sensible and the similarities and differences
            between his theories and Walter Benjamin's work on modernity.
             Rancière argues that the aesthetic regime entails both a rupture
            with what came before it and the possibility of recycling and
            reinterpreting works of the past, what Benjamin described as the
            surrealist practice of evoking the outmoded.  While emphasizing the
            political and military preconditions to the aesthetic regime over
            technological or economic considerations, Rancière also warns
            against drawing strict parallels between aesthetic regimes and
            political presuppositions of equality or inequality.  Furthermore,
            Rancière refuses to privilege Marcel Duchamp's readymades in
            the aesthetic regime's redistribution of the sensible,
            pointing, instead, to Emile Zola's Le ventre de Paris and the
            creation of the modern institution of the museum as key moments
            that broke with preexisting distributions of the sensible.
             Rancière also distinguishes his discussion of novelistic realism
            and narration from Benjamin's characterization of modernity
            as the decline in the ability to narrate experience, critiquing
            Benjamin's nostalgia for the past while recognizing as
            fruitful his linking of new possibilities in aesthetic experience
            to the creation of new technologies.
Richard Moran
         Kant, Proust, and the Appeal of Beauty
         Beauty is a contested concept insofar as it seeks to mark a
            categorical distinction among the sources of pleasure, typically in
            terms of oppositions such as objective/subjective, universal/
            particular, necessity/contingency.  Kant represents a culmination
            of this tradition in defining the judgment of beauty in terms of
            the requirement for universal agreement, modeling the judgment of
            beauty as closely as possible to ordinary factual judgments.   A
            different tradition of thinking about beauty, however, while still
            seeking to mark a categorical distinction by reference to the idea
            of necessity, finds the relevant sense of necessity not in
            conditions of agreement but necessities of erotic love and the
            sense of requirement felt toward its objects.  This paper explores
            the consequences of taking this other tradition seriously, using
            Proust as a representative exemplar, as a way both of making sense
            of some of the features Kant ascribes to the concept of the
            beautiful, while avoiding the paradoxes stemming from his focus on
            the conditions for universal agreement. 
Adélékè Adéè̇ó
         From Orality to Visuality: Panegyric and Photography in
            Contemporary Lagos, Nigeria
             # A new line of self projection magazines that started blooming
                  in Lagos, Nigeria, about the mid-1990s defined itself by
                  filling almost completely every issue with photographs that
                  depict politicians, businesspeople, sports and show business
                  stars enjoying fruits of their extraordinary achievements on
                  festive occasions. The magazine's cozy coverage of the
                  rich and famous irks a lot of serious cultural and literary
                  critics who believe that this style resembles praise singing
                  too closely. This paper, unlike mainline criticisms of the
                  pictorial magazines, takes praise singing to be a serious
                  subject. Its central proposition is that the Nigerian
                  magazine culture embraced these magazines because they have
                  successfully translated into photography the panegyric
                  tendency that pervades popular, self-projection arts in the
                  underlying Yorùbá cultural environment of southwestern
                  Nigeria. The sub-genre of Yorùbá panegyric that the
                  magazines rework into the photographic medium is oríkì
                  bọ̀rọ̀kìnní, or praise chants of the eminent. The paper
                  analyzes sample issues of Ovation magazine to outline ways of
                  placing contemporary African cultural forms in a long
                  perspective and to propose an example of how inter-mediality
                  operates today in popular cultures. In the concluding
                  section, the essay proposes that a "poetic"
                  understanding of photography, as opposed to
                  "theatricality" and or melancholic substitution,
                  represents the best way to think about the type of festive
                  portraiture practiced in Ovationand its imitators.
             
             
            Responses to "Badiou's Number," by Ricardo L. Nirenberg and David
            Nirenberg (Summer 2011).
Alain Badiou
         Critical Response I: To Preface the Response to the
            &lsquo;Criticisms' of Ricardo Nirenberg and David Nirenberg
          
A. J. Bartlett, Justin Clemens
         Critical Response II: Neither Nor
          
By Ricardo L. Nirenberg, David Nirenberg
         Critical Response III: Reply to Badiou, Bartlett, and_Clemens
          
             
            Responses to "Against Literary Darwinism," by Jonathan Kramnick
            (Winter, 2011)
             
Paul Bloom
         Critical Response I: Who Cares about the Evolution of_Stories?
             
Brian Boyd
         Critical Response II: For Evocriticism: Minds Shaped to Be_Reshaped
          
Joseph Carroll
         Critical Response III: An Open Letter to Jonathan Kramnick
          
Vanessa L. Ryan
         Critical Response IV: Living in Duplicate: Victorian Science and
            Literature Today
          
G. Gabrielle Starr
         Critical Response V: Evolved Reading and the Science(s) of_Literary
            Study: A Response to Jonathan Kramnick
          
Blakey Vermeule
         Wit and Poetry and Pope, or The Handicap_Principle
          
Jonathan Kramnick
         Literary Studies and Science: A Reply to My_Critics
          
