In a closely argued three-page letter in 1946, Mary McCarthy flatly rejected New Yorker editor Katharine S. White’s revisions to her latest submission. “I’m afraid that the new manuscript strikes a chill…
Issues
The Third Eye: Editorial Visions of the Draft Text
In a 1993 Paris Review interview, Toni Morrison identifies the value of editing: “Good editors are really the third eye. Cool. Dispassionate. They don’t love you or your work; for me that…
Introduction: Seeing Double: Editors in Postwar American Literature
When literary editors appear in fiction, they are often ambiguous and even duplicitous figures. The plot of Don DeLillo’s Mao II (1991) is set in motion in the top-floor office of a…
Afterword: Ten More Sites of Ambivalence in the “Open”
In the introduction to this special issue, we argued that ambivalence is a disposition animating all criticism, even if only its disavowal, but that ambivalence becomes particularly charged in criticism…
Caribbean Conflagrations: Camouflage, Ambivalence, and Anti-Analogical Entanglements
Beauty’s Blemish: Figuring Caribbean Landscapes The environmental figures that seek to portray the Caribbean’s strange place in the world can be easily recalled and most attributed to the work of…
Racialized Femininity and Representation’s Ambivalences in Trajal Harrell’s The Return of La Argentina
The audience is seated several rows deep, facing a blank gallery wall. As they wait, their chatter buzzes through the room. From an open panel at one side, Trajal Harrell…
Reading Interculturalism After Kalamandalam
In the first half of the last century, scores of Western artists and art historians traveled to India to have a firsthand experience of its variegated heritage of performing arts…
In the Same Room, Again: Anecdotes about Feminist Meetings
A Light Loose Commitment When I was a graduate student in New York, I worked as the managing editor of a feminist academic journal that focused on art and performance…
Circuit Training: The Critique of Narrative Reason
The system must be oriented to openness de novo. Peter Sloterdijk We fence our encounters in with gates. Erving Goffman Form, in the narrow sense, is nothing more than the…
An Introduction to Ambivalent Criticism
This special issue doesn’t propose Ambivalent Criticism™. Instead, this issue forwards essays that reflect on a style in which we already do criticism — a style we are calling ambivalent…