MANIFOLD

Facing an academic (and, indeed, political and intellectual) landscape that is ever more insecure and undefined, scholars can, and perhaps must, reimagine the value, form, and approach of critical writing. As Gerald Prince suggests in American Book Review, “formal experimentation can enhance the understanding and appreciation of texts by mimicking them or pointing to some of their aspects through the very form it takes. Perhaps it can encourage us to reflect on what the tasks of criticism and the most appropriate ways of fulfilling them are.” Prince suggests that a true innovation or experiment in criticism puts the form of the critique in direct conversation with the work that it addresses. To that end, MANIFOLD PRESS will publish works of criticism that experiment with form and perspective, while still remaining, first, critiques.

Experimental criticism essay prize

Beginning with its inaugural selection in Spring 2018, MANIFOLD has endowed the Cookson Experimental Criticism Essay prize, open to graduate students in English and Creative Writing at the University of Colorado Boulder.  The prize is awarded at the annual Experimental Criticism Symposium, hosted by CU English. The 2018 Symposium featured feature Ashon Crawley, Jennifer Scappettone, Brian Blanchfield, and Sasha Steensen; 2019 featured Andrea Brady and Jackie Wang. Visit the application page for more information.

"experimental criticism" has manifold possibilities:

• Hypercriticism, or an exploitation of hypertextual possibilities

• Deconstructed/unconstructed criticism, which might allow the reader to disrupt teleological form by “shuffling” the various components of the critique as she reads

• Multi-lingual criticism of a multi-lingual or translated text.

• Experimenting with genre by using traditional literary forms in the critique instead of limiting them to being objects of criticism

• Dialogical criticism, whereby texts (literary and historical) are put in dialogue which each other—both conceptually and physically on the page—with minimal mediation by the critic

• Performative criticism, in which a critical engagement is performed or has performative utterances

• Subjective criticism, in which the critic juxtaposes personal narrative with traditional explication in order to acknowledge the difficulty of true objectivity in criticism.

Published examples of possible models include (but are certainly not limited to) Susan Howe’s The Birth-mark, Hilton Als’ White Girls, Roland Barthes S/Z, Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, Anne Carson’s “poessays,” Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat, Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, and T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death.