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Submissions

“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.”

—Gerald Prince, American Book Review

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. A true innovation or experiment—an intervention—in criticism puts the form of the critique in direct conversation with the work that it addresses. To that end, MANIFOLD publishes works of criticism that experiment with form and perspective, while still remaining, first, critiques. 

"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

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

  • 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

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

  • Multi-disciplinary critique, which subjects the object of critique to the conventions of multiple critical disciplines simultaneously

  • Objectified critique, which, in the act of interpreting the object of critique, creates a new object

  • Pedagogical criticism, whereby the critique blends boundary between critical thought and pedagogical application

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, Anne Carson’s “poessays,” Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, Kazim Ali’s Anaïs Nin: An Unprofessional Study, Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence, Wayne Koestenbaum’s The Queen’s Throat, Lisa Robertson’s Nilling, Walter Benjamin’s The Arcades Project, and T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death.

Submissions should be 5-30 pages. As noted above, Manifold publishes experiments in criticism; thus, essays will strive to avoid the customs of creative nonfiction and personal essay. We are looking for interventions in the (hegemonic, linear, hierarchical, or dogmatic) conventions of academic criticism. Send submissions, along with a brief bio/cover note, to: manifoldcriticism@gmail.com