On Instagram: an intimate, immediate conversation

What are the formal and political commitments of artistic and scholarly experimentation on Instagram? With the rise of affective criticism, a practice of conversation has proved to be the perfect format for us to talk affectively about such a polarizing and popular subject. With this conversation, we want to capture that same intimacy and immediacy, but challenge the idea that such conversations must always disappear or must dissolve into solo work; to contend that the meaning we create together in ephemeral ways might have its own intellectual staying power. This conversation took place at the University of York in the spring of 2019 and the transcript has been edited for length. Thank you to the Centre for Modern Studies and the Creative Dissonance: Writing Now research strand for funding this event

Knowing Outside of English : Decolonizing at York

In early 2020, Eugenia Zuroski published a short article in MAI journal's toolkit series critiquing conventional introductory exercises in the university classroom. Called ‘Where Do You Know From?’, the task ‘illustrate[s] the importance of attending conscientiously to the ways we relate to one another in the classroom as part of our pedagogical and political responsibilities’. In this piece, Alexandra Kingston-Reese and Shazia Jagot discuss where they know from and how this knowledge has impacted their teaching, research, and development of the University of York's Decolonising Network

On Instagram: an intimate, immediate conversation

What are the formal and political commitments of artistic and scholarly experimentation on Instagram? With the rise of affective criticism, a practice of conversation has proved to be the perfect format for us to talk affectively about such a polarizing and popular subject. With this conversation, we want to capture that same intimacy and immediacy, but challenge the idea that such conversations must always disappear or must dissolve into solo work; to contend that the meaning we create together in ephemeral ways might have its own intellectual staying power. This conversation took place at the University of York in the spring of 2019 and the transcript has been edited for length. Thank you to the Centre for Modern Studies and the Creative Dissonance: Writing Now research strand for funding this event

The Individual Reader

How do we read? For critics, now a few years deep into what has been called “the method wars”, the approaches are numerous, but most of all, are collective. Whether critique or postcritique, or the idiosyncratic in between, what is undeniable about the explosion of methods beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion is that it renders us, critics, in the plural. In his first collection of essays and interviews, Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov proclaimed that “a work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me”, but as Zadie Smith despaired in her 2004 essay “Read Better”, “the idea of the ‘individual reader’ [has] gone into terminal decline”. Looking to the contemporary autocritical novel, however, we find plenty of readers resistant to the interpretative habits of professional readers, drawing attention to the limitations of institutional reading and extoling the aesthetic affordances of reading limited to the individual. Rather than rehashing the motivations and sensibilities involved and required by reading critically that the method wars have revived, then, this article submits to the “individual reader” offered by autocritical novels by Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, and Valeria Luiselli

Teju Cole and Ralph Ellison’s aesthetics of invisibility

Considering ‘invisibility’ as both subject matter and aestheticizing mode of experience, this essay uses the case studies of two American novels - Teju Cole’s Open City (2011) and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952) - to explore how a culturally specific, racially charged, subject is mapped outwards to occupy a broader aesthetic realm