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We Are Stardust: In the Nonworld of Criticism Today


 This review essay discusses Rita Felski’s Hooked, John Brenkman’s Mood and Trope, and Sianne Ngai’s Theory of the Gimmick. It argues that contemporary criticism is marked by a form of wordlessness in which criticism is uncertain if it counts as a meaningful activity. This leads to a hunger for forms of reality in which criticism might ground itself, but also a haunting doubt about the validity or purchase of thinking and scholarship that can be traced to the specific institutional dissolutions of fields and disciplines. The review suggests that although we can see this era as one of innate, inevitable critical loss and crisis, there is a demystifying and a grounding orientation in focusing on the analysis of specific works rather than reifying our general sense of wordlessness.