Choose Your Own Adventure

Abstract

What if critique were understood as a form of Choose Your Own Adventure, the second-person young adult format in which readers are given the agency to decide what happens next in a story? To embark on critique as you would Choose Your Own Adventure is to be intentional in your orientations; it is to situate your framework, materials, and your self in relation to each other and to reflect on what this hermeneutic constellation produces and obscures. This article argues that transparency about critical positionality is a precondition for German studies to flourish and for epistemological abundance to endure. It asks what this might look like in practice, offering the reader three critical excursions through a single film, Angelina Maccarone’s Unveiled (2005).