CRITICAL QUARTERLY最新文献

{"title":"Richard Holmes, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief(William Collins, 2025)","authors":"Michael Ledger-Lomas","doi":"10.1111/criq.70051","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70051","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 3","pages":"159-170"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149125765","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Bret/BRAT","authors":"Nicholas Smart","doi":"10.1111/criq.70015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70015","url":null,"abstract":"<p>2024 was the year of the brat. That was what the Collins Dictionary asserted when they crowned it their ‘word of the year’, fending off competition from ‘brainrot’, ‘delulu’, ‘anti-tourism’, and ‘era’.<sup>1</sup> Propelled by the success of the album <i>BRAT</i>, released in June by popstar Charli XCX, what secured its place at the top, Collins wrote, was ‘More than a hugely successful album, “brat” is a cultural phenomenon that has resonated with people globally, and “brat summer” established itself as an aesthetic and a way of life’.<sup>2</sup> The key to that resonance, especially among young people, was the reclamation of the word from its conventional associations. No longer was ‘brat’ simply a noun that signified ‘a child, esp. one who is ill-mannered or unruly’; it was now also an adjective, one that Collins newly defined as a quality ‘characterized by a confident, independent, and hedonistic attitude’.<sup>3</sup></p><p>It was the summer the world turned slime green, when clothing brands, FinTech start-ups, vegan sausages, and Presidential candidates all embraced elements of the ‘brat’ aesthetic in hopes of wooing the demographic to whom it most appealed. Its influence has proved remarkably pervasive. A focus on punk attitude, sexual liberation, and club culture has invaded practically all of the visual, literary, and performing arts in some form over the last year. In fashion, leather jackets, denim mini-skirts, neon nail polish, black wrap-around sunglasses, platform boots, and messy hair have all returned to high streets and runways. At the Academy Awards, <i>Anora</i>, which followed the chaotic, short-lived relationship between a New York City sex worker and the spoiled son of a Russian oligarch, beat out architectural epic <i>The Brutalist</i> and Catholic drama <i>Conclave</i> for Best Picture. Meanwhile, in the world of dating, the number of users on one app who added ‘Brat’ to their profiles, a kink that involves ‘misbehaving or disobeying’, increased by 540%.<sup>4</sup></p><p>The surprising thing about ‘brat summer’, though, was just how unlikely its rapid ascent really was. As Charli XCX's sixth studio album, <i>BRAT</i> belonged to a genre of music that is thought to have peaked more than a decade ago. In 2021, the singer herself posted a eulogy of sorts to her Twitter account, ‘rip hyperpop? Discuss’.<sup>5</sup> The supposed decline of the genre ran parallel to the decline of the places where it had formerly been enjoyed. The closure of night clubs at an unprecedented rate – owed, in part, to young people turning away from alcohol and drugs – had led to Gen Z being branded ‘Generation Sensible’.<sup>6</sup> Accordingly, the dominant trend in internet culture prior to ‘brat’ had been ‘clean girl aesthetic’, which encouraged young women to channel an understated elegance in beauty, fashion, and demeanour. The last things they were likely to embrace were the three objects through which Charli described the ‘brat aesthetic","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 3","pages":"103-130"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70015","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149125892","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Somerset Maugham's Failings","authors":"Allan Hepburn","doi":"10.1111/criq.70029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70029","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Who bothers to read Somerset Maugham's fiction any more? There was a time when every respectable, middle-class household kept a copy of his <i>Collected Short Stories</i>, alongside <i>Of Human Bondage</i> (1915) and <i>The Razor's Edge</i> (1944), in the front-room cabinet. Maugham's books were a sign of literary sensibility—risqué, yet having moral heft. Now, reading these books is understood to be a guilty pleasure, certainly not a habit to admit in public and definitely not the subject of scholarly inquiry. Maugham is a popular writer, and his commercial success is held against him as evidence that he pandered to middlebrow audiences. Whether his aesthetic ambitions fell short of the highest literary standards or not, his success was stupendous. A Hollywood studio offered $150,000 for the rights to adapt ‘Rain’ (1921) for the silver screen.<sup>1</sup> <i>The Razor's Edge</i> sold 3.5 million copies in the first 20 years after its publication.<sup>2</sup> Actors vied for leading roles in Maugham's plays, which had long runs in London and New York. Despite his success, at the end of his life, from the Villa Mauresque on the Cap Ferrat, where he was surrounded by his collection of paintings—Renoir, Gaugin, Pissarro, Picasso and Laurencin—Maugham complained to his nephew, Robin, ‘I've been a failure. The whole way through my life I've made mistake after mistake. I've had a wretched life’.<sup>3</sup> Most critical accounts of 20th-century literature agree: Maugham fails as a modernist and as a serious writer. His plots are predictable; his prose style leaden in its repetitiveness; his worldview pessimistic to the point of cruelty.</p><p>Ironically, failure is Somerset Maugham's dominant theme. Everywhere in his novels and short stories, characters fail in their authenticity or ambition. Unredeemable hypocrites, they allow their narrow, usually Christian morality to interfere with ordinary human feeling. They worry about consorting with the wrong sort of people, or they act according to what others will say. In ‘Rain’, perhaps Maugham's most famous short story, a prostitute named Sadie Thompson is persecuted by a missionary, Alfred Davidson, who wants to save her soul. The sanctimonious missionary spends night after night praying in Sadie's room. Although he is ‘not a man with whom any intimacy was possible’,<sup>4</sup> it is implied that he has sex with Sadie, then cuts his throat on the day that she is to leave on a boat for San Francisco. Davidson betrays his stern Christian principles by doing more than purifying Sadie's soul. The story is focalised by a character named Macphail, a disabused and aptly named doctor who can neither persuade Davidson to leave Sadie to her fate nor shed his hypocritical attitudes about women, freedom, and morality.</p><p>Human foibles provide Maugham with resources for fiction. In <i>Cakes and Ale</i> (1930), he satirises the craggy world of literary London, where reputations are made and broken by smarmy cri","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 3","pages":"52-65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70029","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149125844","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"On Technique and Judgement in Modernist Poetics","authors":"Sean Pryor","doi":"10.1111/criq.70030","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70030","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 3","pages":"38-51"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149125854","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Patrick Leigh Fermor: Writing a Walk","authors":"William Chapman Sharpe","doi":"10.1111/criq.70019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70019","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 3","pages":"131-158"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149125928","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Last Line","authors":"Beci Carver","doi":"10.1111/criq.70037","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70037","url":null,"abstract":"<p>It is my working hypothesis in this essay that a good last line is one that makes art of its essential artlessness. Last lines may do this partly as a tribute to the listener-in and a recognition of the social contract that writing <i>for</i> anyone entails. In the famous recording of O'Hara's ‘Having a Coke with You’ (1966), done in his New York flat, the poet looks up from the page with the closer: ‘which is why I’m telling you about it’,<sup>9</sup> offering us the line along with a ‘you’ still aflush with lovetalk but now for a moment universal. There is a vulnerability both to the implied unmasking of method and to the manner of utterance which coincides with the last line's traditional gesture outwards, from text to world. Last lines are intrinsically self-reflexive in guiding us to the author at work and metatextual in pulling together text and life; they expose these complications of the text's notional insularity whether or not the author means to or knows that they do. But there is also art in managing this in-built outcome, performing the fall. Raworth's live readings, recorded on PennSound, may recall O'Hara's vulnerable yet composed look up in the paradox by which their punchline-like endings rely for their impact on an effervescent comedy and yet come too soon to be ‘got’. Raworth's artfulness arises at these moments from the flair with which he rides the wave of our amused bemusement.</p><p>It should be added that an impression of length and emotional freight is a necessary premise for effects of terminal consequence. Concluding ‘For Grace, After a Party’, O'Hara builds into the poem's physically slim frame and fragmentary talk of last night's party a mirage of length in the lazy wait for eggs, and the belated—as if in another headspace—outcome: ‘And when they arrive they are/just plain scrambled eggs and the warm weather/is holding.’<sup>20</sup> The bathos hangs on the conceit that there is enough time deposited in the poem for a request to be mislaid like a needle in a haystack, and for the consummation, having ‘arrived’, to be held open. O'Hara's nonchalant refusal to ‘scramble’ to the end disavows his ending's crash at the same time that it provides its pretext, instantiating how a body of poetic thought may fold in. Writing on the relation between ‘labour-time’ and its outcomes, Marx imagines an inevitable disaster: ‘In the same way, the law of gravity asserts itself when a person's house collapses on top of him.’<sup>21</sup> In the examples of closing lines that interest me, the lived time of a writing author presses upon a work throughout its duration, while the ending ‘collapses’ the construct by making that time unignorable. Work has stopped; an author's intellectual musclework flashes up and recedes. Marxian ‘gravity’ of this type naturally leaves little trace upon easy reads (like the page-turner beach novel or formulaic limerick) where our insight into an author's labour must negotiate with the opacities of mechani","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 3","pages":"25-37"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70037","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149125910","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Theatres of Indirectness: Passive Aggression and Failure","authors":"Sara Crangle, Sam Ladkin","doi":"10.1111/criq.70043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Passive aggressive communication operates by embracing malfunction: by design, it must fail to openly address intention, desire or conflict, and, whether consciously or unconsciously conducted, forestalls the agency integral to reply. The ‘tendency of malignant speech is to ingrow like a toenail, embedding itself in its hearer until it's no longer felt to come “from the outside.”’<sup>2</sup> On the surface, the passive aggressor appears to have avoided malediction, or ‘bad words’, with their ‘haunting’ effects, but the strategy of passive aggressive speech may still ‘indwell’ with a pervasive hostility.<sup>3</sup> Denise Riley's extensive accounts of language articulate the coercive effects of interpellation, whether openly combative or not, including when speech acts are situated within ambivalent relationships familial, domestic, intimate, power imbalanced. ‘It's not just a matter of the unspoken “implications” of what's said’, writes Riley, ‘but something stronger: of how language as the voice of its occasion can also inflect its speakers’.<sup>4</sup> To imply—to ‘enfold, enwrap, entangle, involve’ (<i>OED</i>)—but put indirectly and in scare quotes: being implicated in another's actions, enfolded in that implication, is the gluey, debilitating affect we account for in this article. We offer a preliminary account of its social formation and lived consequences, including its ambivalent relationship to intimacy and trust which feeds on the internalisation of inequalities of power and loathing in a gendered, racialised and generational matrix.</p><p>The reception history of Jane Austen's acerbic politesse suggests dissembling is a dominant strain of Englishness. Austen's characters cultivate deep investments in minor improprieties such that offence might be taken or, worse, fail to be taken. D. A. Miller summarises a scene in <i>Sense and Sensibility</i> in which Elinor and Marianne Dashwood are blanked by Robert Ferrars in a London jewellery shop, leaving Elinor ‘furious that he pays her no consideration because he does pay her enough to rub her nose in the fact; and he galls her with a vacancy that is evidently not devoid of the will to display itself, to make her take it in as, hatefully, her own’.<sup>5</sup> Cultivating queer recognition through a luxuriously non-productive, feminised bourgeoisie, Austen's style takes seriously the gestures and language of enforced passivity in which vivisections of the quotidian speak to the intensive labour involved in the etiquette of passive aggressivity. Narrative resolutions hang on explosions of candour that expose the thin veneer of indirect statements or strategies. The lugubrious work of interpretation carried out inside the novels, as well as from outside by us as readers, points to exegetical knowingness as a valuable social skill.</p><p>How to classify passive aggression? Riley mentions passive aggressive speech-acts without labelling them as such, registering the ‘more indirect, yet force","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 3","pages":"66-92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70043","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149125800","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Jorge Luis Borges' Medieval Aesthetics of Failure","authors":"Irina Dumitrescu","doi":"10.1111/criq.70041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70041","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The Cimetière de Plenpalais, Geneva's oldest cemetery, also known as ‘Geneva's pantheon’ or the ‘cemetery of kings’, is the final resting place of several remarkable people. John Calvin and Jean Piaget are buried here, as are author and sex-work activist Grisélidis Réal, and Sofya Dostoevsky, Feodor Dostoevsky's daughter, who died at the age of three months. Perhaps the best-known tombstone, however, belongs to Jorge Luis Borges. The Argentine writer chose to die in Geneva, a city he had lived in as a teenager and one that had shaped his deeply felt connection to European culture. Borges' grave marker offers an overdetermined set of references to one slice of that culture: medieval Germanic literature. The front features his name carved in a version of Insular script. Under it is a rough circle containing a group of warriors crowded together, raising axes and swords above their heads, ready for battle; this is a reproduction of the 9th century Lindisfarne ‘Domesday Stone’, which depicts a Viking raid. Below that, a fragment of verse from the Old English battle poem, <i>The Battle of Maldon</i>, is inscribed: ‘and ne forhtedon nā’, in the context of the poem, a war leader's instruction to his men ‘not to be at all afraid’.</p><p>On the back of the stone is another quotation, this time in Old Icelandic: ‘Hann tekr sverthit Gram ok leggr i methal theira bert’, ‘he takes the sword Gram and lays it between them’. The passage refers to a central plot point in the <i>Völsunga saga</i>, the doomed love of Sigurd and Brynhild. Brynhild is a Valkyrie determined only to marry a man who knows no fear. Sigurd is that man, but despite their pledges to one another, he is ultimately enchanted into forgetting her and marrying another woman. He later assumes the shape of his brother-in-law Gunnar to woo Brynhild for him, but though they share a bed for three nights, he stays faithful to Gunnar by placing his naked sword between himself and Brynhild. Below the Old Norse is an image of a Viking longboat, and below that, a final inscription, this time in Spanish: ‘De Ulrica a Javier Otárola’. These are the protagonists of Borges' only love story, ‘Ulrikke’, which features a middle-aged, celibate professor and the Norwegian woman he falls in love with one night in York. Because they cannot pronounce one another's names, Ulrikke and Javier playfully settle on Sigurd and Brunhild, though unlike their mythic predecessors, they eventually meet in bed without a sword separating them. The story's epigraph is ‘Hann tekr sverthit Gram ok leggr i methal theira bert.’<sup>1</sup></p><p>It is not clear to what extent the tombstone reflects Borges' own wishes, or those of his widow, Maria Kodama, the long-time companion he married two months before his death. Certainly, the final dedication is hers, and she was responsible for having it sculpted. It is also not clear how to interpret Borges' grave, beyond the banal but sometimes overlooked observation that Borges felt a strong","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 3","pages":"10-24"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/criq.70041","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149125921","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"The Wishes of Human Vanity","authors":"Steven Connor","doi":"10.1111/criq.70033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70033","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 3","pages":"93-102"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149125741","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Introduction: The Art of Failure—Disruption, Loss, Decline","authors":"Benjamin Kohlmann, Joseph Elkanah Rosenberg","doi":"10.1111/criq.70050","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/criq.70050","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":44341,"journal":{"name":"CRITICAL QUARTERLY","volume":"68 3","pages":"3-9"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2026-10-09","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"149125752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}