Elizabeth Abel
My life changed in 1979, when Tom Mitchell suddenly – inexplicably – invited me to become a coeditor of Critical Inquiry. Overwhelming as it was – I would be the only assistant professor and the only female coeditor in an august assemblage of renowned male scholars – I eventually realized that I could make a contribution by spotlighting the emergence of feminist literary criticism as an area of special interest for the journal.
Proposing a special issue of CI on feminist criticism felt audacious at the time. Committed to casting a broad net across diverse fields of inquiry, the journal had been wary of special issues. It prefaced its first exception, On Metaphor (1978), with an editorial statement attributing this anomaly to the impact of a recent symposium on metaphor at the University of Chicago. A similar logic undergirded the special issue On Narrative (1980). Venturing beyond that logic that same year, Tom Mitchell placed his editorial signature firmly on the journal with the first free-standing and explicitly transdisciplinary special issue: The Language of Images.
Granting feminism the gravitas of a special issue marked a step beyond both traditionally literary subjects (metaphor, narrative) and newly interdisciplinary ones (iconology) into a discourse that emerged from a political movement rather than an academic discipline. The exploration of sexual/textual politics was not new to Critical Inquiry, however. From its origins, the journal had included pathbreaking essays by Annette Kolodny on defining a “Feminist Literary Criticism” (1975); Catharine R. Stimpson on the mind/body problem in Gertrude Stein (1977); Carolyn G. Heilbrun on marriage in contemporary fiction (1978); Lee Edwards on the female hero (1979); and Sandra M. Gilbert on transvestism as literary metaphor (1980). Writing and Sexual Difference (1981) simply knotted these threads together into a broader critical fabric whose difference was announced by the bright pink cover of its publication as a book.
Writing and Sexual Difference marked a turning point in the focus of the special issues, which from that point on increasingly engaged the intersections between interpretation and politics. The very next special issue, in fact, was titled The Politics of Interpretation (1982). Dedicated to “the proposition that criticism and interpretation, the arts of explanation and understanding, have a deep and complex relation with politics, the structures of power and social value that organize human life,” that issue signaled a strong departure from the journal’s self-description in the epigraph that topped all four issues of volume 1 (1974): “A voice for reasoned inquiry into significant creations of the human spirit.” Followed by several special issues whose political investments were explicit – Canons (1983), “Race,” Writing, and Difference (1985), Politics & Poetic Value (1987), The Sociology of Literature (1987) – the turn to politics reached its own climactic turning point in the special issue on Identities (1992), guest edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Kwame Anthony Appiah. As the editors explain in their introduction:
A literary historian might very well characterize the eighties as the period when race, class, and gender became the holy trinity of literary criticism. Critical Inquiry‘s contribution to this shift in critical paradigms took the form of two special issues, “Writing and Sexual Difference,” and “‘Race,’ Writing, and Difference.” In the 1990s, however, “race,” “class,” and “gender” threaten to become the regnant clichés of our critical discourse. Our object in this special issue is to help disrupt the cliché-ridden discourse of identity.
The special issues that followed – on topics ranging from “God” to “Things” to “Cases” to “Disciplines” to “Comedy” to “Intimacy” to “Pandemic” – enact the disruptions that Gates and Appiah sought.
I hope this little history offers one example of the “unpredictable spontaneity” that Sheldon Sacks celebrated in the journal’s inaugural editorial: the openness to changing intellectual and political scenarios that has kept Critical Inquiry at the forefront of critical reflection for the first half century of its existence and will hopefully keep it there for the half century to come.
Elizabeth Abel is professor and John F. Hotchkis Chair in English at the University of California Berkeley. She is also on the editorial board of Critical Inquiry.
In the Moment 