Categorical Criticism
Description
Accounts of aesthetic criticism typically foreground the practice of close reading, whether of individual novels, films, or memes. But an equally important skill is category formation, or naming and organizing groups of texts, whether generic (e.g. tragedy, horror), stylistic (e.g. minimalism), periodizing (e.g. Rococo), or evaluative (e.g. the beautiful). And while it is evaluative categories like the beautiful that have preoccupied recent accounts of aesthetic education, the skill of judgment is equally at play in any effort to assign an object to any category. Pattern recognition and schematization have long been crucial to the aesthetic humanities (e.g. Russian Formalist tables, William Empson’s or Northrop Frye’s typologies, Jameson’s Greimas squares), but more recently we’ve tended to think of categorizing— saying X is an instance of Y and not Z—as merely restrictive and normative, a constraint to be overturned rather than a capacitating gambit. And while market logics incentivize the coining of new critical phrases or scholarly concepts, we have perhaps too quickly become wary of generalization and taxonomy.
This seminar proposes to look anew at the role of category formation in the work of criticism: what difference does it make when we assign a work to one category or another, how does it determine the explanatory scope and horizon of a reading? What is the relationship between a category and a genre, or a concept? How do aesthetic categories relate to social or political ones?
We invite papers that (1) metacritically reflect on the status of category formation and categorization in aesthetic criticism; (2) analyze the methods of judgment for naming and assigning cultural categories; (3) reflect on the categorizing work that aesthetic objects themselves might do, and/or (4) propose (old or new) categories for effectively parsing or disaggregating the cultural sphere. Possible topics include but are not limited to:
- Typicality, or how and why we select texts as representatives of a category (e.g. “the novel”);
- Scale, or the relation between close attention to an object and more general attention to groups of objects;
- Capacitation, or what different kinds of categories make possible, either today or in earlier models of criticism worth returning to;
- Craft, or how criticism curates categories that depart from algorithmic ones (e.g. Amazon’s “Customers Also Bought or Read”);
- Worldbuilding, or how categories can reorient commonsense for social and political transformation;
- Judgment, or the interplay between normative and descriptive speech acts in determining the type of something; and/or
- Equality, or how hierarchical categories of objects map onto social hierarchies, in a post-Bourdieu sociology of culture.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Yoon Sun Lee, Anne Pierce Rogers Professor of English at Wellesley, works across the fields of Asian American literature, British Romantic literature, and narrative and novel theory. Her most recent book is The Natural Laws of Plot: How Things Happen in Realist Novels (Penn, 2023). She is the past president of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and co-convenes, with Deidre Lynch, the Novel Theory Seminar at Harvard’s Mahindra Humanities Center.
Speaker Bio
Theodore Martin is associate professor of English at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Contemporary Drift: Genre, Historicism, and the Problem of the Present (Columbia UP, 2017) and of the forthcoming American Literature's War on Crime: Novels and the Hidden History of Mass Incarceration (Columbia UP, 2026).
Speaker Bio
Laura Nelson is an Assistant Professor of English at Princeton, where she teaches courses on media studies, radical pedagogies, and contemporary literature and film. Her current book project, After School: Collective Experiments in Art, Study, and Education, looks at formations of study outside traditional schools and universities from the 1920s to the 1980s. Alongside teaching, she co-organizes collective experiments in learning—study groups, alternative schools, and lecture series—in cities.
Speaker Bio
S. Pearl Brilmyer is Associate Professor of English & Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania. She is the author of The Science of Character: Human Objecthood and the Ends of Victorian Realism (Chicago, 2022).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Dora Zhang is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at UC Berkeley. She is the author of Strange Likeness: Description and the Modernist Novel (Chicago, 2020). Her essays have appeared in Representations, MLQ, New Literary History, Modernism/modernity Print Plus, and elsewhere. Her new annotated edition of A Room of One's Own for the Norton Library is forthcoming in 2026.
Speaker Bio
Connor Spencer is a Ph.D. candidate in English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where he is writing a dissertation on gender-sexual typologies in the long twentieth century. His research has been supported by research fellowships and grants from Cornell's Human Sexuality Collection and Yale's Beinecke Library. His writing is published or forthcoming in Post45, GLQ, College Literature, and Esse arts + opinions.
Speaker Bio
Anna Shechtman is an Assistant Professor of Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is working on a book about the Media Concept, portions of which have been published in Critical Inquiry and Representations. Her criticism has appeared in numerous outlets, including The New Yorker, the New York Review of Books, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is an editor at large. Her first book, The Riddles of the Sphinx, was published in 2024.
Speaker Bio
Mitch Therieau is an Assistant Professor of English at West Virginia University. He writes and teaches on aesthetics, media, and the novel. His writing has appeared in Post45, as well as The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Paris Review, and elsewhere.
Papers
Speaker Bio
I am an associate professor of English, core faculty member in the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality, and director of Media Studies at Rice University. I am the author of Crisis Style: The Aesthetics of Repair (Stanford UP, 2021), and the 33 1/3 volume on Madonna’s Erotica (Bloomsbury, 2023). My current work on taxonomy as a humanistic and activist practice has appeared or is forthcoming in Critical Inquiry, differences, PMLA, Signs, and elsewhere.
Speaker Bio
Patricia Stuelke is Associate Professor of English at Dartmouth College. Her book The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique was published by Duke University Press in 2021. Her other writing has appeared in venues such as American Quarterly, American Literary History, and Post45 Contemporaries. She is currently at work on a second book project on twenty-first century transnational cultural front politics and aesthetics.
Speaker Bio
David B. Hobbs is Assistant Professor of English at the University of Lethbridge (Alberta, Canada). His articles have appeared in Modernism/modernity, Representations, Modern Language Quarterly and elsewhere, and he writes frequently for The Nation. He is at work on his first book, What Can You Do Alone? Lyric Sociality and the Global Depression for Harvard UP.
Speaker Bio
Violet Spurlock is a PhD candidate in English, with a Designated Emphasis in Critical Theory, at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a 2025–2026 fellow at the Center for the Study of Law and Society. Her academic work is published or forthcoming in Chicago Review, Post45, Psychoanalysis and History, Qui Parle, and elsewhere. She is also the author of two volumes of poetry: This Reasonable Habit (2026, written with Rainer Diana Hamilton) and In Lieu of Solutions (2023).