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.