A genre of arts criticism, literary criticism or literary studies is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical analysis of literature's goals and methods. Although the two activities are closely related, literary critics are not always, and have not always been, theorists.
Lola Ridge was an Irish-born New Zealand-American anarchist and modernist poet, and an influential editor of avant-garde, feminist, and Marxist publications. She is best known for her long poems and poetic sequences, published in numerous magazines and collected in five books of poetry.
George Elliott Clarke is a Canadian poet, playwright and literary critic who served as the Poet Laureate of Toronto from 2012 to 2015 and as the Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate in 2016-2017. Clarke's work addresses the experiences and history of the Black Canadian communities of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, creating a cultural geography coined "Africadia."
New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom's 1941 book The New Criticism.
Ivor Armstrong Richards CH, known as I. A. Richards, was an English educator, literary critic, poet, and rhetorician. His work contributed to the foundations of New Criticism, a formalist movement in literary theory which emphasized the close reading of a literary text, especially poetry, in an effort to discover how a work of literature functions as a self-contained and self-referential æsthetic object.
Walter D. Mignolo is an Argentine semiotician and professor at Duke University who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as decoloniality, global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity, border thinking, and pluriversality. He is one of the founders of the modernity/coloniality critical school of thought.
José Esteban Muñoz was a Cuban American academic in the fields of performance studies, visual culture, queer theory, cultural studies, and critical theory.
The Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism is awarded for literary criticism by the University of Iowa on behalf of the Truman Capote Literary Trust. The value of the award is $30,000 (USD), and is said to be the largest annual cash prize for literary criticism in the English language. The formal name of the prize is the Truman Capote Award for Literary Criticism in Memory of Newton Arvin, commemorating both Capote and his friend Newton Arvin, who was a distinguished critic and Smith College professor until he lost his job in 1960 after his homosexuality was publicly exposed.
Eli Mandel was a Canadian poet, editor of many Canadian anthologies, and literary academic.
Chinampas is a spoken word album by avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor on which he reads his poetry accompanied by the sound of bells, tympani, and small percussion. Taylor performed all of the vocal and instrumental parts, which are overdubbed. A note on the album jacket states: "Chinampa – an Aztec word meaning 'floating garden'."
Saidiya Hartman is an American academic and writer focusing on African-American studies. She is currently a professor at Columbia University in their English department. Her work focuses on African-American literature, cultural history, photography and ethics, and the intersections of law and literature.
Justin Clemens is an Australian academic known for his work on Alain Badiou, psychoanalysis, European philosophy, and contemporary Australian art and literature. He is also a published poet.
Critical university studies is a field examining the role of higher education in contemporary society and its relation to culture, politics, and labor. Arising primarily from cultural studies, it applies critical theory toward the university since the 1970s, particularly the shift away from a strong public model of higher education to a neoliberal privatized model. Emerging largely in the United States, which has the most extensive system of higher education, the field has also seen significant work in the United Kingdom, as well as in other countries confronting neoliberalism. Key themes of CUS research are corporatization, academic labor, and student debt, among other issues.
Virginia Walker Jackson is UCI Endowed Chair in Rhetoric at the University of California, Irvine. She is one of the founders of historical poetics and of the new lyric studies, and is credited with "energiz[ing] criticism" about Emily Dickinson in the twenty-first century. She is more recently credited with revising the racialized history of American poetics, as the poet Terrance Hayes writes, “If there is a kind of ‘poet’s poet,’ might there also be a kind of ‘poet’s scholar,’ someone a poet reads for lucid, explosive doses of insight and history? Yes: Virginia Jackson. Actually, she’s more than a poet’s favorite scholar, she is a poet’s favorite pathfinding detective. Her brilliant Before Modernism is a radical reorientation of American lyric literary assumptions. Virginia Jackson unearths the overlooked, undervalued Black poets at the root of modern American poetry, and every branch of contemporary poetry trembles with new fruit.” Her research includes nineteenth-century American poetry, the history of American poetry, comparative literature, lyric theory, the history of criticism, the history of poetics, and genre theory.
Evie Shockley is an American poet. Shockley received the 2012 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Poetry for her book the new black and the 2012 Holmes National Poetry Prize. She was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2018.
Phillip Brian Harper is a literary scholar and cultural critic. He currently serves as Program Director for Higher Learning at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and was previously Dean for the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. Harper is best known for his work in modern and contemporary literature, African American literature and culture, and gender and sexuality studies.
Stefano Harney is an American activist and scholar. Prior to relocating to Brazil, Harney taught at Singapore Management University, but was dismissed in part for awarding all his students A grades. Since then, he has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London as well as at the European Graduate School.
The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study is a collection of essays by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, published in 2013. The collection criticizes academia.
Excelsior is the second studio album by American musician Jasper Marsalis, and his first under the alias Slauson Malone 1. The album was released on October 6, 2023, by Warp Records, Marsalis' first release with the label.
