ABOUT THIS BOOK

The contributors to Situation Critical argue for the continued importance of critique to early American studies, pushing back against both reductivist neo-empiricism and so-called postcritique. Bringing together essays by a diverse group of historians and literary scholars, editors Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly demonstrate that critique is about acknowledging that we are never simply writing better or worse accounts of the past, but accounts of the present as well. The contributors examine topics ranging from the indeterminacy of knowledge and history to Black speculative writing and nineteenth-century epistemology, the role of the unconscious in settler colonialism, and early American writing about masturbation, repression, religion, and secularism and their respective influence on morality. The contributors also offer vital new interpretations of major lines of thought in the history of critique—especially those relating to Freud and Foucault—that will be valuable both for scholars of early American studies and for scholars of the humanities and interpretive social sciences more broadly.

Contributors. Max Cavitch, Brian Connolly, Matthew Crow, John J. Garcia, Christopher Looby, Michael Meranze, Mark J. Miller, Justine S. Murison, Britt Rusert, Ana Schwartz, Joan W. Scott, Jordan Alexander Stein

AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY

Max Cavitch is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania and the author of American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman.

Brian Connolly is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida and the author of Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America.

REVIEWS

In Situation Critical, Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly issue a rousing call for a return to critique, arguing for the importance of the study of early America to some of the most urgent questions of twenty-first-century life. Locating contemporary ideas about sovereignty, race, sexuality, justice, and power in the unsettled state of colonial and early national American culture, the essays collected here engage early America not as a stable ground or point of origin but rather as a particularly fertile site for a critical history, one that brings empirical and theoretical approaches into dynamic relation.”

-- Meredith L. McGill, Professor of English, Rutgers University

“What an edifying delight to think along with the scholars gathered in Situation Critical, whose objects of analysis range from Puritan annoyance to Melvillean justice, queer possibility to secular rectitude, cultures of abolition to settler colonial fantasy. Max Cavitch and Brian Connolly have convened essays that are surpassingly lively, nimble, exacting, and generous in their engagement with the amplest possibilities of critique. Situation Critical is a greatly welcome intervention.”

-- Peter Coviello, author of Is There God after Prince? Dispatches from an Age of Last Things

“Situation Critical advances a full-throated, theoretically sophisticated defense of the ongoing importance of critique to early American studies. . . . Its essays clearly represent some of the most exciting work in early American studies today.”
-- Thomas Koenigs Eighteenth-Century Studies

"The range and subtlety of the contributors’ analyses of the relationships across paradigms of critical self-reflection, discursive artefacts, and the American historical imagination is uniformly impressive."
-- Matthew Pethers Early American Literature

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Moby-Dick

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