Critical Inquiry is a peer-reviewed academic journal in the humanities published by the University of Chicago Press. It is considered a leading journal within literary studies, and particularly in the field of critical theory.
The journal was founded in 1974 by Wayne Booth, Arthur Heiserman and Sheldon Sacks, and is currently edited by W. J. T. Mitchell. The journal has been the site of a number of important debates within literary studies. It was where Stanley Fish published his article "Interpreting the Variorum", in which he proposed his idea of interpretive communities, as well as where M. H. Abrams and J. Hillis Miller had a well-known debate about deconstruction. It was also where Jacques Derrida published his essay in memory of Paul de Man.
The journal's editors and editorial board are well-known throughout academia and beyond. The former include Lauren Berlant, Bill Brown, Dipesh Chakrabarty, Arnold Davidson, Elizabeth Helsinger, Françoise Meltzer, Richard T. Neer and Joel Snyder, and among the latter number Stanley Fish, Fredric Jameson, Homi K. Bhabha, Lorraine Daston and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.. Edward Said was on the board until his death.
Famous quotes containing the words critical and/or inquiry:
“The critical spirit never knows when to stop meddling.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“For what are the classics but the noblest thoughts of man? They are the only oracles which are not decayed, and there are such answers to the most modern inquiry in them as Delphi and Dodona never gave. We might as well omit to study Nature because she is old.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)