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:
“If our entertainment culture seems debased and unsatisfying, the hope is that our children will create something of greater worth. But it is as if we expect them to create out of nothing, like God, for the encouragement of creativity is in the popular mind, opposed to instruction. There is little sense that creativity must grow out of tradition, even when it is critical of that tradition, and children are scarcely being given the materials on which their creativity could work”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“The philosophic spirit of inquiry may be traced to brute curiosity, and that to the habit of examining all things in search of food.”
—W. Winwood Reade (1838–1875)