The Other Post-Criticism: Experimental Critical Writing by Women and the Future of the Literary Humanities

Project Information

TOPCRIT

Grant agreement ID: 887344

DOI

10.3030/887344

Project closed

EC signature date 3 April 2020

Start date 1 June 2021

End date 31 May 2024

Funded under

• EXCELLENT SCIENCE - Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions

Total cost

€ 241 398,72

EU contribution

€ 241 398,72

Coordinated by

UNIVERSIDAD POMPEU FABRA
Spain

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TOPCRIT (The Other Post-Criticism: Experimental Critical Writing by Women and the Future of the Literary Humanities)

Reporting period: 2021-06-01 to 2024-05-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

TOPCRIT aims to produce a richer and more inclusive understanding of the concept of post-critique by studying the pioneering role of women in contemporary literary-critical culture. Working at the cutting edge of debate on the functions, forms and futures of criticism, the project used a combination of interdisciplinary scholarship and innovative technologies to document, investigate and disseminate experimental literary-critical writing by women, providing the first account to date of women’s contributions and challenges to the post-critical paradigm.

To ensure maximum impact and visibility, project outputs were designed to influence state-of-the-art academic debate, public conversation, and future curricular models. A vibrant outreach strategy was developed to spark wider public interest in the ways in which experimental literary texts can perform key critical functions, and to strengthen women’s key role in contemporary critical conversation.

The principal research objectives of TOPCRIT were 1) the documentation and analysis of women’s contribution to a decisive reorientation of the tasks and forms of contemporary literary criticism; and 2) the incorporation of this contribution in a broadened and diversified concept of post-critique.

The project targeted an area of literary-critical production that, despite a growing lay readership, has received little scholarly attention: contemporary experimental writing that engages literary-critical methods, forms, and debates in non-standard written and performance-based formats, and whose engagement with literature enjoys a broader or non-standard emotional register. Bringing to the fore the pioneering role of women in this "other" post-critical paradigm is important in social terms as it works to redress a strong bias in popular imaginaries of "post-" concepts and the critical (and specifically "post-critical") avant garde toward high-profile male authors from the continental philosophical tradition.

Complementing its award-winning publications, TOPCRIT's communication and outreach strategy included the flagship public program, Performing the Lecture, which was held in collaboration between the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, the Centre for Contemporary Culture, Barcelona, the Barcelona Biennial of Thought, and the Casa dels Clàssics. This program of lecture-performances and public conversations between scholars, artists and experimental authors aimed to challenge popular perceptions of the lecture form and to explore the idea of the lecture as performance.

TOPCRIT has made a strong impact on contemporary conversation around post-critique through the Fellow's novel approach to experimental literary-critical writing by women, which the project has successfully documented and analysed.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

TOPCRIT is built on a solid base of research and analysis of canonical and cutting-edge new writing on critique and post-critique, post-critical writing, and the future shape of literary studies. Research in this area has run the full duration of the project, complemented by reading and close textual analysis in an alternative tradition whose lineaments the project has sought to define: experimental literary-critical writing by women authors in the late-twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Activities undertaken during the project, and its principal results, include:

Production of a multifunctional project website that acts as a hub for all project activities, publications and related material, news, and events.
Publication of six individual articles and/or book chapters on the conceptual profile of post-critique and on the experimental writing of contemporary women authors writing in English, including Anne Carson, Susan Howe, Denise Riley, Lisa Robertson, and Jan Zwicky.
Publishing a co-edited book, Wild Analysis: From the Couch to Cultural and Political Life (Routledge, 2022), which features one of these articles, and which won a Gradiva Award for Best Edited Book in 2022.
Publishing a highly visible monograph, Anne Carson: The Glass Essayist (Oxford University Press, 2023), which features three of the project's key articles, and which won the Poetry Foundation's Pegasus Award for Poetry Criticism in 2024.
Presenting the project and its results as an invited speaker at a range of international conferences, public venues and media events in Belgium, Italy, Norway, Spain and the UK.
Coordination of Performing the Lecture, a program of public lecture-performances and conversations held in collaboration with several top cultural organisations in Barcelona.
Founding and coordinating an open departmental reading group in Poetry and Philosophy, and participating as a speaker in departmental outreach activities including a cycle of talks on contemporary culture and repetition.
Targeted course-based training in university teaching at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
On-the-job training in conference and public event organisation, research with a strong gender dimension, and public engagement.
Exploitation of project results to secure future collaborations with cultural organisations and a top interdisciplinary research centre in the UK.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project has progressed beyond the state of the art in its innovative conceptual work on post-critique and in its original analysis of the writing of contemporary women authors, which is situated in the project's publications as a challenging new form of post-critical writing and practice. The Fellow's work on the project of poet and classicist, Anne Carson, is to be considered especially high-impact. This first major study of her writing to date has won one of the most important international awards in literary criticism and has put the Fellow's research on the international map. The impact of TOPCRIT's core research on Carson and other contemporary women authors is expected to have a strong and measurable impact on public perceptions of the novelty and significance of their work, and of the potential for vibrant exchange between academic literary criticism and experimental literary and artistic culture today. The research produced during TOPCRIT has not only highlighted such exchanges and advocated for their continued expansion. The project's public outreach activities have provided a high-capacity public forum for these exchanges to happen.