The
Los Angeles Review of Books Quarterly Journal
"No Crisis” issue considers the state of critical thinking and writing — literary interpretation, art history, and cultural studies — in the 21st century. The last several years have been an era of crisis for the academic humanities, traditionally the home of the interpretive disciplines. Across the system of education in the United States there are, in fact, many crises. For our part, we see the crisis as the effect of economic and administrative decisions, not a failure of ideas. So, we asked a group of eminent critics to choose a recent critical text and to write about why it matters: not to coolly evaluate it but to stand and think with a critic whose writing they value. The essays produced are works of criticism in themselves; in them, and with "No Crisis," we hope to show that the art of criticism is flourishing, rich with intellectual power and sustaining beauty, in hard times.