On November 7, 2023, the croak of a coqui greeted me as I entered the lecture hall for Ramón E. Soto-Crespo’s Modern Critical Theory talk, “Environmental Humanities and the Caribbean.” According to Soto-Crespo, the coqui and the Puerto Rican parrot are only two of the animals who fill the soundscape in the El Yunque National Forest. Both animals are on the verge of being silenced due to deforestation. In the 1940s and 50s, Puerto Rico switched gears from sugar cane monoculture to a manufacture-based industry that would generate more wealth for the nation. Such modernization, Soto-Crespo...

On October 31, 2023, Penelope Deutscher gave the lecture “Revocability, Exception, Disqualifying Qualification: Grammars of Power After Foucault and Roe” for the Unit for Criticism’s Modern Critical Theory lecture series. As a Foucauldian scholar, Deutscher’s work traces power through Foucault’s original theory and the revised grammars that have come afterwards.  The MCT lecture comes from her current project to name hinges of power in contemporary discourse and offers qualifying disqualification and disqualifying qualification as an intervention in naming methods of regulation. ...

Especially relevant in the era of Coronavirus and current labor movements in the U.S., Shirl Yang (postdoctoral researcher at Washington University of St. Louis) posits that novels set in empty offices undo a longstanding relation between narrative uncertainty and the 18th century notion of the work ethic. In her lecture on October 3, 2023, for the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, titled “A Labor Theory of Suspense,” Yang notes that the economic excitement of early capitalism was built upon the anxiety of spiritual predestination,...