Precarity in/as Critical Practice

Abstract This essay considers the widening range and plurality of critical approaches in the field of poetry criticism as part of a broader impulse in humanistic discourses to find new ways of approaching critical study that likewise reflect and respond to the precarious conditions surrounding the act of study itself. Beginning with a brief sampling of recent critical works reflective of increasing generic hybridity, I trace some of the historical roots of these developments and consider the complex nature of precarity itself. In the increasing hybridity and plurality at play contemporary work across literary-critical subfields the motivations, methodologies, and definitions (implicit or explicit), we find the emergence of a precarity poetics that is both formal and definitional, both fraught and generative, rooted in its surrounding material, environmental, and institutional conditions. The second half reflects on how an awareness of precarity’s multivalences as both condition and a potential poetics informs my own research and recent writing. In closing, I offer some provisional notes toward articulating and cultivating a precarity poetics as intentional methodology and practice.