The Marxist Literary Group and the Forum on Literary Criticism collaboratively propose a panel that asks how the coronavirus pandemic has altered our sense of time and how, in turn, this alteration has affected literary criticism, a genre haunted by the question of “timeliness.” More specifically, this session will highlight emergent or developing modes of criticism that respond to this crisis, while addressing the ways in which the pandemic has disrupted the very timeliness of those institutions that make criticism possible, including journals, presses, graduate programs, and tenure. The papers comprising this session insist that, far from running out of steam, critique itself often seems out of time: untimely by nature, but also short on time in the most basic sense. Tricky to clock, criticism is not productive labor—its intensification not directly correlated with surplus value. The time it takes is thus both easily reduced to nothing and infinitely exploitable, especially for our colleagues who are double-timing as caregivers to children, parents, and friends, and who are disproportionately women. Yet, criticism also seems out of time as it faces what appears everywhere to be the foreclosure of a future to which it once addressed itself, as jobs in literary studies continue to be casualized out of existence, and especially in the wake of a pandemic year that saw work intensify and exceed the limits of the workday that left little to no time for reading, writing, research, or teaching—the very stuff of criticism. All of this begs the question: when is it time for criticism?

To this end, the participants aim to address the abstract and concrete dimensions of criticism’s relationship to time, treating its more philosophical and theoretical valences as deeply imbricated in the historical and materially specific practices that take place in classrooms, libraries, and research carrels. Refusing to consider one without the other, the papers composing this session view an attentiveness to this imbrication as the key to reimagining and revitalizing the timeliness of criticism. Anna Kornbluh will begin this conversation by considering the ways the immiseration of intellectual labor gives critics a different vantage on the extreme conditions that have been preoccupying Marxist literary criticism as well as contemporary cultural production. Doing so, Kornbluh proposes to demonstrate how a consideration of working conditions within the contemporary university occasions some methodological and conceptual attention to problems of distance, slowness, presentism, and mediation. Similarly, Emily Steinlight will approach this topic not only in analogy to reproductive labor but also in direct relation to the uncounted work of many academics (disproportionately women). Engaging Kathi Weeks and Jonathan Crary on the total absorption of time by capital, in addition to Christina Lupton’s work on the improbable temporalities of reading, she will center the challenge of sustaining an activity that disrupts “homogenous empty time” via struggles over the accounting of work hours. Framing critical time as a theoretical and practical problem, she treats theorizing itself as a practice that entails concrete challenges for academic organizing. Mathias Nilges will conclude the session by examining recent crises of temporal thought and their particular relation to the “timeliness” of criticism. His paper aims to illustrate that the creation of the currently dominant temporal regime depended significantly upon the erasure of competing temporal imaginaries—the erasure, that is, of different ways of telling time and knowing it. Doing so, he contends, provides criticism with the means necessary to approach such crises as an opportunity, rather than simply a moment of exhaustion. After all, what has the pandemic revealed if not those multiple ways of living in and making sense of time that rub up against the linear, singular temporal imagination of capital?

Lastly, our panel is composed of papers by three tenured faculty members in an effort to respect the time of graduate students, NTTs, and other academic workers, who are largely only compensated for their teaching as opposed to their criticism, and to reduce their exploitation on panels that ask them to explicitly engage with their own precarity in the academy. Furthermore, the papers will serve as introductory remarks to what we hope will be a lively discussion filled with diverse voices and so the papers will be slightly shorter than the average conference length, with each presentation being limited to no more than 10 minutes to reserve over half of the allotted time for discussion.