Editorial : toward countertextuality

Abstract

A truism, to start with: scholarship and academic discourse are protocol-bound and standardising practices. There are consequently some things that any journal should self-evidently do and some things that it would not, in regularity, be expected to do. CounterText: A Journal for the Study of the Post-Literary appears oddly predetermined by its title and subtitle to facilitate a contrary critical practice delivering on things that other journals wouldn’t admit, which then become, where it’s concerned, precisely the kind of thing that it would be expected to home. CounterText cannot be conventional; yet it is a journal, where academic probity and rigour must be respected. How then is it to deliver on this contradiction, serving both convention and unusualness and the expectations thereat and in between? In the process, how will it guard against the possibility that its obligation to not be square might end up countenancing form sand shapes of critique (and its transformations and invention[s]) that are, shall we say, untoward?