Crisis and critique in Christine Smallwood’s The Life of the Mind (2021)

To date, literary fiction's interventions into debates about the crisis in literary studies, and contestations over critical methods, have received scant scholarly attention. Christine Smallwood's The Life of the Mind treats the idea of crisis with irony, utilising overstatement in the novel's narrative discourse to draw attention to crisis discourse's inefficacy in delivering meaningful change. The novel represents literary critique, especially as extended to non-literary objects, as a compulsion; and, as failing to result in action. Instead, in The Life of the Mind, crisis and critique are discursive conventions which culminate in the protagonist remaining in a suspended emotional and economic state. This paper draws its theoretical approach from the novel's intertexts, including Lauren Berlant's conceptions of crisis ordinariness and impasse, and contextualises The Life of the Mind in relation to its intervention into discussions about critique and reading methodologies. Literary criticism and literary fiction are portrayed as being in a state of impasse in Smallwood's novel. Despite Berlant's (and Ann Cvetkovich's) guarded sense of impasse as a state of potential, in The Life of the Mind impasse is regarded ironically; progress in the protagonist's situation, in the discipline of literary studies, and in the practice of critique, are questionable.