ABSTRACT
As the title of this essay collection suggests, the rhetorical mode of late twentieth-century academic criticism appears to be confessional. Selected facts of critics' lives—such as body size, hair type, car preferences, travel encounters, sexual proclivities, familial, marital, and pedagogical relations, religious beliefs, fantasies, dreams, phobias, diseases—now regularly punctuate literary and cultural criticism. Any aspect of individual experience, however particular, can be included in what composes the critical ethos.
