ABSTRACT
Chapter 8 focuses on thinking critically. It sees critical thinking as an indispensable aspect both of literary studies and of living in a world in which we confront pressing questions of justice and inequality, climate crisis and ecological destruction. The chapter explores the idea that to think is to cut, to decide, to judge (from the ancient Greek verb krinein), illustrating this through an exploration of the pithy saying or aphorism (Kafka, Wittgenstein, Oscar Wilde and Sarah Manguso) as well as via examples of lucid and compelling contemporary critical writing, such as Maud Ellmann on ‘The Modernist Rat’.
