Subjects that have long been investigated and appropriated by scholars need to be emancipated from the forms in which such scholarly acquisition took place, if they are still to have any value.

The journal whose plan we present here hopes to create confidence in its own content by giving an account of its form.

Form is inseparable from content, yet academic writing often suggests the contrary by ignoring its own form. The academic monograph, the 8,000 word expository essay, the book review, and the conference paper remain the predominant critical forms of the humanities and social sciences. This journal seeks to promote a proliferation of the forms available for cultural critique, taken in the broadest sense. We venture to publish short, experimental work that challenges prevailing divisions between creative writing and criticism, poetry and prose, image and text. Convolution brings together a shifting collectivity of scholars, artists, poets, musicians and critics to explore the fragmentary, the interdisciplinary, the visual, the unpublishable, and the miscellaneous. Our ambition is to promote modes of expression that are less academic without necessarily being less scholarly—and in the process, to make criticism more relevant.

Convolution begins not with a manifesto or apology, but with a simple conviction—that the forms available for criticism have not been exhausted, and that criticism can be made more germane, more interesting, and more current through continuing formal innovation.

Jenelle Troxell
Robert Hardwick Weston
Paul Stephens

The Editors

E-mail: convolution.journal@gmail.com