Timothy O’Leary, (2026). Fiction’s critique: Gray’s Poor Things and the conduct of sensibility. Textual Practice, 1–19.
https://doi.org/10.1080/0950236X.2025.2608009
ABSTRACT
This essay explores how works of literary fiction contribute to the aims of critique, understood along Foucauldian lines as a transformative engagement with modes of subjectivity. Drawing on the work of Michel Foucault and Jacques Rancière, these modes are defined in terms of the ‘conduct of sensibility’. Alasdair Gray’s novel Poor Things (1992) reveals aspects of the conduct of sensibility and of the battle between conflicting forces that strive to give shape to that conduct. The novel makes a contribution to the practice of critique by providing both an analysis of a certain framework of subjectivation and by offering a strategic map for its transformation. If the conduct of sensibility unfolds along an axis of perception, interpretation, and action, then works of fiction offer privileged access to that complex web, not only as tools for analysis but also as interventions that nudge, probe, and disrupt. Hence, rather than critique on its own, or literature on its own, being able to engage in effective critique, my argument is that the practice of critique needs fiction, not as an occasional object of analysis but as a constant ally in its work.
KEYWORDS:
Critique, fiction, sensibility, Poor Things, Foucault
Foucault News 