All He Needed Was a Hull: Slow Criticism in Cancel Culture Times

Abstract: The essaytraces an arc from atrue story of shipwreck involving the ships Patience and Deliverance in the seventeenth century to a twenty-first-century conversation between the artificial intelligence system ChatGPT and the author on the subjects of patience and narrative crisis. It is suggested that deliverance from crises isintegral to the conceptual structure of both patience and narrative. Features of patience as a "postcrisis virtue" are then sought to be captured within a triangulation of concepts: urgent patience (paradoxical and action-oriented), narrative patience (methodological and linguistic), and fake patience (mechanical and emotionless), leading on to a tentative listing of some features of a "slow criticism" attentive to the fractious anxieties of our times.