Presented by
the Center for the Humanities
Critical Theory Reading Group |
Rita Felski
William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of English, University of Virginia
Critical and Postcritical Reading
|
What is often called “critique” in literary and cultural studies is better described as a hermeneutics of suspicion. Ricoeur’s term offers a fresh slant on current styles of argument, pointing out the salience of mood (suspicion) and method (an array of well-established techniques for deciphering counter-intuitive and unflattering meanings). Once we face up to these aspects of critique, it becomes harder to sustain any claim for its exceptionalism—its intrinsic superiority vis-à-vis other forms of thinking and writing.
Critique values literature and art only to the extent that they mimic the qualities of critique itself—that is, to engage in skeptical or subversive questioning. And yet works of art do not only subvert, but convert, they do not only inform, but transform--a transformation that is not just a matter of intellectual readjustment but also of emotional realignment. And here critique, which prides itself on the vigilance of its detachment, proves a poor guide to the richness of our aesthetic attachments. What, then, might a postcritical practice of reading look like? How do we develop forms of scholarship more attuned to the affective dimensions of reading and more willing to articulate the positive value of literary works for both academic and lay readers?
Rita Felski is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor at the University of Virginia and currently serves as the editor of
New Literary History (John Hopkins University Press). She has received numerous honors for her work including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the
PMLA’s William Parker Riley Prize. In addition to six books including
Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (2000) and
The Uses of Literature (2008), she has published dozens of articles on the topics of genre (especially tragedy), modernity and postmodernity, feminist theory, cultural studies, and comparative literature.
