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lewreviews's review
5.0
Surprisingly moving in its reconception of literary studies, Felski gives the power back to the reader and our affective reactions to works of art. It reclaims the importance of emotion, of laughter, of tears, of shock, and it shows just how valuable our affective intuitions can be in our quest to decipher meaning and value from literature. It has articulated everything that I have a problem with in academia and, even better, given a beautiful alternative to the dry prose of academic journals and books. As one who always leads with his heart, this non-fiction theory book has captured mine.
And my eyesight. I read this entire thing on my laptop screen. My eyes are burning as much as my passion for postcriticism.
Without a doubt, this will be one of the most influential books of my life.
And my eyesight. I read this entire thing on my laptop screen. My eyes are burning as much as my passion for postcriticism.
Without a doubt, this will be one of the most influential books of my life.
travisclau's review
5.0
"The aim is no longer to diminish or subtract from the reality of the texts we study but to amplify their reality, as energetic coactors and vital partners in an equal encounter."
Felski ends her book there after a smart "redescription" of critique as a practice and an academic mode of suspicion. Sums up nicely and contributes to current conversations about reading practices in the Academy and offers new avenues for what she calls "postcritique." Indebted to Latour's Actor Network Theory, Felski's postcritical method begs us to be entangled with, receptive to, and pleasured by the text as a capable coactor. The book is a timely call for a redefinition of the relationship between academic reader to text.
Felski ends her book there after a smart "redescription" of critique as a practice and an academic mode of suspicion. Sums up nicely and contributes to current conversations about reading practices in the Academy and offers new avenues for what she calls "postcritique." Indebted to Latour's Actor Network Theory, Felski's postcritical method begs us to be entangled with, receptive to, and pleasured by the text as a capable coactor. The book is a timely call for a redefinition of the relationship between academic reader to text.
lbrex's review
5.0
An intriguing, compact, and timely discussion of changing trends within literary studies, away from Marxist, feminist, new historicist, and psychoanalytic approaches that look at literary texts with suspicion, seeing them as problematically representative of larger systems of domination. Most exciting here are the last two chapters, in which Felski outlines other ways of reading and interpreting literature that avoid some of the pitfalls that she sees in critique. The book dovetails nicely with Felski's editorial work at _New Literary History_, and many of the footnotes (especially in the later chapters) direct readers to articles from thinkers and critics such as Bruno Latour and Marielle Mace who have published in _NLH_. In many ways, _NLH_ provides a good backdrop for this book. The chapter on context, for instance, intrigued me and provoked me (I think I tend to identify as a new historicist), such that I will go back and read more of the articles from that issue of _NLH_. I'd like to read more about how the notion of context connects (and doesn't connect) with the hermeneutics of suspicion that Felski questions here.
This book is of interest to anyone with an investment in literary studies or who has taken upper-level English courses in college. With Felski's signature precision, it identifies an interesting shift in current thinking about literature and interpretation, and will be worthwhile to more than simply professors. If you're someone who is a fan of Eve Sedgwick's essay on paranoid reading and reparative reading, this book will also be of interest to you.
This book is of interest to anyone with an investment in literary studies or who has taken upper-level English courses in college. With Felski's signature precision, it identifies an interesting shift in current thinking about literature and interpretation, and will be worthwhile to more than simply professors. If you're someone who is a fan of Eve Sedgwick's essay on paranoid reading and reparative reading, this book will also be of interest to you.
mkwojcie's review
5.0
"Why--even as we extol multiplicity, difference, hybridity--is the affective range of criticism so limited? Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?"
Felski embarks on a comparative history of critique as an interpretative mode, asking how it came to be considered the primary professional mode of the academic and challenging its claim to be the sole critical engine of progressive change. Not only have fundamentalist and conservative causes like disbelief in the facts of climate change or virulent suspicion of academics themselves appropriated the tools of suspicious reading, Felski argues, but it has also limited the methodologies and vocabularies through which we are allowed to read "seriously." Moving beyond suspicion means moving toward a greater range of affective and utopian possibilities for reading and mattering and making meaning. An essential read for those interested in the debates regarding the value of the humanities, as well as reading as an interpretative mode.
Felski embarks on a comparative history of critique as an interpretative mode, asking how it came to be considered the primary professional mode of the academic and challenging its claim to be the sole critical engine of progressive change. Not only have fundamentalist and conservative causes like disbelief in the facts of climate change or virulent suspicion of academics themselves appropriated the tools of suspicious reading, Felski argues, but it has also limited the methodologies and vocabularies through which we are allowed to read "seriously." Moving beyond suspicion means moving toward a greater range of affective and utopian possibilities for reading and mattering and making meaning. An essential read for those interested in the debates regarding the value of the humanities, as well as reading as an interpretative mode.
rwcarter's review
5.0
This book articulated thoughts I have had for ages. Addressing themes such as the perceived intellectual superiority of the critical mood, spatial metaphors of interpretation, and the detective metaphor used to examine critique, Felski gives an enthralling history of not only literary critique, but critical theory as a whole. Her call to treat texts as co-actors and appreciate the interaction between text and observer it at once unique and calls to action that could perhaps be applied in the real world.
suddenflamingword's review
3.0
Not being directly involved in academia, I'm not sure how this fits into that larger structure. The image Felski conjures - sufficiently, I think - is a system that became too attached to a particular way of discussing art. Critique here meaning, not criticism or interpretation, but a language of "depth" and seemingly self-flagellating distance that Felski sees as having limited our ability to talk about art.
Which is where the collection largely sits. It posits itself as an analysis of critique and lays the cement of that foundation thickly (4 chapters in a 5 chapter book), but concludes on a note that leaves a sense of 1) unclarity about the practicals of the overall project, 2) whether this is truly about the limits of critique or the polemical limits of critique.
In the former it's not clear what, programmatically, an ANT inspired system would look like. The one instance of concreteness is that one of her classes ends with students discussing their affective responses to works of art. How these look and how they're exactly distinct from critique as described by Felski isn't clear, nor is it entirely clear how simply changing the rhetoric of critique away from "diving" into an "inert object" to "engaging" a "coactor" functionally changes the practice. This is likely my ignorance of Latour's ANT theory however.
The latter is informed by the former in that it shows how blended together the issue of critique as a mode of artistic encounter and critique as a mode of political activity are, such that one of the most memorable moments is the use of former French President Hollande's disdain for the Humanities as a representation of the need to shift the way the academy discusses itself. In that sense it feels as much as kind of internal house keeping and political activism as it does a "critique of critique." It even ends with a riff on Marx's last dictum of "Theses on Feuerbach": "The point, in the end, is not to re-describe or reinterpret critique but to change it."
Not a bad book, by any means, but it doesn't leave me any clearer on what the actual practice of this supposed change to critique appears to be.
Which is where the collection largely sits. It posits itself as an analysis of critique and lays the cement of that foundation thickly (4 chapters in a 5 chapter book), but concludes on a note that leaves a sense of 1) unclarity about the practicals of the overall project, 2) whether this is truly about the limits of critique or the polemical limits of critique.
In the former it's not clear what, programmatically, an ANT inspired system would look like. The one instance of concreteness is that one of her classes ends with students discussing their affective responses to works of art. How these look and how they're exactly distinct from critique as described by Felski isn't clear, nor is it entirely clear how simply changing the rhetoric of critique away from "diving" into an "inert object" to "engaging" a "coactor" functionally changes the practice. This is likely my ignorance of Latour's ANT theory however.
The latter is informed by the former in that it shows how blended together the issue of critique as a mode of artistic encounter and critique as a mode of political activity are, such that one of the most memorable moments is the use of former French President Hollande's disdain for the Humanities as a representation of the need to shift the way the academy discusses itself. In that sense it feels as much as kind of internal house keeping and political activism as it does a "critique of critique." It even ends with a riff on Marx's last dictum of "Theses on Feuerbach": "The point, in the end, is not to re-describe or reinterpret critique but to change it."
Not a bad book, by any means, but it doesn't leave me any clearer on what the actual practice of this supposed change to critique appears to be.
heteroglossia's review against another edition
4.0
I remember lamenting to my professor about what I felt to be the ruthlessness and unkindness of academia. So many times I felt like exasperatedly saying to one person or the other "What you're saying might seem contrarian but it doesn't mean you're smart! You're just being a dick!" I had sensed that the almost automatic position was one of suspicion towards the work or the discussion at hand. I found it hostile, not exactly in tandem with my own conflict-avoidant personality that preferred a more exploratory, collaborative, more appreciative way of approaching a text or discussion. If I had something to contribute, I didn't want to tear down so much as continue to participate in building up and improving a discussion.
Reading this book by Rita Felski felt quite incredible because I could finally see this automatic stance of suspicion de-centered. And I say de-centred not problematized, because she is not against critique or saying it's inherently a poor position, but simply saying that it's not the de facto best, most intellectual position out there. There are other methods of inquiry that can be taken if we are so willing. I also appreciate that she addresses the fact that to understand the limits of critique is not to fall into that apolitical stance of pure aestheticism. Unfortunately (to me, at least) that stance is very much alive in literary departments, even if literary departments might see themselves as progressive.
And that's the thing! She reveals how to be critical has its own approach, "mood", language that would eventually be employed, and stance. To be critical sometimes is just to adopt the stance of being critical. So once you've got on all the trappings, what you say can be part of the contemporary mood of "chic bitterness," but it's actually no guarantee that you're actually saying anything radical or even rigorous. It does give the shine of it though.
She offers a new pedagogy and way (inspired by Latour's ANT theory) for the literary critic and academic to approach their work, one that is Postcritical -- A hermeneutics that seeks to uncover, unveil, instead of one of suspicion. It's a beautiful thought. We wouldn't be digging into the text and feeling like we were completely demystifying it, or breaking it apart, anymore. Instead we were looking to it in a more wondrous way, and being more open to its affective potentials.