The Limits of Critique

by Rita Felski

Why must critics unmask and demystify literary works? Why do they believe that language is always withholding some truth, that the critic’s task is to reveal the unsaid or repressed? In this book, Rita Felski examines critique, the dominant form of interpretation in literary studies, and situates it as but one method among many, a method with strong allure—but also definite limits.

Felski argues that critique is a sensibility best captured by Paul Ricoeur’s phrase “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” She shows how this suspicion toward texts forecloses many potential readings while providing no guarantee of rigorous or radical thought. Instead, she suggests, literary scholars should try what she calls “postcritical reading”: rather than looking behind a text for hidden causes and motives, literary scholars should place themselves in front of it and reflect on what it suggests and makes possible.

By bringing critique down to earth and exploring new modes of interpretation, The Limits of Critique offers a fresh approach to the relationship between artistic works and the social world.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Theory, Literary Criticism, Criticism, Academia, Grad School

232 pages, Hardcover

First published October 22, 2015

About the author

Rita Felski is William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of English at the University of Virginia, and editor of New Literary History. Felski is a prominent scholar in the fields of aesthetics and literary theory, feminist theory, modernity and postmodernity, and cultural studies.

Felski received an honors degree in French and German literature from Cambridge University and her PhD from the Department of German at Monash University in Australia. Before coming to the University of Virginia in 1994, she taught in the Program for English and Comparative Literature at Murdoch University in Perth. She served as Chair of the Comparative Literature Program at Virginia from 2004 to 2008.

From 2003-2007 Felski served as U.S. editor of Feminist Theory. She has also served on the editorial boards of Modernism/Modernity, Modern Fiction Studies, The International Journal of Cultural Studies, Criticism, and Echo: A Music-Centered Journal. Her work has been translated into Korean, Russian, Polish, Swedish, Hungarian, Italian, Croatian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Turkish.

(from Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Diana · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[Peter Mathews · Rating 3 out of 5]

After reading Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique (2015), I am puzzled by a recurrent tendency among critics to misread Roland Barthes. Felski points at Mythologies as one of those texts that exemplifies the inherently limiting negativity of critique. As such, Barthes "engages in the Sisyphean task of turning nature back into culture, of highlighting the artifice and arbitrariness of what seems self-evident" (75).

Yet in "Myth Today" Barthes shows himself fully aware of how a "demythologized" text counterproductively forms a new myth, pointing to the failed example of contemporary poetry, which "by fiercely refusing myth [...] surrenders to it bound hand and foot" (134). Barthes thus seeks instead to create instead what he calls "an artificial myth", a parody of mythological discourse that finds its model in Flaubert's Bouvard and Pécuchet with The Dictionary of Received Ideas. Indeed, he claims to have already undertaken such an enterprise in his earlier book Writing Degree Zero, "which was, all told, nothing but a mythology of written language" (134). Barthes's method is pointedly not bound by the negative limits of demythologizing critique, but is a creative rereading of the kind that Felski champions in her conclusion.

Felski does the same thing in the next chapter, when she points out that critique often claims to overturn hierarchies, such as that between author and reader, when it all it really does is reverse them. "In a famous essay, Roland Barthes declared that the author’s death frees up the reader to make of the text what he wishes, to cast off, in revolutionary fashion, the repressive yoke of God-given, author-sanctioned meaning." (109) Such readings have the "hubris in its claim to know the text better than it knows itself" (109), and as such they disingenuously place themselves in a position of inquisitorial mastery.

Felski's solution is grounded in "actor-network theory" (ANT), which proposes instead to read a text as a creative reimagining that eschews the inherent negativity of traditional critique. "The hermeneutics of suspicion is an art as much as a science: a piecing together of signs to create new constellations of meaning, a patient untangling and reweaving of textual threads" (108).

This is EXACTLY the same solution that Barthes outlines in "The Death of the Author", right down to his metaphor of text being woven from different threads. "In the multiplicity of writing, everything is to be *disentangled*, nothing *deciphered*; the structure can be followed, 'run' (like the thread of a stocking) at every point and at every level, but there is nothing beneath: the space of writing is to be ranged over, not pierced; writing ceaselessly posits meaning ceaselessly to evaporate it, carrying out a systematic exemption of meaning." (147) The text is thus "performed" by the reader each time it is read, with the same variations of meaning that characterize the performance of a play.

While I like the direction of Felski's overall argument, especially as so much literary criticism has become, for me, too negative and inquisitorial, I can't help but think that her reading of some critics, like Barthes, is made too narrowly in order to accentuate her point about the limits of criticism.

[Eric]

Before I discuss the book itself, I should probably take a minute to mention my background, which had a big effect on my encounter with Felski's argument. I'm in the field of rhetoric and have been, basically, since I was an undergraduate. That means my familiarity with trends in literary studies is limited (e.g., I know what "New Historicism" is but would have a hard time naming more than a couple of its practitioners; I've read some work in gender and postcolonial studies that circulates across the literature/rhetoric border but don't keep up with PMLA or New Literary History). Because of this background, there were parts of Felski's book where I had to take her word on things and others where I found myself thinking, "Wait, haven't rhetoricians been defending and enacting the sort of work Felski's advocating for decades?" For instance, Felski focuses on the "rhetoric of critique" because doing so "primes us to look closely at current ways of reading rather than through them" (6). I found myself recalling The Electronic Word (1993), in which Richard Lanham argues for what he calls "bi-stable oscillation": looking at as well as through texts. This is not a criticism of Felski's argument. Just as engaging rhetorical scholarship means I miss lots of what's happening in literature, of course Felski's literary orientation means she's going to miss stuff in rhetoric. Again, I'm taking her word that this is very much an argument that still needs to be made in literary studies. It just left me wishing, especially since she explicitly positions her project as rhetorical, that there were another rhetorical scholar or two in the reference list—and feeling like a greater attunement to rhetoric could've jump-started this conversation in literary studies a long time ago.

That said, I became interested in Felski's book because a similar conversation is in fact happening in rhetoric: specifically, a turn toward "postcritical" approaches to scholarship. Felski builds on French theorist Bruno Latour, who's made/is making big waves in rhetoric. She also spends a lot of time with queer theorist Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, whose work on "reparative reading" seems to be having less influence on the "postcritical" conversation in rhetoric. (That said, I ordered Sedgwick's Touching Feeling, plus a big stack of books on affect theory, the moment I finished The Limits of Critique. So Felski does a nice job presenting and speaking to the significance of Sedgwick's project.) I was interested in getting both the perspective of a literary scholar and a clearer sense of the "critique" from which scholars pursuing postcritical projects are trying to distinguish themselves—especially because "critique" can be a handily vague label for people who want to dismiss a huge range of theoretical work that they already don't like. That is, scholars can nod to the term "postcritical" in order to wash their hands of deconstruction, postcolonialism, queer theory, various feminist methods, psychoanalytic criticism, and so on.

Felski aligns "critique" with what Paul Ricoeur calls "the hermeneutics of suspicion." Her gloss of Ricoeur—who is himself riffing on Nietzsche, Freud, and Marx—is this: “radicalism of thought now calls for intensive acts of deciphering, thanks to a heightened sense of the duplicity of language and the uncertain links between signs and meaning. Their aim is not just to underscore the unreliability of knowledge—a theme amply mined by previous generations of philosophers. Rather, these thinkers instantiate a new suspicion of motive—of the ubiquity of deception and self-deception…. Meaning can be retrieved only after arduous effort; it must be wrested from the text, rather than gleaned from the text” (31).

Working with Sedgwick’s “reparative reading” and Latour’s actor-network-theory (ANT), Felski goes on to describe the methods of “digging down” and “standing back” that are often the bread and butter of Marxist and Freudian literary criticism. She argues that such methods fail to listen to or engage texts on their own terms. The method prescribes how a text is read so that “the world view of the critic is neither shaken nor stirred. What a text ultimately portends is foretold by a prior theoretical-analytical scheme” (64). Felski goes on to link Foucauldian, poststructuralist, and certain postcolonial approaches to the hermeneutics of suspicion. Citing Latour, she claims that such approaches work to reveal how many of the beliefs, institutions, and assumptions that guide everyday life are socially constructed: “To describe something as socially constructed is to deliver an accusation or mount a reproach. It is, as Latour remarks, to seek to reduce something to dust by showing that it is made up” (77). She offers the work of Judith Butler as an example.

From there, Felski goes on to describe the critic’s (often explicitly stated) similarity to the figure of the detective. The critic, like the detective, is constantly on the look out for a guilty party. She also echoes Latour’s polemical claim that “Context stinks!” (152), resisting context-heavy approaches to literary criticism that reduce the text to a predetermined artifact of its time or situation. Felski isn’t interested in doing away with context entirely. She just wants to position texts as “nonhuman actors” that can speak to and challenge their context (and their readers) rather than simply emerging out of that context (163). She questions the rigidity with which many literature scholars define historical eras, claiming that this rigidity can confine and reduce the agency of texts.

Pushing the limits of critical approaches, Felski argues that ANT allows scholars to see “the reader-text connection” as “part of a network rather than a self-enclosed dyad” (173). She positions this point as vitally important to literary studies, “especially in the classroom” (173). “The text,” she writes, “is not sequestered away in haughty or melancholic isolation; it is unmistakably worldly rather than otherworldly” (176). Felski goes on to describe her take on "postcritical reading," including the way she deploys it in the classroom (172). A key aspect of such reading is its openness to the affective and emotional effects of texts. She describes, for instance, a student who “elucidated his sense of shock on watching the French film Irreversible, as being triggered not only by its graphic and sexually violent subject matter but also by disorienting camera angles and a reverse plot” (180). Felski describes the “most noticeable difference” that resulted from including postcritical affective approaches as “a surge of élan in the classroom, a collective sigh of relief at encountering an analytical language for reflecting on, rather than repudiating, their aesthetic attachments” (181).

There are lots of things I like about Felski’s book. She maps out the rhetoric of critique in literary studies in a thorough and accessible manner. Admittedly, I started this book a little skeptical of postcritical approaches, and I finished with a clearer sense of their possibilities. And, given her commitment to description, it’s worth noting that—argumentative claims aside—I feel like Felski’s book left me with a much better sense of what is and has been meant by “critique” in literary studies and English studies more generally. I’m also all for attending to affective and emotional matters in pedagogical settings and scholarly work.

After my first reading, I’m left with two primary misgivings, both of which have to do with Felski’s claims about the affect (and purported lack thereof) of “critique.” Felski describes critique as trying (and failing) to perform a “scission of thought from affect” (25). Felski doubts the viability of such a scission. I agree with her on this point. That is, I agree “that mood brings the world into view in a certain way” and that the pretense of “ironic detachment” doesn’t mean a writer is dis- or unaffected (25, 54). But I don’t follow her when such detachment is applied to, say, Judith Butler’s work. In fact, I’m skeptical of Felski’s Latourian claim that Butler seeks to reduce things to dust by showing that they’re made up. I’m thinking of a recent interview with Butler: “Some trans people thought that in claiming that gender is performative ... I was saying that it is all a fiction, and that a person’s felt sense of gender was therefore ‘unreal.’ That was never my intention…. But I think I needed to pay more attention to what people feel…. I did not mean to argue that gender is fluid and changeable (mine certainly is not).” So while Butler admits more attention to “what people feel” would be a good thing, she’s attentive to the fact that gender can’t be reduced to dust by being revealed as a social construct. Rather, this can be a way of thinking through and acknowledging gender’s relative stability if not obduracy. In any case, it seems to me there’s a great deal of affect at work in Butler’s writing. It may not be “élan,” but I’m not convinced that something like an affect of hope isn't in there. And, moreover, even if we were to link Butler will less celebratory affects—frustration, resignation, melancholy, and so on—I'm not sure that such moods can or should be lumped in with either an actual or a self-styled lack of affect.

That said, Felski herself acknowledges this at some points. For instance, she nods to Sara Ahmed’s “spirited defense of the killjoy feminist” in an endnote (210n22). And I should mention that her assessment of Butler’s work is nuanced. Later in the book, she allows (or at least paraphrases) Butler’s suggestion that the difficult language of critique might convey “a certain humility” (137)—and I'd call "humility" an affect. In general, however, Felski characterizes critique as “ironic and deliberative rather than angry and accusatory,” and aligns Butler with the first of those two pairs. Again, I agree with Felski that ironic detachment is a mood, an affect. What I’m less sure about is her claim that practitioners of “critique” pretend it’s not—that, in other words, writers like Butler think they are or want to be thought of as coolly separating themselves from the commonplace beliefs and systems they’re analyzing.

This gets me to my other major misgiving, which is the distinction or lack thereof between “critique” and auto- or self-critique. According to Felski, suspicious critics claim an ironic detachment from both the socially constructed systems they’re critiquing and their own embroilment in those systems: “‘You do not know that you are ideologically driven, historically determined, or culturally constructed,’ declares the subject of critique to the object of critique, ‘but I do!’” (131). For Felski, there’s a sort of haughty, holier-than-thou attitude in such declarations. And I'm sure this is the case in lots of critiques. I should reiterate that I’m not squarely in Felski’s audience, and I haven’t read many of the key theorists she’s after. For instance, I’ve barely read any Frederic Jameson. I’ve read a lot more Foucault, but still not a ton—essays, interviews, and an array of excerpts, but no books. And it’s “the mode of Foucauldian genealogy” that Felski positions as paradigmatically critical and detached, and in which she suggests Butler is working. I won’t deny Foucault’s extensive influence on Butler, nor the likelihood that lots of people in literature are forwarding an ironically detached “gotcha!” style of critique. It’s just that I don’t feel such detachment in many of the key writers that Felski cites that I myself have read (Derrida, Butler, et al.). Moreover, I see in those writers an affectively complicated grappling with their embeddedness in the structures they’re calling attention to. I don’t see the hubristic glee that Felski seems to glimpse beneath critics' phlegmatic performances (and here I may be going too far, because Felski is adamant that she's not interested in diagnosing or uncovering anyone's psychological state)—an excitement, maybe, but one mixed with at least glints of melancholy, sadness, resignation, even a tinge of hope in the possibility of approaching such artificial structures as structures without presuming or even wanting to destroy them by virtue of critique.

So the TL;DR version of my two hesitations: First, I’m not convinced some of the key practitioners of critique whom Felski cites are actually trying to feign the detachment and disaffection she ascribes to them (though that doesn’t mean plenty of other writers aren’t). Second, I’m not convinced that the detachment Felski ascribes to “critique” as a way of dismantling or demystifying others’ belief systems can be smoothly extended to self-critique. In other words, I think there’s a bigger affective difference between critiquing others’ positions and critiquing one’s own position than Felski generally acknowledges.

I don’t mean to sound dismissive, though. I scratched more marginalia in The Limits of Critique than I do in most books, and that’s a credit to the text and the writer. The argument here is made passionately and distinctly, and it unfolds in an engaging and thought-provoking manner. I think there’s a great deal of pedagogical and scholarly possibility in Felski’s ANT-style approaches to literature. Moreover, her description of the hermeneutics of suspicion holds a lot of water. I’m just uncertain how neatly some of the writers, texts, and schools of thought she characterizes as coolly “suspicious” fit into that category. Perhaps there is an affectively charged ironic entanglement happening in some cases—an entanglement that differs significantly from ironic detachment.

[Behzad · Rating 4 out of 5]

Critique either "stands back" or "digs deep" so as to put into motion a hermeneutics of suspicion vis-à-vis the text. Texts are either concealing something, or fail to divulge the essentials to the reader. Hence the need for a critique to be carried out, so as to correct the wrongdoings of the text. In this sense, critique resembles a set of moral tenets about what texts are and are not allowed to.
Rita Felski opts, instead, for a post-critical reading of texts, which she expounds through the book, mainly in terms of denouncing the various types of critique: post-structuralism, Marxism, New-historicism, etc. Critique, Felski argues, sets out to dethrone the establishment and to subvert the status quo. It has turned, however, into an establishment of its own along the way, and it has failed to come up with anything to show for it. It has not been able to radically or even meaningfully question the establishment.
According to Felski, a more positive and embracing approach to literature can fix the harm critique has done. She calls it "post-critique" or post-critical reading (and points toward the lineage of the term in the works of Latour, Sedgwick and others), and defines it as the attempt to understand how a text works and what it brings to the table; the attempt to say yes to a text, rather than adopting an a priori hostility toward it, characteristic of critique.
One problem with this book is that Felski starts too late to talk about post critical reading. The majority of the book is dedicated to puncturing one method of critique after another (which raises suspicions about whether Felski's own work can be seen as "a critique of critique" or not), and postpones the crucial task of charting post-critical territory to the last pages of chapter five. When she finally introduces and actually uses the Actor-Network Theory, the reader is able to find affiliations between post-critique and alternative methods of reading, such as Franco Morreti's Distant Reading. However, she does not actually apply her favored method to a substantial reading of any texts so as to give a general idea of what post-critique entails.
Also, post critical reading resembles the philosophy of literature in terms of the questions it asks, the most important of which is "what can literature do?" and "how?" What I'm trying to say is, Post-critique is not an entirely new method of reading, though Felski refrains from labeling it as her own concoction.

[Simon Robs · Rating 5 out of 5]

https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/p...

[Dante · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've yet to fully make up my mind on this book - it's repetitive and, oddly, Felski's conclusions are as unconvincing as they are interesting - highly - and despite the wave of criticism and hostility the post-critique movement has been met with, she articulates very well an image of 'critique' and its traps. It's an image many are likely to contest, and my own dispositions certainly clash with her reading-practice , but nonetheless, it's fair to say that its a useful book, whatever else it might be.

Extra note: In general, Felski's writing is highly readable, but there are some very unfortunate analogies; 'Yet the negativity of critique, like Baskin-Robbins ice cream, also comes in various flavors...'

[Kenny Kidd · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aaaaaawesomeeeee

For anyone who’s remotely interested in the current dialogue on Literary theory and hermeneutics, or who is frustrated by how much critical analysis and text-excavating they had to do in literature classes, this may appeal to you greatly! It’s an awesome summation of the value that critical, deconstructive, analytical reading has, ending with its eventual shortcomings and proposing that a more holistic, appreciative and semi-mystical approach to texts might gain some experience or truth from the act of reading that is lost through reading with a strictly critical lens. Cool stuff 😎

[Lucy Green · Rating 2 out of 5]

eh

[Roisin · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most important books of literary theory I have read (no joke)

“That critique has made certain things possible is not in doubt. What is also increasingly evident, however, is that it has sidelined other intellectual, aesthetic, and political possibilities - ones that are just as vital to the flourishing of new fields of knowledge” (190

Neophenomenological experiences of reading “connect us to our lives as social beings, while also inviting us to reflect on the distinctive qualities of works of art: what spurs us to pick up a book or to become utterly engrossed in a film. We cannot hope to do justice to these qualities, I argued, as long as we remain in the thrall of a suspicious hermeneutics. Sometimes serious thinking calls for a judicious decrease rather than an increase of distance — a willingness to acknowledge and more fully engage our attachments.” (192)

[Neil · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in literary scholarship and pedagogy. Felski deftly explores the limits of critique (which she connects closely to Ricoeur's concept of the hermeneutics of suspicion) as a methodology and "critiquiness" (via Castiglia) as a mood of reading. In one chapter, she considers the spatial metaphors of "digging down and standing back" that mark classic projects of critique. In another of my favorite sections, she points to how critics tend to position themselves as detectives trying to discover the crime a text has committed. And she manages to explore the limits of these techniques without performing a critique herself.

In her conclusion, Felski introduces a few schools of "postcritical" reading that reinvigorate the ways we think about interpretation and the affective attachments we have to literary texts. She's especially a fan of actor-network-theory, but she also talks about some recent work coming out of the French academy (of all places) on affective hermeneutics that sounds really compelling.

This book, especially the last chapter and coda, also have really valuable ideas for how to teach students critical reading skills that incorporate our/their attachments to books and poems, as well as the modes of critical thought that tend to prevail in theory courses (Marxism, Postcolonial Theory, Psychoanalysis, etc.). *The Limits of Critique* offers a very readable and enjoyable overview of the history and state of the field. Five stars!

[Christina “6 word reviewer” Lake]

Sigh. Sigh. Sigh.

Some of us have been saying this for years. Reading it made me as angry as the prodigal son’s older brother! Trying to repent...

[Mark Wollaeger · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Limits of Critique
by Rita Felski
Chicago and London: University Chicago Press, 2015. 228 pages
Mark Wollaeger

Holy shit, did I get a lot of pleasure out of Rita Felski’s new book! Every time a turn of phrase or extended metaphor made me smile I put a smiley face in the margin. If I laughed aloud I sometimes circled the smiley face. A quick scan of my advance copy reveals twenty-three grinning little doofuses scrawled in the margins. That’s more than one every ten pages. I think of them as doofuses (doofi?) because I fear they make me look a little dopey, perhaps mildly contemptible. That’s because I’ve been around long enough to know that my affective responses to Felski’s text are supposed to remain in the margins, not front and center, and certainly not worded in this way.
For the conventions of scholarly critique amount to a genre that presses me to summarize Felski’s
argument in elegantly clinical prose, locate it within existing scholarly conversations, and identify a shortcoming or two. Ideally, the identification of weaknesses, lacunae, or outright mistakes operates by showing – and this is where critique clicks into place within the subgenre of the book review – that Rita, through no fault of her own, doesn’t know what she’s talking about. The fault would lie not in her but in her ideological constellation, and my duty as critiquer would be to reaffirm a fundamental assumption of critique today: the critiquer has greater access to truth than does the critiqued, and it is his job to unmask what masquerades as truth within the discourse of the critiqued – ta da! – as history, which is to say, as ideology.

Note that this book is not called Against Critique or Beyond Critique. Felski delights in tracing the limits of critique not because she opposes it but because she believes as literary critics we should not be limited to critique. The mastertrope of The Limits of Critique is expansion. The introduction ends with the hope – she calls it a “wager” – that “we can expand our repertoire of critical moods while embracing a richer array of critical methods” (13). She presents these as simultaneous activities or commitments – new moods, new methods – though there seems to be a reciprocal causality at work: if we attend to a broader spectrum of our affective eesponses to texts, we may take up new methods; if we decide to take up new methods, we may rediscover the rich diversity of responses that drew most of us to literature in the first place. Later, perhaps drawing on her past work in modernism, she hopes that a diminution of critique’s status may “turn out to be a liberation” (116).1

So what is the predominant critical mood today? Negative, cantankerous, and disgruntled. But Felski is not exhorting us to put on a happy face, turn that frown upside down, and regruntle our critical mood.2 Approvingly observing that “Academia has often been a haven for the disgruntled and disenchanted, for oddballs and misfits” (12), she acknowledges the power and value of critique. Felski reports that this book was motivated in part by some bemused responses to her previous book, The Uses of Literature (2008), in which she expressed her sense that critique seemed to be headed for a dead end and called for modes of reading and criticism more sensitive to the pleasures of reading and to the motives and needs of ordinary – that is, non- academic– readers. Arguing for a shift away from literature as ideological ruse without reverting (the horror, the horror) to aestheticism or mere appreciation, she hazarded four categories of aesthetic experience worthy of more sustained attention: recognition (not identification), knowledge, shock, and enchantment.3 Some readers asked in response, “what’s so wrong with critique?”

In this book she backs up to redescribe critique, the unexpanded motivating term of The Uses of
Literature, in order to detail its status as the default genre of critical argumentation and to show why we need alternatives. Critique, as she presents it, is not only a mode of argument but also a style, tone, and ethos – a critical assembly that needn’t become criticism’s all in all. The first chapter asks “what happens if we think of critique as an affective stance that orients us in certain ways” rather than as a mode of intellectual rigor detached from affect and from its objects of inquiry. Critique itself, Felksi argues, is a mode of attachment, not an affect-neutral tool, but it’s a mode of attachment that occupies a very narrow spectrum of possible affects. Although critique comes in many flavors, suspicion governs them all – one affect to rule the rest – and Felski turns to Paul Ricoeur’s concept of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” to denaturalize its inevitability. Ricoeur came up with the phrase while thinking through the implications of his own work on three historic masters of critique, Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, all of whom aimed to throw off the weight of the past and its ideological legacies by puncturing illusions, toppling idols, and destroying divinities. Their iconoclasm shares “a spirit of ferocious and blistering disenchantment” (32) that changed the world, but that shouldn’t make it the only language game in town. A hermeneutics of “restoration” as opposed to suspicion does not presuppose the empty poverty of language that makes everyone but the person wielding critique’s blade the stooge of ideology; it “luxuriates in the fullness of language” and assumes that “the words on the page do not disguise truth but disclose it” (32). In the hands of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche critique may have been a lever that pried apart dominant discourses, allowing new thoughts to flower from the cracks, but now, with so many critics having mastered the genre, critique’s attack on entrenched power has come to seem like an endlessly repeated trick of the trade, a set of moves that has itself become as hegemonic as what it once opposed.

The second chapter identifies these moves with a dominant set of critical tropes – “digging down and standing back” – and the third with a dominant narrative, the detective novel, in which the critic searches for clues she is able to recognize because she already knows what she’s looking for: the ubiquitous operations of power. As in a Raymond Chandler novel, a “mood of watchfulness permeates the critical theory seminar: a conviction that no text is innocent and every sentence has something to hide” (96). If the assumption that “guilt is always collective and social” is valuable as a political strategy – witness the Black Lives Matter movement – it doesn’t always produce the best, or most useful, or most engaging accounts of the literature we study. Felski finds many ways to describe the potential circularity of critique: suspicion generates the clues we need to diagnose the all-consuming guilt we posited from the beginning: “Critique sniffs out the guilt of others, only to engage, finally, in an anguished flurry of breast-beating and self-incrimination, a relentless rooting out of concealed motives and impure thoughts. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa – except that, in contrast to Christian theology, there is no hope of final salvation” (114). Yes, that earned one of my smiley faces. Describing critique’s picture of social meaning as determined exclusively by power, Felski notes that in consequence critics must scramble to find things that resist this principle in order to have something to value: “The result is a zigzagging between categories of inside and outside, center and margins, transgression and containment, as critique tries, like a frantically sprinting cartoon rabbit, to outrun the snapping jaws of its own recuperation” (189). Circled smiley face. Here it is worth pointing out that Felski remains true to her other-than-critique commitment by refusing to put a human face on the rabbit: no where in this book does she single out a particular critic for his exemplary wrongness; everyone is treated generously.

The fourth chapter is playfully titled “Crrritique”: “the word flies off the tongue like a weapon,” far from the palatal pleasures of Humbert Humbert’s “Lo-lee-ta, “emitting a rapid guttural burst of machine-gun fire” (120). This chapter shifts focus from critique’s rhetorical and affective qualities to a discussion of its key tenets. But rather than rehash those here – the neoclassical clarity of Felski’s own account awaits you4 – it is perhaps better to leap ahead to the possible worlds critique crowds out. The chapter begins by observing “By now my more patient readers may be getting restive. (The rest will have long since tossed this book aside in a fit of exasperation.)”; and the next chapter, the fifth, begins: “‘So what are you proposing, then?’ The badgering voices can no longer be ignored” (150). Her instincts are right: as one of those already persuaded by her earlier pages to renounce to the seduction of suspicion, I was indeed a little impatient to get to the fifth chapter to gaze on the stars that would guide my new path. To anyone familiar with Felski’s recent journal articles, or with the provenance of the quotation that forms the title of the fifth chapter, “‘Context Stinks!’,” it will come as no surprise that all along (not that she was hiding it) Felksi has had her eye on one star in particular, Bruno Latour, and in particular the actor-network-theory, or ANT, he lays out in Reassembling the Social.5

Now if I were to give in entirely to the lure of critique, I might complain, “All this way just for an application of ANT to literary criticism?” But that would be unkind, ungenerous, and perhaps most important, unproductive. First, the path to chapter 5 is largely, as I’ve indicated, a great read. Second, figuring out how to make what has been called Latour’s sociology of mediation work with literary studies is not at all self-evident or easy, and Felski makes a good case for one way to do it.sup>6. Third, a number of alternatives to critique have been advanced in recent years critique-fatigue is widespread across disciplines), most prominently weak theory, object-oriented ontology, and surface reading, all of which show family resemblances with ANT. But given the currently hostile environment for literary study today – the challenges to its social value and consequently to its public funding – the kind of approach Felski limns seems to me the most useful
and promising supplement to critique currently making the rounds. Rhetorically, weak theory risks
embracing the weakness imputed to literary study by those already critical of it inside and outside
the University; surface reading, positioning itself against the kind of deep or symptomatic reading
associated with critique, seems to me not to have produced many compelling examples of a viable counterpractice; and object-oriented ontology, however valuable its decentering of the human and consequent appreciation of the complex modes of existence of things, is not well-suited to making its claims resonate outside the academy in ordinary language. And frankly, bridging that gap is something we all should be worried about.

Now I could be wrong about all this, but here’s what I appreciate about Felski’s appropriation (no longer a bad word in a Latourian universe) of ANT: it provides a way of thinking about the particular kinds of agency exhibited by literary texts. We know that some texts we call literary
tend to travel better than others across space and time, and actor-network-theory provides an alternative to believing either that ideology provides an exhaustive explanation for this fact or that some kind of intrinsic literary value exists outside history or particular practices of valuing. Felski’s Latourian mantra is “texts act not by themselves but with a motley assortment of coactors” (170), and she adopts Latour’s concept of non-human actors not to demystify the autonomous agency of the bourgeois subject or to invest things with the kind of omnipotent agency that critique assigns to ideology but in order to theorize a network of distributed agency in which everything acts on, mediates, everything else. As literary critics, our job, as opposed to the tasks of the sociologist or historian, is to trace the relevant networks that make particular texts (still) available to us as literature, and to ask how these texts have acted in relation to other actors, including their readers, publishers, collectors, censors, distributors, antagonists, fans, and so on. But rather than assert that all we should do is chart new itineraries within an ever-expanding network of material and causally reciprocal interconnections – a kind of updated romance quest for deferred meaning along endless chains of signification (a mantra from our poststructuralist past) – Felski shows a more circumscribed interest in developing an expanded understanding of the affective dynamics of reading. Understanding how texts act on particular readers – how readers and texts form attachments – is something literary critics are particularly well-positioned to study, for doing so requires attention to some longstanding interests, including form, literary history, and reception, and may draw on more recent ones as well, such as affect theory, ecocriticism, and the posthuman.

Is it entirely clear what such alternatives would look like? No, but that’s partly the point. The considerable power and value of the first four chapters of The Limits of Critique derive from the impetus they provide to help us unlearn the deep-seated protocols of our profession. Why should critique, a genre committed to the overthrow of power (from an implicitly transcendental position disguised as a marginal one), be accepted as the norm? Of course the challenge of opening space for other practices should not be underestimated. I suspect graduate students still need to master critique to thrive on the job market, such as it is; possibly, with the help of The Limits of
Critique, they can learn to master it and undo its hegemony all at once. Still, judging from my own moments of resistance to Felski’s redescription, the appeal of the hermeneutics of suspicion runs very deep. I have a flowering bush in my backyard with vibrant fuschia blooms. I can never remember its name. My daughter even provided me with a mnemonic; I have forgotten that too. having studied so much Freud in graduate school, I can’t help thinking that the lapse must be a parapraxis shielding me from a deep conflict, one I resist dredging up from the murk of my unconscious. I’ve tried to diagnose the block without success. Probably it means nothing. But I suspect it does. Maybe I should just move on.7

Endotes

1. Modernism occupies a provocatively equivocal space in The Limits of Critique. On one hand, it is responsible for our habits of reading suspiciously between the lines (42) and our distrust of plot and other equally artificial and arbitrary structures (88). On the other hand, the idiom of
liberation from the narrow strictures of critique’s investment in rationality also derives from
modernism.

2. My subordinated scholarly voice, initially appearing in parenthesis in the main text, is subordinated further here, demoted in revision into this endnote to say that yes, “disgruntle” is one of those few frequentatives left in the English language, the suffix “le” turning “grunt” into a repeated action, as well as one of the even rarer instances in which the prefix “dis” operates as an intensifier. So, technically, to “regruntle” one’s critical mood would not mean to ameliorate it but to deepen its ethos of dissatisfaction (note the more expected negative sense of “dis” here), just as the increasingly popular “critique of critique,” as Felski points out in chapter 4, reinforces the normative power of critique by doubling back on itself. But “regruntle,” I would say, fails to signify only for the pedant.

3. Rita Felski, The Uses of Literature (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2008).

4. Bold clarity, given that, in the words of Trinh T. Minha, “Clarity is a means of subjection” (quoted at fuller length, in all its clarity, on p. 136).

5. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); also relevant is Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30 (Winter 2004): 225-48.

6. Felski discusses the challenge in chapter 5 and in her afterword, but see also her article “Latour and Literary Studies,” PMLA 130.3 (2015): 737-42.

7. Hibiscus. I had to text my daughter. Her proffered mnemonic was “biscuit,” which I retrieved as “muffin.” I have so much work yet to do.

[Sir Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

Speaking figuratively (and in terms a friend of mine might use) I was headbanging with my fist raised the entire time I read this book.

If you or a family member/friend have ever been exposed to high doses of literary criticism and wondered why analyzing the power structures that surround a given literary work is more important than the aesthetics of the work itself, I particularly recommend this book. Or if you’re skeptical of any of the following:

-that an absence is automatically evidence of a repressed presence;
-that Mansfield Park is an imperialist program;
-that Flaubert is, deep down, a fascist;
-that Pynchon is, all evidence to the contrary, reactionary because his characters joke around and sing (this is no time for such things!);
-that the primary thing to take away from reading arguably the most varied and endless of all writers—Shakespeare—is that his works were an apology for the crown;
-that describing the present with too much vividness is reactionary because it enshrines the status quo;
-that the status quo is always oppressive and much, much worse than it appears;
-that the word conservative necessarily means hostile to all forms of life, regardless of context;
-that being “radical” or “emancipatory” is the highest aim of any thinker.

A book like this has been a long time coming. Way back in 1999, James Wood, in a review of Bloom’s big Shakespeare book, wrote the following:

“The critic, as analyst or perhaps detective, interrogates the text for those moments at which the poem seems to be displaying its stresses…. These are the moments at which anxiety is being repressed. Having found those moments, the critic then announces that the real subject of the poem is this very anxiety of the struggle to hide it…. Having been caught out, the poem is triumphantly led off in golden chains; the detective writes up his report in hideous prose, making sure to flatter himself a bit, and then goes home to a well-deserved drink.”

And now here’s Felski, in 2015:

“The scholar-turned-sleuth broods over matters of fault and complicity; she pieces together a causal sequence that allows her to identify a crime, impute a motive, interpret clues, and track down the guilty party…. Rather than being a weightless, disembodied, freewheeling dance of the intellect, critique turns out to be a quite stable repertoire of stories, similes, tropes, verbal gambits, and rhetorical ploys.”

“A stable repertoire”: Felski hits home here. One of the satisfying things about this book is watching Felski present some of the common tropes of contemporary criticism and then incisively undermine them. Critique, particularly what’s called suspicious reading, has become its own genre, with tics and methods that its practitioners rely on. What once might have seemed avant-garde has become systematized. And it goes beyond theory and practice: even the mood is remarkably similar throughout critical theorists’ writings, regardless of the subject matter. The mood is one of judgment and condemnation, hostile to nuance, hostile to any idea of value or artistic merit, smugly indifferent to aesthetics (which is dismissed as idle dilettantism), eager to assign Guilt for even minor misdemeanors. This mood pervades academia and much of pop culture.

In my review of Franco Moretti’s Bourgeoisie, I noted the seemingly inescapable nature of the conservative, imperialistic, guilty for anyone who engages in writing (or thinking or shopping or etc.). Reactionaries are, not surprisingly, reactionary; but so, we learn, are progressives and liberals and pretty much everyone else.

The tendency in so much theory is to shortchange real-world progressive thought by fixating on how complicit and embedded such thinkers and writers supposedly are in the regimes they criticize and analyze. Maybe their error is using clear language in a straightforward manner—which is inherently androcentric and a product of power. Or maybe they write about and try to understand the contemporary society they live in—which is so limiting politically (What about the coming utopia? Not radical enough to write about that?). Or sometimes they might even attempt to reach an understanding with others who think differently than them.

As Felski notes, the radical critic’s condition is not unlike the condition of Mankind after the Fall: “Guilt no longer accrues to specific words, thoughts, or actions but is held to be intrinsic and inescapable—an existential state imposed by the fallen condition of language…. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa—except that, in contrast to Christian theology, there is no hope for salvation!”

Even the radical critic is never radical enough.

Here’s one of the critique methods Felski homes in on:

“One common strategy of negative argument among literary and cultural critics can be dubbed ‘deflation via inversion.’ This rhetorical trick of the trade follows a two-step rhythm: the critic dangles an enticing or promising prospect before the reader, only to whisk it away and replace it with its opposite. A rise is followed by a fall; an idea is expressed only to be negated…. The positive turns out to be a temporary way station en route to the negative.”

This deflation-via-inversion method perfectly describes, for example, so much of Slavoj Zizek’s writing. He’s always saying things like, “But isn’t the Left’s sustained bombardment of those in power with ‘subversive’ demands—whether ecological, feminist, antiracist, etc.—just feeding the machine of power, actually providing material to keep it all in motion?”

And doesn’t every single critical theorist you’ve ever read fit this bill?:

“We are regularly apprised that what looks like difference is yet another form of sameness, that what appears to be subversion is a more discreet form of containment.” Such as when Moretti informs us that Flaubert’s apparent literary progressiveness is actually a disguised form of social control. (Don’t ask me how Flaubert managed to control people by producing well-written, disinterested prose.)

This passage nicely sums up the extent to which the hermeneutics of suspicion has fully infiltrated pop culture:

“An overriding justification of critique is the political claim to come ‘from below’…. And yet vernacular suspicion is promiscuous rather than partisan, attaching itself to a broad spectrum of views. At present, for example, it can often take forms that are much less likely to garner sympathy from professors at Berkeley or Birkbeck: right-wing populism, grassroots opposition to multiculturalism and a scapegoating of migrants, disdain for out-of-touch intellectuals and an energetic debunking of their scholarly credentials. What has become of critique … when French villagers know that 9/11 was really an inside job and an entire industry is devoted to showing that the Apollo Program never landed on the moon…. There is, in short, nothing automatically progressive about a stance of suspicion.”

In other words, most people now have, if anything, an excess of distrust rather than a surplus of belief. Perhaps what we tend to exhibit now is a kind of inverted naivety: we innocently assume the worst in all things. We think it’s that simple. (Granted, sometimes it might be.)

Where I work, for example, the default response to pretty much any communication from the executive team is one of cynicism and suspicion: Such a rosy picture: What are they not telling us? The numbers from the financials seem good: What dubious means did they use to come up with those? Surely "working smarter and more efficiently" is code for downsizing!

Beyond assuming that the official version is likely never the entire or fully true story, people now assume the official version is automatically the version furthest from the truth; correspondingly it’s often held that the wilder the idea, and the more fringe its source, the more validity it has. And this way of seeing is no longer the preserve of fringe intellectuals, academics, and cranks: It’s arguably the mainstream.

Anyhow, one of the main things this book does is stand up for literary works, which are given a vampiric treatment by too many critics: they suck the blood out of the works, and then abuse the corpse (this statement feels a little cliché; I may have unwittingly stolen this from someone). Felski notes the obvious: Literature itself anticipated suspicious reading by centuries; many writers have used methods “that systematically block readers from taking words at face value…. Suspicion and interpretative unease … are actively provoked by literary texts rather than being imposed on literary text.” It is easy to think of novels written long before postmodern or poststructuralist thought that do just this. Thus, traditionalist critics that seek to protect the texts against the onslaught of critique are a little off the mark: “The irony here is that it is often literature itself, rather than an overattachment to Althusser or Derrida, that teaches readers to tread warily and read skeptically.”

To cite just one example of a critic’s denigration of literature, she criticizes Frederic Jameson for holding that “the art work, even at its most radiant and effulgent, turns out to be an anticipation and confirmation of the tenets of Marxist thought…. There is no moment of revelation, no startling of consciousness, no transformation of thought; the world view of the critic is neither shaken nor stirred. What a text ultimately portends is foretold by a prior theoretical-analytical scheme.”

Such takedowns would seem like low-hanging fruit, if these academics and their thoughts on literature weren’t esteemed to the extent they are.

Although she never quite puts it in these terms, this can be read as a manifesto against a decades-long siege on literature by groups of intellectuals who value nothing of the qualities that make literature a worthwhile pursuit.

[Justin Goodman · Rating 3 out of 5]

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.

[Paul · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great little tour-de-force of an argument for a better way of approaching scholarship in the humanities, arguing that the dominant strain of "critiuque" has led academia into a dead end, unable to explain why humanities scholarship is actually enjoyable and worthwhile.

Instead, Felski argues for "postcritical" readings that make room for description, emotion, present effects, and the tenets of actor network theory, in which all of us, including nonhumans like texts, are enmeshed in networks that affect all of us in different ways. Instead of a "hermeneutic of suspicion," she calls for a hermeneutic of ... I don't know, celebration? Curiosity?

In any event, Felski does not reject the notion of critical reading, disagreement, or pointing out when texts fail basic tests of justice, equity, or inclusivity. But she rejects the arrogant, grumpy, self-deluding posture of the disconnected, disinterested, disenchanted scholar who can describe the failings of any given text forever trapped in systems it hides, obscures, or elides.

On top of it all, Felski is an English professor, so despite the very academic nature of this book – written about academia to other humanities scholars – it's enjoyable reading, with many more references to Sherlock Holmes than I expected!

[Nanette · Rating 3 out of 5]

In critiquing–yes, I did read critically, especially as I waded deeper into Felski’s pedantic exposé on suspicious critique. I found the text belabored–yet hopeful! (There’s my empathy, sympathy, recognition and identification….) Obviously, Felski anticipated my “restive” mood at the beginning of Chapter 4, knowing I felt like “toss[ing] this book aside in a fit of exasperation” (117). It took her a long while to get to her point and, once there, it was rather unsatisfyingly platitudinal. However, I applaud her intent and cheer, “You go, Girl!” as she dedicates herself, “to the best of [her] ability…to try out different vocabularies and experiment with alternative ways of writing, to think in a more sustained and concentrated fashion about what other moods and methods might look like” and to change critique (192-3). I will be watching–and possibly following suit.!

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

Yee yee ass lib shit... Ask me to elaborate so I can vent

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Phenomenology trumps hermeneutics. Hermeneutics of suspicion bad. ANT (mostly) good. In Felski’s words:

“The subject of this book, then, has been a specific genre of writ-ing: the rhetoric of suspicious reading in literary studies and in the humanities and interpretative social sciences generally. Rather than being synonymous with disagreement, it is a specific kind of dis-agreement- one that is driven by the protocols of late twentieth- and twenty-first-century academic argument. Critique, in this sense, is the hardening of disagreement into a given repertoire of argumentative moves and interpretative methods.”


(I get that Felski isn’t railing against cheap rhetorical prose, but how about the very odd practice of the alliterative serialized listing she does? Here are some compiled at random: “scrutinizing, scanning, searching” (37), “surprised, stirred, reoriented, replenished” (114), “vigor and vitality” (125), “contagious and charismatic” (149). Putting these above examples into their contexts, it sometimes appears that Felski is looking to intensify her own prose with more melodious language than actual substance and coordination—like, what does it mean that “Critique is contagious and charismatic…”?)

[Leigh · Rating 2 out of 5]

the "critique" she's railing against here is basically a straw man. the approach she is critiquing (lol) is not one that is dominant in any of my 15 years of experience in US university literature departments. her interpretation of Marx, Barthes, et al as purely negative in their critique is just not accurate? there are SOME Marxist thinkers who read him that way, but plenty that don't. feels like she chose the worst three dudes in her department and treated them as representative of a whole field. those posturing negative intellectuals exist, but in setting their bullshit up as the dominant mode of thinking in literary studies (in order to argue against it), this book gives them an importance that they don't deserve.

[Alison Brady · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 Stars.

I agree with Felski in many respects. I too am fatigued by the endless, self-perpetuating negativity of critical approaches in scholarship today – in literary studies, but also in the humanities more generally. I am also interested in not so much discarding critique but in downgrading it, such that it becomes one of many possible approaches to engaging with texts - in short, figuring out how we might reorient ourselves towards literature not with suspicion but with something more like affirmation. I liked the ANT stuff - in my mind, it's a convincing way to help us rethink a "new(ish)" hermeneutics. But whilst Felski argues that we need to do more than simply ‘critique critique’, four out of the five chapters of the book (roughly 75%) do precisely that. Maybe this, in fact, further evidences her claim that deconstructing existing approaches often comes more naturally to us that constructing new ones? Some her descriptions of "critique" were also rather caricatured, and often that same sense of superiority that Felski reproaches comes across quite strongly throughout. I can feel Felski’s exasperation through the pages – much of which I share – but because of that, she is also prone to repeating herself quite a lot. Perhaps she thinks she is just adding ‘nuance’ to her argument by doing so, but in actuality, I found that she was using additional metaphors unnecessarily, and ended up saying the same thing over and over again in (marginally) different ways. For instance, I don't think we needed a whole chapter on how the critic is similar to the sleuth in detective novels - one paragraph, perhaps, would have sufficed. In sum: a useful, highly readable and timely text, but also a bit verbose at times, and ultimately, a bit unsatisfactory in its proposed alternatives as well (which also would've been helpful to see modelled in the writing itself.)

[Richard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great contribution to the growing body of literature which questions the confluence of critical to suspicious reading and the almost axiomatic standing of this mode of engagement with texts in the academy. Felski argues for a plurality of post-critical modes of reading which are edifying and reparative. What's more Felski is a gifted writer: she talks about the 'barbed wire of criticism' which protects the reader from 'contamination' by texts that are read; she identifies the affective delight of the suspicious reader who sleuth like isn't taken in by any prima facie reading, but who is therefore never opened by a text. Here's Felski's lucid prose:

"And here the barbed wire of suspicion holds us back and hems us in, as we guard against the risk of being contaminated and animated by the words we read. The critic advances holding a shield, scanning the horizon for possible assailants, forever fearful of being tricked or taken in. Locked into an endless cycle of punitive scrutiny and self-scrutiny, she cuts herself off from a swathe of intellectual and experiential possibility."

And then there's the best sentence of the book, found in the introduction. It is a great question, a question that inspires a different mode of engagement with texts and so an alternate affective delight in interpreting them:

"Why—even as we extol multiplicity, difference, hybridity—is the affective range of criticism so limited? Why are we so hyper-articulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?"

[Jana Giles · Rating 3 out of 5]

A timely discussion of an important concern. Felski is right to resist and accuse the academic tendency to orthodox readings based on the hermeneutics of suspicion, and to encourage us to find other interpretations of literature. Unfortunately her argument here is weak in that it is really a summary of the issue and lacks rigor. Felski doesn't delve into the long history of aesthetics and affect studies or philosophical of neuroscience. She doesn't deal with the problem of, say, Kantian disinterestedness, nor does she offer a solution. While I agree that other, positive modes of engaging with art exist and are desirable, I think her discussion might do more harm that good for the discipline of literary criticism.

[Dunico · Rating 2 out of 5]

A postcritical critique of a critique of frustration

Well, that was somewhat hard. Not hard in the sense that the reading was too heavy or too complicated, but hard because some of the points were really well made and others just seemed outright silly. Engaging in the demonic ‘’critique of a critique’’, I have to say that Rita seems like an interesting thinker who’s in touch with her epoch, but at the same time I can’t help but feel that her reading of the tradition of the literary studies is somewhat reductive and misguiding. For example, her knowledge of Barthes is mediocre at best, and I don’t claim to be an specialist, quite on the contrary, but even I can point that a lot of her claims fall under what Barthes (surprisingly for her, it seems) has already done years prior with a style that was not only vanguardist but also full of its own poetic merits. I shall point: The act of reading as a pleasurable and aesthetic experience with value on its own as Barthes did on ‘’The pleasure of the text’’; Criticism not as an only negative activity, but as an creative affective force as Barthes did on almost all of his career to the point of the absurd in ‘’The empire of signs’’ in which he basically creates his own version of Japan based on his visits to the country and how they moved him; The freedom of the reader towards the text, not as a violation of the texts own composition, but as a freedom from the authoritative force of the author, as the DEATH OF THE AUTHOR THE TEXT SHE USES TO EXEMPLIFY HIS INCAPACITY did. I mean… Sometimes it’s even shameful how a little bit of Barthes and Bakhtin could get her to almost the same conclusions, but with so much more substance. It’s obvious that critique has its limits as every form of rhetoric does, but it is a little bit suspicious to ground your affirmations on misreadings of a lot of stuff made prior to your work and to not even acknowledge.
Also her claims on phenomenology being an useful instrument to make an alternative to criticism is also at least dubious. You mean, phenomenology? The camp of philosophy founded by Husserl who famously wrote a book on how Descartes didn’t criticize and doubt the world enough? How we should’ve gone further? The camp of studies that is literally characterized by the use of reason to comprehend, in doubt, every phenomena surrounding us? Again, maybe Bakhtin and his critique of Husserl and maybe Kristeva could’ve helped.
Honestly, I don’t know about the academic scenario of the US since I don’t live there and english is not even my first language so I can’t pinpoint exactly if she’s right or accurate on her description of the departments and their intellectual production, but I can tell from my experience that critique has not been only negative and maybe that is a difference of cultures or simply the luck of being in a new generation that has not been destroyed by marxist and instrumentalist readings. In my master’s degree, I see a constellation of researchers interested and entranced by the works they’re studying, interpreting, playing with and on that I can partly agree with her: Research is supposed to be a pleasurable, joyful, transforming and stimulating act, but sometimes it is not and it is an act of putting yourself against something that affirms your identity. The identity is defined only by what it is not. Difference is what sets apart. Obviously, sameness is a resourceful alliance to be made, but every phenomena is essentially different.
And I think that she’s right on some stuff: Certain readings that seek to demystify the text are sometimes too instrumental and too pragmatic to the point that they view the text not as an aesthetic object but as a class conflict manifestation, an historical artifact, a sociological object and this type of reading can only weaken the aesthetic object by colliding the ethical and aesthetical camps of existence. I really wanted to be brought by the whole post critical approach, but it seems to me that it is still very failable and it makes the basic error of assuming that every critique since the dawn of cartesian thinking has been the same and has been engaged in the same mood. Criticism has been creative and has been a part of the existence of the arts as long as the writing system began. Brazilian modernism was constructed mainly on criticizing what has been done prior and the artists themselves picking up what should be continued and what should not.
It was informing reading this as she writes exceptionally well and it engaged me intellectually, so in favor of the dialogical tradition, I’m happy I got to spend some days together with the text even if I think Bakhtin and Barthes would’ve done wonders to the arguments and even if I view negativity quite differently. Negativity has its place in our world and in our thought systems, especially in dialectics and its constant evermoving process of synthesis and production towards the absolute. I can’t help but question where will this constant urge for positive claims (all over our culture right as a response to the grim existential and ethical crysis of the collapsing world) take us? Is positivity really the way? Is the negativity misguided? Is positivity dead? Is it really that we should change the way and not push further? Is the downfall of absolute values the fault of Derrideans or is it a sign of the times? Of the demonic polymorphic nature of the technocapital? I don’t know for sure for this is a knowledge reserved only to oracles. May the future and present be kind to us.

[Zach · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some interesting points, but this could’ve been a journal article.

[Hanne · Rating 2 out of 5]

Well-written and interesting but I think it portrays critique in a too simplistic way. There's not that much content to it, it sort of makes a good point but then just lingers on it

[Milan · Rating 4 out of 5]

While I'm not sure I'm entirely convinced of all the claims she's making (or claims to have conclusively argued for), I'm still deeply, deeply thankful for this book. I can't say I'm over critique -- I'm not even properly on it, yet! -- but that wouldn't be in line with the book's goals anyway. What Felski succeeds in, and let me tell you, it felt invigorating to read, is to show that what goes by the name of "critique", or what she subsumes under it, is not the method of reading, but one among others. One mood, one script, one hermeutics among others.

Felski repeatedly asserts that she's not, in fact, critiquing critique, because that would leave the machinery intact. The end result, though, even though, as promised, she steers the reader gently away from overbearing, cynical againstness, must be described in terms associated with critique: it's a thorough demystification -- she's taking the wind out of its sails, alright! And although I'm not so taken with the exuberantly joyful and sprightly tone Felski strikes when speaking to alternatives, I find myself cheering at the prospect of finding methods of engaging with literature in affirmative, overtly art-loving ways, without -- for fear of being duped -- truncating affect, experience, and the sheer enjoyment of good fucking prose, whether scintillating, broody, jagged, or piercing your thorax right through to your heart. This is not wide-eyed, but truthful. Anybody disavowing it simply has forgotten.

Nabokov is the one who definitively endeared me to literature, his Lolita, to be precise. I had not the slightest idea you could do this with language. At the time, the story seemed secondary, the moral questions nagging but ultimely subordinate to this first-time sense of enchantment I felt encountering the magic of words on a page. The shivers just kept on coming. I was delighted to find that I was a "Good Reader" in Nabokov's eyes, one who reads "not with his heart, not with his brain, but with his spine." Academia, on the other hand, against which he seems to prematurely rail here (I find it likely that Nabokov would have been decisively camp Bloom a little bit later on), teaches you to sin in all the right (i.e., interesting, exhilarating, jouissance-inducing) ways against Nabokovian scripture: Marxism, various historicisms, and also satanic Father Freud, whom Nabokov hated with a passion, all figure prominently; more recently, Felski stepped forward as one proponent of emotion, identification, immersion, and so on. And that's the thing: critique, although its practitioners likely wouldn't readily avow it, can be a thoroughly enjoyable enterprise. But it's also tired, sometimes stifling, and not as singularly insightful as it would like to claim to be.

The most interesting opening Felski provides us with is, in my opinion, the purchase affect, (aesthetic) experience in its different shades, arguably has on one's subsequent engagement with the work, because it provides a blueprint for how to think form, stylistics, the sound and rhythm of language, in relation to, well, meaning, but in less of an analytic fashion than before. I'll need to explore this further, but it seems to me like it would be possible to enact in literary studies a similar shift as has happened in psychoanalysis at some point: countertransference, it would turn out, is not a flaw, but a useful source of knowledge; not an obstacle to cold, hard, surgical analysis, but an opportunity for even richer kinds of method. Being taken, moved, displaced of sorts; being touched, or awed, or encouraged, or devastated. Feeling cool, feeling enlivened, feeling torn, and feeling sick. These are not simply to be dispensed with, but ultimately built upon. Felski's is a bird's eye view, exposing the outer Limits of Critique: what it can, and what it can't do. These (and it's all in there, too) are its interior limits: that which is foreclosed in a way, left behind and then conscientiously occluded. 'I want no part of this.', the mantra goes. The time seems ripe for transgression.

[S · Rating 5 out of 5]

I really enjoyed this book even though I was clearly 100% out of my depth. A lot of the phrases she used lacked any clear definition to me and I don't have enough context to feel comfortable speaking directly about them. Instead my review will use almost entirely her phrasing from the book in bits and pieces that made sense to me.

I really enjoyed this book more as a bigger social commentary than anything deep in the literature world. I don't know what the world is like anyhow. But either way, it all rings very true.

Let'sssssssss try this..

"the mistake that chronic negativity equals fearless intelligence" p51
the opposite of critique is not blind acceptance p81
"reading should be a phenomenon to engage" p84
"convicition that those at odds with the status quo see better and farther than others" p141

What Does Critique Look Like?
A practically exclusionary academic sensibility of autonormative normativity skepticism (p9) associated with...
* "a spirit of disenchantment" (p2)
* being "serious and scrupulous" (p5)
* refusal to be associated with the status quo (p17)
* refusal to trust the text, claiming the author must have better insight to the text themselves (p31)
* constant search for alternative meaning (p33)
* an attempt to appear emotionless that is at odds with scientific objectivity (p74)
* an attempt to make judgement without a motive (p4)
* a general distaste and devaluation for the nature of society because it's fungible (p73-74)
* an act of taking no pleasure (p39) in an act of intellectual heroism (p84)
* general dissatisfaction that serves as evidence of clear sightedness (p41)

What Critique Does?
What harm does the style of critic have? Below are some..
* dismantles and discredits the text at the harm of both the text and the author, continually attempting to prove lack of value or uniqueness (p62,p65)
* refuses to engage or contribute to the text
* overvalues past context rather than present relevance (p14)
* digs and rips to find "hidden meanings" in a sort of feeling that anything good must be hard earned and unclear. That the genuine value is always hidden from the surface. (p27)

The Problems With Critique
* it is incorrectly associated with inherent rigor [and] intrinsic radicalism (p3)
* it is seen as having a lack of mood and emotion and therefore more likely to be truth (FALSE) (p21)
* the suspicion associated with lack of relaxation, ease, and indifference sells the process of critique as harder work than more positive interpretation (p37) through a barrier of self-protection from attachment (p44)
* it is looking for blame (p88) because the reader is instilling as sense of morality to assign a collective and social guilty party - which also denies the author credit (p90)

Why Critique Must Be Stopped
* it does not allow the reader to be genuinely touched by the art (p39) and attachments are seen negatively (p41)
* it has a negative impact on relationships between the classes (p43) when critique is used to dismantle minority expression (p144)
* critique is used as a form of language that can serve as a conduit of exclusion and power (p43) which is strengthened by the fact that it is meant to be the last word (p123)
* critique devalues other forms of reading, because it insists by nature that if you are not critical you must be uncritical (p51)
* it refuses (personal/individual) deep involvement, absorption, immersion (p54)
* lacks a sense of positive identity (p72) and therefore lacks genuine insight (p136) and genuine complexity of thought "Dismissive Perfectionism" (p136)
* critique relies on a feeling of standing outside of routine, but it already taught as one of the only ways to read in academia

Why Then Do We Critique?/When Critique is Positive
In this world where critique is the only valid form of reading, we often do it to validate literature we connect with in other ways (p4) and to legitimize things we love (p65). It can grant significance and confirm that what we read is worth of attention and gives purpose to our reading it. (p99).

It also strikes on a personal level because humans are drawn to the feeling of winning (p112) - so we make a game of reading as if it were a satisfying crossword puzzle (p107) to beat. We're "addicted to the charge of narrative suspense and revelation" (p111) and in that way critique creates a "rise before the fall" even after the reading ends. (p128)


It also seems to trigger in our monkey brains the satisfaction of clue-finding, classifying, and pattern recognition. (p89)

Critique also brings solidarity and community around a text, which otherwise wouldn't exist for long without a following, just like any art.

What Then Do We Do?
Rita Felski proposes something called "postcritical critique" - as a way to acknowledge that critique is involved and not an invalid part of our history, but that it is not the only way. She seems to acknowledge that connecting with the reading and staying aware of our own biases will require an even higher effort put into interpretation (which can be relational (p147) and not destructive) and reading good heartly and in good faith. It can bring justice for the author/text and attachment without dispelling magic and mystery (p95) and discouraging emotional enjoyment. The reader is meant and encouraged to contribute without it being emotionally shameful or directly opposed to intellectualism. The purpose is to strengthen rather than diminish the text, without being blindly supportive of everything we read. The goal is more comparative rather than oppositional thinking. (p50)


Some Final Quotes
"the lengths to which we go to keep at bay the force of artworks, the same artworks whose ability to snap us out of our torpor drew us to them in the first place. How curious it is that we dig wide moats - of history, ideology, formal analysis - and erect thick conceptual walls lest we be touched by what, in truth, lures us." Chaouli, p191

[Nathaniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

a little repetitive, excessive use of the word “excoriate”, but good — although I still liked Uses of Literature more.

there’s an uncommented-on gap between what Felski says at the beginning of the book — namely, that critique in itself isn’t necessarily bad, but that the unquestioned dominance of critique as the sole acceptable mode of academic writing about literature is bad — and the substance of her argument, which is that critique is bad and we should be doing something different. I’m on board with the first claim, but I don’t think that means we need to abandon critique altogether: surely the goal should be an academic culture where we can recognize that critique provides tools that may help with some kinds of tasks but not with others, and that there are other approaches that are equally valid and may be more useful for different kinds of goals — in other words, that critique isn’t (different kinds of critique aren’t) the be-all end-all of academic writing about literature, but rather one valid practice (or group of practices) among many.

[Miranda · Rating 5 out of 5]

"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.