Reevaluating Literary Critique: From Suspicion to Restoration

1. EN126 History and Textuality EN126 History and Textuality Week Ten: Critique and Post Week Ten: Critique and Post- -Critique Critique Dr. Alice Kelly Dr. Alice Kelly

2. New New History of the Novel Realism vs Nominalism Etc. Historicism Materialism Felski and Sedgwick CRITIQUE

3. Week 10: Critique and Post-Critique Until recently, ‘critique’ denoted a dominant tendency among literary scholars to read works of literature as encodings of ideological and discursive formations which delimit the possibilities of thought and action in a given historical moment. Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique exemplifies and explains a recent reaction against this mode of reading. In place of the ‘suspicious’ readings of literature that 'critique' tended to produce, many literary scholars have followed Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call for ‘reparative readings’ that seek to restore and add meaning to texts, rather than stripping it away to reveal a supposedly hidden ideological core.

5. Structure of today’s lecture: 1. Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003) – Paranoid and Reparative Reading 2. Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) 3. Where do we go from here?

8. Part One: Part One: Eve Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling (2003)

9. Eve Sedgwick, 1950-2009

10. The hermeneutics of suspicion

11. It is possible that the very productive critical habits embodied in what Paul Ricoeur memorably called the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’—wide-spread critical habits indeed, perhaps by now nearly synonymous with criticism itself—may have had an unintentionally stultifying side effect: they may have made it less rather than more possible to unpack the local, contingent relations between any given piece of knowledge and its narrative/epistemological entailments between the seeker, knower and teller. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, p. 124

16. The candelabra on the altar are made of ‘Seventy-five’ shells, the Virgin’s halo is composed of radiating bayonets, the walls are intricately adorned with German trophies and French relics, and on the ceiling the curé has had painted a kind of zodiacal chart of the whole region […]

17. But the chapel-museum is only a surplus expression of the curé’s impassioned dedication to the dead. His real work has been done on the battle-field, where row after row of graves, marked and listed as soon as the struggle was over, have been fenced about, symmetrically disposed, planted with flowers and young firs, and marked by the name and death-dates of the fallen.

18. As he led us from one of these enclosures to another his face was lit with the flame of a gratified vocation. This particular man was made to do this particular thing: he is a born collector, classifier, and hero-worshipper. In the hall of the ‘presbytère’ hangs a case of carefully-mounted butterflies, the result, no doubt, of an earlier passion for collecting. His ‘specimens’ have changed, that is all: he has passed from butterflies to men, from the actual to the visionary Psyche. Fighting France: From Dunkerque to Belfort (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1915)

19. Week 10: Critique and Post-Critique Until recently, ‘critique’ denoted a dominant tendency among literary scholars to read works of literature as encodings of ideological and discursive formations which delimit the possibilities of thought and action in a given historical moment. Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique exemplifies and explains a recent reaction against this mode of reading. In place of the ‘suspicious’ readings of literature that 'critique' tended to produce, many literary scholars have followed Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s call for ‘reparative readings’ that seek to restore and add meaning to texts, rather than stripping it away to reveal a supposedly hidden ideological core.

20. Seizing the upper hand, critics read against the grain and between the lines; their self-appointed task is to draw out what a text fails – or willfully refuses to see. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, p. 1

21. For Klein’s infant or adult, the paranoid position is understandably marked by hatred, envy, and anxiety—is a position of terrible alertness to the dangers posed by the hateful and envious part objects that one defensively projects into, carves out of, and ingests from the world around one […] […] By contrast, the depressive position is an anxiety-mitigating achievement that the infant or adult only sometimes, and often only briefly, succeeds in inhabiting: this is the position from which it is possible in turn to use one’s own resources to assemble or ‘repair’ the murderous part-objects into something like a whole. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, p. 128

22. Given that paranoia seems to have a peculiarly intimate relation to the phobic dynamics around homosexuality, then, it may have been structurally inevitable that the reading practices that became most available and fruitful in antihomophobic work would often in turn have been paranoid ones. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, p. 127

23. I am, in the present project, interested in doing justice to the powerful reparative practices that, I am convinced, infuse self-avowedly paranoid critical projects, as well as the paranoid exigencies that are often necessary for nonparanoid knowing and utterance. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, pp. 128-9

24. Everything can be understood as an aspect of the carceral, therefore the carceral is everywhere. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, p. 135

25. Reparative motives, once they become explicit, are inadmissible in paranoid theory because they are about pleasure (‘merely aesthetic’) and because they are frankly ameliorative (‘merely reformist’). Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, p. 144

26. What we can best learn from such practices are, perhaps, the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading’, p. 150

27. Part Two: Rita Part Two: Rita Felski’s Felski’s The Limits of The Limits of Critique Critique (2016) (2016)

28. University of Virginia, UVA Today, May 2016

29. Why is it that critics are so quick off the mark to interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and take umbrage? Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, p. 5

30. Critique is not only a matter of method but a certain sensibility—or what I will call ‘critical mood’. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, p. 5

31. The hermeneutics of suspicion does not exclude other possibilities (for Ricoeur, these include a hermeneutics of trust, of restoration, of recollection). Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, p. 9

32. At a certain point, critique does not get us any further. To ask what comes after the hermeneutics of suspicion is not to demolish but to decenter it, to decline to see it as the be-all and end-all of interpretation, to wonder […] whether critique has run out of steam. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, p. 9

33. […] the critic-as archeologist who ‘digs deep’ into a text I order to retrieve a concealed or camouflaged truth […] the rhetoric and posture of the critic-as- ironist who ’stands back’ from a text in order to defamiliarize it via the knowing equanimity of her gaze. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, p. 7

34. rather than looking behind a text […] we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible. This is not idealism, aestheticism, or magical thinking but a recognition—long overdue—of the text’s status as coactor: as something that makes a difference, that helps makes things happen. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique, p. 12

35. Part Three: Part Three: Where do we Where do we go from here? go from here?

37. Opening page of Frankenstein (1831 edition), The Morgan Library & Museum