“Whether she takes a formalist or a queer approach, the critic’s job is to interrogate the text, diagnose its complicity with social forces, rebel against this complicity, and extol the virtues of texts that do this work for us. The authority of critique depends, in part, on its dispassionate tone, its ability to provide the critic with enough distance to identify and interrogate what seems like common sense. If she does not engage in critique, then the critic is thought to be naive, uninterested in politics, or, far worse, a humanist!”
“Felski’s argument does not do away with critical thinking. Instead, by examining what critique can and cannot do, she rethinks politics altogether and reimagines the contribution literary critics might make to the university and the culture at large.”
“The Limits of Critique begins by redescribing critique as a literary version of what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur calls the “hermeneutics of suspicion.””
“Taking on the role of the critic has its own affective rewards. The critic is the knowing reader who stands above or beyond the many attachments that prevent the lay reader from being able to see what a text really means. The critic is never naive. The critic is a member of an exclusive club made up of those who are in the know, those who are not bamboozled by the appearances of things. As it turns out, literary critics have practiced a method whose intellectual virtues have often obfuscated its emotional pleasures.”
“Uses of Literature takes a step beyond Literature after Feminism, offering four alternatives to suspicious reading: recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock, each outlining a less antagonistic methodology.”
“Students become critics who are looking for a gap to fill, an absence to make present. In this way, critique is a “matter of style, method, and orientation (‘knowing how’ to read a text or pursue a line of reasoning), involving emulation of both tone and technique.””
“Felski argues that this style takes two basic forms and that these forms have become second nature for the critic. Critics “dig down” and “stand back.””
“Digging down is the practice of the Freudian and the Marxist. These critics stoop to excavate, interrogate, and dissect the text. They mistrust its surface.”
“Standing back is the move of the poststructuralist and the New Historicist. These critics distance themselves to situate, contextualize, and denaturalize the text. They mistrust what seems natural.”
“These metaphors of digging down and standing back function as the centripetal forces of critique. They encourage the critic to adopt a distrustful attitude toward the text. Interpretation hinges on the assumption that all texts mean more than they say. The act of reading simply becomes the act of “drawing out the nonobvious.””
“Critics must tell a persuasive story about the text’s complicity with larger social structures.”
“Every text has something to hide, and once the critic has figured out which social forces lie buried beneath its surface or hidden in plain sight, she must give a persuasive account of the text’s complicity. The text is always an accomplice, if not a perpetrator.”
“club reserved for those who can think this way. But like many other specialized forms of knowledge, critique depends on self-awareness, even a hyper-self-awareness, and suspicion can become monstrous when turned on itself.”
“The book does not set out to reveal how critique has overshadowed a truer path to meaning, but to catalog just how it has become “synonymous with intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and noncompliance with the status quo,” how it has become “not just one good thing but the only conceivable thing.””
“we can’t look to “social explanations” for why things are the way they are because the “social” is the very thing that always needs to be explained. We cannot rely on social forces to explain a text, or on a text to explain the social forces that produced it. For Latour, what’s important about this view is the significance of all humans and nonhumans in forming these networks. In other words, all humans and things are actors. Everyone and everything is a mediator rather than a mere intermediary, even and especially literary texts.”
“So when we think about the political implications of how we read, we cannot simply think of the text as an object produced in a certain political context, or as an intermediary that can transmit that context to us, or even as a mere critique of that context. The text must be understood as a mediator, an actor that plays a significant role in the very formation of that context. “Politics, in the sense developed by actor-network theory,” Felski explains, “is no longer a matter of gesturing toward the hidden forces that explain everything; it is the process of tracing the interconnections, attachments, and conflicts among actors and mediators as they come into view.””
“Felski’s talk, “Doing the Humanities,” that has stayed with me most. In an effort to take a further step beyond the limits of critique, she offered four answers to the question, “If we’re not only doing critique, then what else do we do when we do the humanities?””
“First of all, she says, we curate. We are caretakers who preserve a tradition (yes, even when we critique that tradition).”
“We also convey, both communicating and transporting values, sensibilities, texts, and stories.”
“We criticize. Criticism in this sense includes forms of disagreement and objection that do not follow the mood and style of critique.”
“Finally, we compose. We make. Composition is not creation out of nothing, but creation through gathering, assembling.”