What is Literary Criticism for? (Part 3)

A Defense of Postcritique and Wonder

In Defense of Postcritique and Wonder

The weaknesses of critique and the critical method (see Part 2) was the central problem I faced as a budding student of literature, and it wasn’t until late in my education that I began to realize that I wasn’t the only scholar who had noticed this tendency of the critical method toward endless undermining. At first, I was faced with the disconcerting contradiction that, while literary studies had understandably sought wider representation of varying philosophies, beliefs, peoples, and creeds, it nevertheless sidelined my own attitudes and orientations, for instances of them were few and far between in the criticism that I read.

Enter postcritique. After expressing in one professor’s class my interest in the aspects of literature that were universal, the ways in which literature could teach wisdom to us and speak about truths that transcended our differences rather than emphasizing them, he kindly and thoughtfully recommended to me Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique. This was my introduction to the developing field within literary studies known as postcritique or post-critical reading, which is currently asking some of the same questions about literature and mainstream literary criticism as I have been. Postcritique is a reaction to the perceived shortcomings of the intensely critical methods of interpretation, considered generally as “critique,” described above, and it seeks to find new ways to read and new interpretive tools. The methods postcritique reacts against share a suspicious attitude toward the works they investigate, and postcritique, while acknowledging suspicion’s place, questions whether it should be our exclusive modus oparandi when we “investigate” literature. I put quotation marks around “investigate” not in imitation of Derrida but because a central idea of postcritique is to pull back on our tendency to interrogate literary works; as Felski opines, critique always looks to unearth some crime or wrongdoing and find a guilty party (86, 90), while postcritique sees this as just one among many possible ways to read.

In his 1970 book Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, Paul Ricouer identified a common thread among the methods of interpretation of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche, which was a tendency to militant reading, to ferret out hidden and often sinister meanings; they created a “school of suspicion” (28, 32). Postcritics picked up on this key phrase and idea. Felski calls it a “hermeneutics of suspicion” and uses it as the igniting point and compass for The Limits of Critique. She argues that “these thinkers instantiate a new suspicion of motives—of the ubiquity of deception and self-deception. Rather than being conveyed in words, truth lies beneath, behind, or to the side of these words, encrypted in what cannot be said, in revelatory stutterings and recalcitrant silences. . .Apparent meaning and actual meaning fail to coincide” (31). Postcritics argue that the term “hermeneutics of suspicion” describes the aura and mood of critique in general, and that this view of texts is far too narrow and unnecessarily harsh.

Who and what are postcritique’s guiding theorists and tenets, then? With what do we replace suspicion? A good articulation of the field’s overall mode of operation can be found in the opening pages of The Limits of Critique: “Rather than looking behind the text—for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives—we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible” (Felski 12). In a similar vein, Toril Moi has argued in her 2015 essay “Nothing is Hidden: From Confusion to Clarity; or, Wittgenstein on Critique” that critique’s assumption that texts have a hidden meaning is unfounded. Against Saussure, Moi aligns with Wittgensteinian thought that treats a text as an utterance or action rather than object, in which case its meaning cannot be understood by “digging down into it” but rather by receiving it in a direct and open manner. Instead of “What’s the hidden meaning?” the question becomes “Why this?” which opens up interpretive and affective possibilities, allowing for admiration alongside interpretation (Anker and Felski 21, Moi 34, 37). Postcritique is thus less interested in deconstructing than in constructing: it asks, What do texts say and create? What do texts give us? What do they teach us? Why do certain texts or writers become fixed in networks over time and continue to influence us? Might it be because they have something valuable to offer? In her important 2013 postcritical essay, “Ways of Reading, Modes of Being,” Marielle Macé writes, “Works take their place in ordinary life, leaving their marks and exerting a lasting power. . .Reading is not a separate activity, functioning in competition with life, but one of the daily means by which we give our existence form, flavor and even style” (213). For Macé, reading is a way of imagining the possible and taking on new forms of perception, with the accompanying enlightenment that can bring (214-15). In her conception, then, the way I connected fantasy novels with life as a youth—the way fantasy helped me to see the danger and magic of the everyday and myself as a quester—is not so romantic or unreasonable after all. Macé and others in the movement further add that we need to stop divorcing affective from interpretive reading.

Indeed, postcritique does not shy away from examining the emotional or aesthetic impact of literature and believes that such affective reactions can be allied to intellectual and interpretive reactions. The two are not mutually exclusive. As I’ve touched on already, in conjunction with its openness to and affirmation of the role of emotion in reading, postcritique objects to critique’s own unacknowledged rhetorical mood of dissatisfaction, suspicion, opposition, and negativity, a tendency Christopher Castiglia explores and terms “critiqueness” in his essay “Hope for Critique?” in which he also calls for a return to idealism, hope, and imagination in literary criticism (212, 214). Postcritique highlights and rejects the tendency of critique toward an attitude of pessimism, hypervigilance, and disappointment—and its belief that only this mood is a guarantor of intellectual rigor—as Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felksi outline in the introduction to the 2017 collection of essays Critique and Postcritique (10-12). (It is important to note that, for all of its questioning of critique, postcritique does not dismiss critique out of hand, since such a suspicious approach to critique would simply be another form of critique itself).

In acknowledging the power of texts to move and inform and even to transcend barriers of time and place, postcritique offers new pathways to understanding and appreciating literature. “[P]ostcritical reading. . .can better do justice to the transtemporal liveliness of texts and the coconstitution of texts and readers—without opposing thought to emotion or divorcing intellectual rigor from affective attachment” (Felski 154). Postcritique begins with a certain respect for a text, assuming that its power to draw us in, move us, make us think—even over the course of centuries—is significant, though not necessarily sinister. Toril Moi’s “Why this?” approach looks into these aspects of a text: its strangeness, its ability to influence us, draw us in, and enchant us. This question can take many forms, but it works as a kind of overarching starting point for a post-critical reading: beginning with something puzzling about a text and trying to understand its significance, but with the key assumption that the text and writer have agency and are not merely slaves of language or discourse or social conditioning, and are not intrinsically and necessarily concealing meaning for ignoble purposes.

Felski describes some concrete examples of what postcritical reading—less suspicious, inquisitive, hopeful, attune to texts’ agency within networks, open to a marriage of thought and emotion—looks like when she describes some of her students’ recent projects in interpretation:

In his final essay for the course, one student chose to analyze a poem by James Wright in dialogue with recent accounts of empathy by Suzanne Keen and others, clarifying how poetic devices help bring about an education of emotion and a movement between self-elucidating and self-transcending forms of empathy. Another student investigated questions of enchantment in The God of Small Things, detailing the sensual and rhetorical seductions of its style and the absorptive dimensions of its literary world while developing a forceful argument against the rationalist mistrust of enchanted states. A third 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, while engaging larger questions about the aesthetics of shock in post-modernity. (181)

These examples illustrate how postcritical interpretations can be vigorous, carefully argued, and dense, drawing connections between literature and life, style and affect, text and context. These examples and principles outlined above also suggest how postcritique allows for new justifications of the humanities and their importance at a time when they are seriously under threat.

The postcritique movement has roots reaching far back, at least to C.S. Lewis, who, for instance, pointed out how psychoanalysis “explains away” our reactions to literature in an unsatisfying manner back in the 1930’s (“Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism” 292-6, 300). John Gardner can also be considered a proto-postcritiqe thinker through his 1977 book On Moral Fiction, in which he argued that art could teach moral truths, not didactically, but through test cases, and that such truths were not necessarily socially constructed (19). But alongside Paul Ricoeur, two of the most important proto-postcritical figures include Bruno Latour and Eve Sedgwick. Each wrote a highly influential essay (among other pieces) in the early 2000s that helped launch the postcritique movement.

Latour’s essay “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern?” appeared in Critical Inquiry in the winter of 2004 and cast a worried eye over the fruits of critique and notions of socially constructed truth. In it, Latour calls for a change in tactics as he observes that the hyper-critical, hyper-suspicious methodology of critique is being applied to undermine what he considers to be scientific facts, such as climate change. For Latour, the method of critique, in addition to containing serious logical contradictions, has backfired, and is failing as a tool for progressive change. He asserts, “There is no sure ground even for criticism. Isn’t this what criticism intended to say: that there is no sure ground anywhere? . . .What if explanations resorting automatically to power, society, discourse had outlived their usefulness and deteriorated to the point of now feeding the most gullible sort of critique?” (227, 230).

Latour asserts that the critical mindset has set us on the wrong track, and that that is part of why the humanities have declined (231, 239). Extreme skepticism as a mood has drawbacks even outside the humanities. Paraphrasing Latour, Felski writes, “When it comes to dealing with urgent social and ecological questions, we are witnessing what looks like an excess of distrust rather than a surplus of belief” (45). Latour further identifies some of the contradictions inherent in critique, particularly the way that critique fails to acknowledge that it accepts certain premises and methods uncritically and uses them to dismantle other systems and to explain (away) human behavior itself. “But critique is also useless when it begins to use the results of one science uncritically, be it sociology itself, or economics, or postimperialism, to account for the behavior of people” (Latour 243). Here, Latour acknowledges that critique must admit that at least some truths (say, principles of psychoanalysis or the idea of a gender spectrum) are not socially constructed in order to have any basis from which to operate.

Scientific realities and belief in them cannot be socially explained, Latour observes, and with this realization comes the realization that other truths might not be reducible to social constructions either: “Once you realize that scientific objects cannot be socially explained, then you realize too that the so-called weak objects, those that appear to be candidates for the accusation of antifetishism, were never mere projections on an empty screen either. They too act, they too do things, they too make you do things” (243). And this is where Latour’s Actor Network Theory (ANT), elaborated in other of his works and taken up by Felski, comes into play and forms some of the philosophical background for postcritique. To put it succinctly, ANT holds that the world is not formed solely by center and periphery or by active agents and passive agents or by the constructed and the constructors, or any other such two-dimensional models, but by a complex network of actors, constantly acting and reacting. Thus readers and writers influence texts, and texts influence readers and are part of “extended constellations of cause and effect” (Felski 164). In terms of literature, then, “[a]ctor-network theory offers another view of works of art and social constellations in which they are embedded. It is no longer a matter of championing text over context or vice versa, but of rethinking the fundamentals of analysis” (Felski 154). Felski takes ANT and asserts that literary texts can function as “non-human actors” that have the capability to make a difference in the world, not from their refusal of the world, but through their ties to the world (154).

If Latour’s essay and his idea of the transtemporality and agency of texts operating in a network formed the first pillar of postcritique, Eve Sedgwick’s idea of paranoid versus reparative reading formed the second. In “Paranoid and Reparative Reading: Or, You’re So Paranoid, Your Probably Think This Essay is About You,” Sedgwick, like Latour, questions the hegemony of critique and “the concomitant privileging of the concept of paranoia” (125). Sedgwick does not oppose critique in itself but wonders why it has become practically the only theoretical practice (126). More exploratory than argumentative, she goes on to describe the nature of paranoia and its history in critical theory, describing it as anticipatory, reflexive and mimetic, a strong theory, a theory of negative affects, and as placing its faith in exposure.

She also asserts that practicing methods of reading and interpretation other than paranoia does not, in itself, mean that we deny what she calls “the reality. . . of enmity or oppression.” She suggests, too, that violence and oppression in our age might not need unveiling; they might be already self-evident and blatant (140). Sedgwick contrasts all this with Melanie Klein’s notion of the “reparative process,” which Sedgwick applies to literary criticism (128, 144). She proposes a method of reparative reading that seeks to renew and repair, rather than expose and demystify. Sedgwick imagines a kind of reading where good surprises are possible alongside the bad ones and hope plays a role (146).

Both essays mentioned above made an impact, with Latour’s receiving polarized responses in the years since its publication, as Heather Love outlines in “The Temptations: Donna Haraway, Feminist Objectivity, and the Problem of Critique” (50-52), but still managing to spark a movement that would become postcritique. Thus the interventions made by Latour, Ricouer, and Sedgwick, and championed by Felski, especially in her foundational work The Limits of Critique, were essential to the development of the field.

Though it is possible to sketch out the main tenets of postcritque and its history, as I’ve attempted to do above, the term “postcritique” is intentionally open-ended since the movement encompasses a range of ways of reading, interpreting, and responding to literature. It is, of course, impossible to approach a text without some assumptions and methods already in our heads. But postcritique expands the pool of acceptable assumptions to use, and scholars including Sharon Marcus, Stephen Best, Rita Felski, Yves Citton, Heather Love, Marielle Macé, C. Namwali Serpell, John Michael, Christopher Castiglia, and Elizabeth Anker are experimenting with these new ways of reading and new ways of thinking about reading. Felski writes, “The role of the term ‘postcritical,’ then, is neither to prescribe the forms that reading should take nor to dictate the attitude critics must adopt; it is to steer us away from the kinds of arguments we know how to conduct in our sleep. . .Reading [in the postcritical method] is a matter of attaching, collating, negotiating, assembling—of forging links between things that were previously unconnected” (173). There isn’t just one postcritical method, which is part of why it allows for that elusive spirit of discovery and exploration that I have referenced during this opening statement.

I align with postcritique’s valuing of enchantment alongside or in place of the disenchantment integral to critique in our approach to literature. It is as concerned with exploring what we cherish as what we find fault with. This is not, of course, an injunction to starry-eyed naivete in the way we read, but rather an acknowledgement that literature has the power to create and inspire, and that sometimes allowing it to do so takes as much courage and intellectual rigor as it does to make literature into a tool or subject of the negative, the deconstructive, the disenchanting. “[L]ike tenacious bloodhounds, we sniff out coercion, collusion, or exclusion at every turn. We are often stymied, however, when asked to account for the importance of meanings, values, and norms in all forms of life, including our own” (Felski 15).

For reasons that I hope have become clear, as a professional and a scholar in the field of English, I place myself firmly within the postcritique camp, though naturally that doesn’t mean I align with every philosophical notion of other postcritical scholars. Postcritique allows us to examine two questions that critique overlooks or even disdains: what can we learn from literature and why are we moved by it? Postcritique makes room for such questions. And these are some of the questions I am most interested in as a scholar.

And here I have to anticipate an objection to the idea that literature could ever “teach us,” could ever tell us something universal. The repulsion that many of us feel at the word “universal,” “truth,” or “moral” is due to the bad name that these words have acquired. I could almost feel this understandable reaction in some of my readers when I presented my thoughts on art at the beginning of this series. These words are often associated with regimes of power that used them to assert their dominance and impose their false order as the order. Gardner puts it this way:

As I’ve admitted already, morality has become, in many people’s minds, an unattractive word. . .but the only thing wrong with morality, it seems to me, is that it’s frequently been used as a means of oppression, a cover, in some quarters, for political tyranny, self-righteous brutality, hypocrisy, and failed imagination. One might as well turn against turnips because Sherman sometimes ate them in his march across the South (23).

To put it another way, Gardener defends the concept of morality, and literature’s ability to make moral observations, on the basis that the problems we’ve seen in history are not due to the concept of morality per se, but rather the way it has been abused. One cannot throw out all twenty-dollar bills just because some of them are counterfeit. Perhaps we can reclaim these words, in literary studies as in other facets of society, as means of discovery and solidarity, rather than oppression. If we don’t, we have little standing between us and a completely “post-truth” world full of “alternative facts.”

I believe that postcritique can play an important role in teaching English in today’s world. My goal as a teacher of writing and reading, again, is discovery and enlightenment, for me and the students. In an echo of Actor Network Theory, I seek to impress upon students the complex interaction of ideas, writers, readers, and historical forces that occur in society. Through our discussions and writing assignments, my students and I seek to connect, collate, construct—examine what is possible. I also leave room for affective reading and writing; I encourage my students to write with passion and curiosity, while still writing in a formal way that respects the conventions of the genre of academic writing. As one example of my treatment of literature, I have provided my students with one prompt on the poem Beowulf that asks them to analyze whether or not the poem has relevance in the modern world and should still be read. Although I don’t use the term, I am asking them the postcritical question, is this text transtemporal? Does it continue to act in our modern networks? I don’t force one answer or the other, but I present it as a valid question to ask about a work of literature.

Of course, my own opinion is that even old texts can be transtemporal and have something to teach us today, and interpretation is in part an act of making new and understanding the way literary works speak to us now. This is part of what excites me about literature, and, I believe, the initial thrill that leads people to pursue a life of literary scholarship: this possibility of discovering an unexpected resonance or message in a text that can be connected to our modern lives, to the actual pulse of everyday life, rather than remaining purely theoretical or being confined to serving the function of some controlling (often political) discourse. I will close this post, then, with Felski’s words on this point, which highlight the incredible power that great literature continues to possess:

Why, in short, are we so sure that we know more than the texts that precede us? The advantage of our hindsight is compensated for by their robustness, resilience, and continuing resonance. Their temporality is dynamic, not fixed or frozen; they speak to, but also beyond, their own moment, anticipating future affinities and conjuring up not yet imaginable connections (Felski 159).

Works Cited and Bibliography (For Parts 1-3)

Adams, Thomas R. and Nicolas Barker. “A New Model for the Study of the Book.” The Book History Reader,edited by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, 2nd ed., Routledge, 2006, pp 47-65.

Baxter, Charles. Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Graywolf Press, 1997.

Castiglia, Christopher. “Hope for Critique?” Critique and Postcritique, edited by Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski, Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 211-229.

Darnton, Robert. “What is the History of Books?” The Book History Reader,edited by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery.  Routledge, 2004, pp 9-26.

Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. University of Chicago Press, 2015.

Gardner, John. On Moral Fiction. Basic Books Inc. Publishers, 1978.

Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?: From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 30, no. 2, 2004, pp. 225-248, www.bruno-latour.fr/node/165.

Lewis, C.S. “Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism.” 1933. Selected Literary Essays. Canto Classics, 2013.

Love, Heather. “The Temptations: Donna Haraway, Feminist Objectivity, and the Problem of Critique.” Critique and Postcritique, edited by Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski, Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 50-72.

Macé, Marielle. “Ways of Reading, Modes of Being.” New Literary History, vol. 44, no. 2, 2013, pp. 213-229. www.jstor.org/stable/24542592. Accessed 3 March 2020.

Moi, Toril. “Nothing is Hidden: From Confusion to Clarity; or, Wittgenstein on Critique.” Critique and Postcritique, edited by Elizabeth Anker and Rita Felski, Duke University Press, 2017, pp. 31-49.

“nominalism.” The New Encyclopedia Britannica, 15th edition. Volume 8. Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc. University of Chicago, 1992.

O’Connor, Flannery. Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, edited by Sally Fitzgerald and Robert Fitzgerald. 1957. Farrar, Straus, & Giroux, 1970.

           

Parker, Robert Dale. How to Interpret Literature. Second Edition. Oxford University Press, 2011.

Pieper, Joseph. Only the Lover Sings. Ignatius Press, 1990.

Percy, Walker. “Another Message in the Bottle.” Signposts in a Strange Land, Picador, 2000.

Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. Yale University, 1970.

Salkeld, Duncan. “Shakespeare and ‘the I-word’.” Style, vol. 44, no. 3, 2010, pp. 328-341.

Sedgwick, Eve. “Paranoid and Reparative Reading: Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, Duke University Press, 2003, pp. 123-52.