Critique and Critical Making

Abstract

InThe Limits of Critique, Rita Felski Uses Paul Ricouer's phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion” to frame and reappraise “a diverse range of practices that are often grouped under the rubric of critique: symptomatic reading, ideology critique, Foucauldian historicism, various techniques of scanning texts for signs of transgression or resistance” (2–3). Throughout the book, she argues that literary criticism has overvalued this approach, in part because of its many affordances and pleasures. Without rejecting critique altogether, Felski concludes that “it is one way of reading and thinking among others: finite, limited, and fallible” (192).