“Critique Is Ordinary”

Abstract

In her scholarship and her editorship of the journal New Literary History, Rita Felski has played a central role in recent debates about reading methods in literary studies. Literary critics engaged in endless discussions about how to read may strike an odd note, since reading is the one thing everyone assumes we know how to do. But in the face of the defunding of the humanities, critics have been rethinking the epistemological and ethical grounds of the field and proposing new and often unfamiliar approaches. In her latest book, The Limits of Critique, Felski addresses this “legitimation crisis” by turning her attention to critique, that systematic and skeptical form of inquiry that, she argues, dominates the contemporary practice of literary criticism (5). Critique, associated since Immanuel Kant with the questioning of religious and other forms of dogma, has in her view become a new dogma, an obligatory “style of thinking” in the profession (2). Focusing on critique as “mood and method” (1), Felski follows Paul Ricoeur in considering the attitude of suspicion—detached, wary, vigilant—as the guarantee of scholarly rigor and the last refuge of oppositional thought. Felski has little patience with such high-flown claims. Her focus is on the limits of critique: she sees it as one approach among others, reminding her readers that suspicion is a professional habitus with established links to law, expertise, and bureaucracy. She does not wish to bury critique; rather, she wishes to “redescribe” it, to “offer a fresh slant on a familiar practice in the hope of getting a clearer sense of how and why critics read” (2). If the effect of this reframing is to deflate critique, Felski's ultimate goal in The Limits of Critique is to widen “the affective range of criticism”: “Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?” (13), she asks, and sets out to imagine a more generous criticism.