The Limits of Critique and the Affordances of Form: Literary Studies after the Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Abstract

AbstractHow are we going to read literature in the future? What is the direction literary studies should take? The question has gained urgency in view of a growing dissatisfaction with the mode of reading that has dominated the field over the last decades, a method of critical unmasking that is based, in one way or another, on a hermeneutics of suspicion and its key premise of the all-determining power of an absent cause. Concepts like reparative reading, surface reading, distant reading, new formalism and postcritique signal a search for alternatives. This essay focuses on two books that have been especially influential in this search, Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015), seen by many as a wake-up call to move beyond a stifling routine of suspicious readings, and Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015), an original reconsideration of the matter of form and its possible political functions. Both of these books want to escape narratives of determination in which singularity and difference are lost, but both approach the challenge in strikingly different ways. Both tell stories of a liberation from determinations that are based on very different founding assumptions. This suggests to discuss them in the larger context of other narratives of liberation in literary studies, as this essay does in its conclusion.