Weird Times

Abstract

Recently, some literary critics have proposed that we might relate to texts in a different way than we're used to. Instead of plunging into critique, plumbing a text's depths, or coolly analyzing its symptoms, instead of “digging down and standing back,” as Rita Felski puts it, critics might adopt a less skeptical, less paranoid— less critical—stance. We might attend to a text's surfaces, in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's terms. We might get “close but not deep,” as Heather Love suggests. We might practice a new formalism, neither naive nor nostalgic but keyed to the aesthetic and the political.