Let me make my position on Stephen Marcus and Sharon Best's introduction their special issue of Representations clear: I believe these critics argue about way we read, but even importantly about way we should read, without being appropriately self-reflexive or critical about their agendas (this is of course what they claim is problem with critics of whom they are suspicious!). They want us disavow our hermeneutics of suspicion because such a hermeneutics claims legitimacy by acting in name of a critical freedom read artwork against its own protocols, and sometimes do so in name of larger cultural or historical truths obscured or supplanted by glossy seductions of art. They would rather have us attend artwork with critical Perhaps I should, in interest of reading, repeat their words: they exhort us perform work that attends as much complexities of critic's position as those of artwork, but seeks occupy a paradoxical space of minimal critical agency.3 So critics should spend time attending complexities in their own positions-I thought this is what theoretical turn in literary studies was all about-while also minimizing their critical agency. OK-so what should we do differently?They offer two options: first, turn computers and other forms of machine intelligence, they will allow us critical subjectivity and produce more accurate knowledge about texts. Computational methods will allow us become potent describers, anatomizers, taxonomists, and thus bypass selectivity and evaluative energy that have been considered hallmarks of good criticism, in order attain what has almost become taboo in literary studies: objectivity, validity, truth.4 Second, be like Anne-Lise Francois (who I'm afraid I have not read) and think of literary criticism as an act of bearing witness capacity of artwork bear witness constraints of existence.5 I have long thought that elucidation of such witnessing was sine qua non of a critical hermeneutics, and that convincing criticism must adequately describe concerns, textures, and form of artwork it reads. But then they hint at why they think their protocols of surface reading are different from such full description: we mustn't read literature for models of how overcome constraint, they write, or to register difference between our critical freedom and limits placed on others.6Reading this, I tried hard think of any text that does not contain within itself inklings, or in some cases coruscating visions, of a future different from present it describes-that is, even texts whose primary business it is detail, slowly and attentively, how constraints of daily existence always make available their own sense of how those constraints might be lightened. This might seem a risible example, but it should make my point: in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728), when Lockit welcomes Macheath Newgate, he sells him a lighter pair of fetters than standard-issue ones, and recommends these constraints in following terms: Do but examine them, sir. Never was better work. How genteelly they are made! They will fit as easy as a glove, and nicest man in England might not be ashamed wear them. If I had best gentleman in land in my custody, I could not equip him handsomely. 7 We can linger on Lockit's salesmanly celebration of these fetters, but do we then not note that Lockit's language is a fine satire of class pretension, as well as a pitch-perfect reminder that money can lighten weight of law and of incarceration in early eighteenth-century London (or indeed today)? Even if we knew nothing of sociology of London hanged at this point, or of overlaps between criminality and proletarian poverty, language, characters, and plot events of The Beggar's Opera would make visible us not only the agency of act of bearing witness given (which is what Marcus and Best want us linger over) but also agency of those who kick against pricks. …
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Feb 24, 2024
Matteo Bächtold 
Open Access
