Limits Of Critique Research Articles

Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction: Atlantic and Other Worlds by Greg Forter

MLR, .,   –). Despite such defensiveness over his subject, there are also fine moments where Evans illuminates the multifaceted approaches to O’Connor by exploring the dialogue and debate between critics, especially in Chapter  in relation to the role of Christianity and/or Catholicism in her writing. Evans exhaustively focuses on books and articles about O’Connor, but at the expense of wider O’Connor scholarship. Of course, parameters must be set but the exclusion of broader discussions of O’Connor makes for some awkward assertions. For example, in Chapter , ‘e South: Heritage and Change’, Evans connects the increased interest in the role of the South in her writing to the rise of New Historicism, but asserts that even in more recent, twenty-first-century O’Connor criticism, there is still only the briefest discussion of ‘O’Connor as a specifically southern writer’ (p. ). Ultimately, his concentration on single-author studies of O’Connor bypasses numerous illuminating studies of her as a Southern writer that appear across Southern studies. e same may also be said for broader discussions of O’Connor in areas including religious/theological literary criticism, American literary studies, and Gothic studies. Evans’s overarching concern centres on O’Connor’s continuing relevance in an increasingly secular world, as he claims ‘there is a growing possibility that O’Connor—one of the most explicitly religious of all modern writers—may lose the prominent place in the literary canon she presently occupies’ (p. ). Secularization is not the only threat he perceives: New Historicist approaches demand greater critical reflection on O’Connor’s politics, particularly her ideas concerning race, which he argues may render her work unpalatable to today’s readers. While Evans draws attention to the positive impact of New Historicism in areas such as canonization and gender studies, in the wake of the movement’s critical re-examination of history, he postulates that if O’Connor is to remain a subject of study, readers may need to return to the potentially safer limits of New Criticism. It might be the case, though, as Evans discusses at various points throughout the book, that such a regressive move may not be required if O’Connor’s fiction continues to interest scholars across a broad spectrum, from those interested in the grotesque to those examining her politics, in terms of both race and gender. e book is a must for emerging O’Connor scholars, and in relation to its subtitle ‘Searchers and Discoverers’, it delivers on providing an invaluable foundation for researchers in the field. U   W  E S R Critique and Utopia in Postcolonial Historical Fiction: Atlantic and Other Worlds. By G F. Oxford: Oxford University Press. . viii+ pp. £. ISBN ––––. Greg Forter’s book concentrates on post-British Empire historical works of fiction from the Atlantic and Indian Oceans, written in English. According to Forter, postcolonial historical fiction has flourished since the early s, and his choice  Reviews of books extends from  to . e novels he has chosen, although looking back to and set in the colonial era, were written during or aer decolonization. As a form, they demonstrate the aermath of colonialism implicit in the term ‘postcolonial’ and the politics of resistance inherent in anti-colonial struggles, but also neo-colonial forces that still shape the postcolonial world. Forter argues that postcolonial historical fiction is able to excavate alternative futures from an ‘undigested past’ (p. ), while nevertheless resisting utopian closure. Forter places postcolonial historical fiction within the wider context of the historical novel in English, which he argues began with Walter Scott in the s. Scott demonstrated an authentic ‘historical consciousness’, with history as a clash between social classes from which the present emerges while remaining organically linked to the past. e historical novel rose to its high period from  to , before falling into the status of low-brow entertainment. In this account, it sank even lower aer the First World War, becoming an exclusively low genre, but rose again in the postmodern era of the s, which is also the start, in Forter’s view, of postcolonial historical fiction. Forter focuses on different types of historical fiction—realist, postmodern, or Romantic—and in each...

The Problem-Solving Mode: Social Scientists Back Home and the Limits of Critique

Abundant debates on the problematic positioning of intellectuals in the Global South are typically confined to migrant scholars and to the insider/outsider binary vis-a-vis their object/subject of study. Yet intellectuals back home—both those returning and those who never left—must also forge through the fraught politics of location and epistemic privilege as the other side of the same coin. Nowhere is the politics of location perhaps more striking than in the social sciences and among social scientists based in the Global South who have mostly been trained in Western universities or in Westernized local universities. As academics who mobilize knowledge in the context of state-led and international donor-assisted development projects, their work demonstrates that in the Global South the primary goal of social scientists should be to not only offer a critique but to solve a problem toward making institutions and systems fulfill their functions. In this problem-solving mode, the distinctions between “outsider” as critical-distant (i.e., opening everything up for discussion and debate following a scholarly tradition but may be oblivious of contexts and particularities) and “insider” (i.e., possessing knowledge of the local manifestations of universalized and globalized processes but may not be critical-distant) are to be erased. The “outsider” joins forces with the “insider” as the social scientist moves from being critical-distant to being socially embedded and then back again. This problem-solving mode urges social scientists back home to be critical of but yet part of the system as one tries to solve a problem.

Protection of Personal Information in the Medical Sphere of Social Relations

The purpose of the work was to identify the main legal parameters of modern information. As material sources of research at work, not only the Ukrainian regulations in the field of medical relations information are used, but also relevant innovations in the legal regulation of medical information relations, which are produced in the countries of the European Union. It is established that in the normative legal acts of Ukraine, unlike in European legislation, there is no division of information about an individual into general data and vulnerable personal data. The laws of Ukraine do not contain the notion of "public figure", whose limits of criticism, according to the European Court of Human Rights, are broader for an ordinary person. Among the main conclusions, it stands out that, in order to guarantee the freedoms and rights of citizens, it is necessary in the regulations to classify groups, lists of personal data and access to them based on the secret classification to avoid ambiguities. The materials in the article have practical value for graduates of higher education institutions of police and medical specialties, among others.

How to Write About Superheroes

AbstractEighty years after the first Superman comic, scholars are catching up to the importance, and to the popularity, of superheroes in comics and in other media. Recent monographs and edited collections examine racial politics, disabilities, other identities, and reception history across a range of decades and of superhero characters. Most of these worthy works remain within the limits of critique, judging the comics on how well they handle one or another theme; the result is a picture of superhero comics that cannot do justice to the genre. To them and to their like, the academic critics of the future might add—what vernacular comics critics already contribute—additional attention to what one or another character does best, to the transformative potential of even minor superhero work, and to how commercially produced superhero comics at their best handle narrative form.One superhero symbol can work many ways, as Neal Curtis’s examination of Truth and other Captain America stories shows: Cap has repeatedly fought off right-wing doubles, alternatively costumed versions of himself who aspired to make America white again.

The Potential and Limitations of Symptomatic Criticism: The Case of Ruth Miller’s Poetry

My article has two interrelated aims: to subject a text-focused criticism to a symptomatic demand and, in the process, to introduce, or rather re-introduce, a neglected but significant voice: that of the poet, Ruth Miller. I relate my own earlier textual response to my later symptomatic reading and conclude that, whatever the potential or limitations of the two responses, this South African poet of the 1960s continues to move beyond categorisations such as women’s poet, or political or non-political poet, to engage readers in a compulsion of language, thought, and feeling: what is it to live with awareness in the shadow of death? As Miller’s two collections are long out of print, I regard it as integral to my task of introduction to quote substantially from her poems.

Reading Others / Reading Texts: The Hermeneutics of Suspicion in Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

ABSTRACT David Foster Wallace’s famous discussion of postmodern irony can be seen to share much with the recent reappraisal of the mode of postmodern thinking known as “critique” in books such as Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015). Wallace’s collection Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999) can be read as interrogating “the hermeneutics of suspicion” (the central reading strategy of critique) through its presentation of characters who are attached to this mode of thinking. Although this collection offers a clear warning against the dangers of a hermeneutics of suspicion, this warning is complicated by the fact that, as a text, it requires – and calls on – our suspicion in order to be understood. At a time when Wallace’s own work is increasingly the subject of critique, turning to this collection, and its interrogation of suspicion, can provide us with a place for thinking about the kinds of suspicion we ought to bring to our reading of Wallace. By both illustrating the dangers of suspicious reading practices, and demanding such practices in order to be read, the collection forces readers to think about their own role in deciding when to exercise and when to withhold their suspicion.

How to Be a Good Reader of World Literature

How to Be a Good Reader of World Literature

When Not Communicating. The Critical Potential of the Literary Text and the Limits of Interpretation

When Not Communicating<b>. The Critical Potential of the Literary Text and the Limits of Interpretation</b>

The Humanities without Critique: On a Service Industry for Neoliberal Academe

The Humanities without Critique:On a Service Industry for Neoliberal Academe Jeffrey R. Di Leo (bio) It is unusual for a movement in the humanities to have a theme song. This particular theme song was written in 1968 by Mark James, who also released it the same year. It begins, "We're caught in a trap / I can't walk out / Because I love you too much baby." The song, "Suspicious Minds," became famous the following year when it was covered by Elvis Presley. In 1969, it would become his last number one single in the United States. Its chorus, "We can't go on together / With suspicious minds / And we can't build our dreams / On suspicious minds" perfectly foreshadows the heated debate of late over the role of "suspicious reading" in the humanities. The question upon which the fate of the humanities appears to be hanging in the balance—and to which "Suspicious Minds" is the unofficial theme song—is whether suspicion is the proper way for students to read texts. Back in the early 1970s, the philosopher Paul Ricouer provided what has become the classic formulation of suspicious reading. In his book, Freud and Philosophy, Ricouer proposed two general directions for interpretation. One direction seeks to "purify discourse of its excrescences, liquidate the idols, go from drunkenness to sobriety, realize our state of poverty once and for all" (Ricouer 1970, 27). The other direction "use[s] the most 'nihilistic,' destructive, iconoclastic movement so as to let speak what once, what each time, was said, when meaning appeared anew, when meaning was its fullest" (Ricouer 27). For Ricouer, all textual interpretation is "animated by this double motivation: willingness to suspect, willingness to listen; vow of rigor, vow of obedience," a "tension" and "extreme polarity" that is the "truest expression of our 'modernity'" (Ricouer 27). One direction he calls the "school of reminiscence" and the other the "school of suspicion" (Ricouer 1970, 32). If the aim of the school of reminiscence is the restoration of meaning, then the aim of its opposite, the school of suspicion, is the demystification of meaning. For Ricouer, the three "masters" that dominate the school of suspicion are Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud (Ricouer 32). Though their lines of thought are "seemingly mutually exclusive," "[a]ll three begin with suspicion concerning the illusions of consciousness, and then proceed to employ the stratagem of deciphering" (Ricouer 34). Thus, for Ricouer, "the Genealogy of Morals in Nietzsche's sense, the theory of ideologies in the Marxist sense, and the theory of ideals [End Page 527] and illusions in Freud's sense represent three convergent procedures of demystification" (Ricouer 34). Now, fifty years after Ricouer dubbed Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the masters of the school of suspicion, some scholars are arguing that these masters and their theoreticial legacies are at the root of the problems facing the humanities today. The shorthand way of terming their approach to interpretating texts and documents is the word critique—which is widely regarded as the modus operandi of the humanities. But if the humanities are indeed in peril, is it possible then to save them by simply rejecting critique, their modus operandi? This "conviction," writes Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, is one that is "shared by a growing number of scholars" (2015, 186). For these "postcritique" scholars, continues Felski, rejecting critique and its "rhetoric of suspicious reading in literary studies and in the humanities and interpretive sciences generally" (187) is the solution to the woes facing the humanities.1 While Felski recognizes the criticism that rejecting critique is tantamount to becoming a "pawn of neoliberal interests" (2015, 186), she nonetheless tries to distance herself from the neoliberal agenda for the humanities by saying that her real motivation is elsewhere. Namely, it is "a desire to articulate a positive vision for humanistic thought in the face of growing skepticism about its value" (Felski 186). But in spite of her claims to articulate a "positive vision" for the humanities, Felski does the opposite. The postcritique that she promotes has produced a virulent and highly destructive form of antitheory, if not also, anti-humanities.2 Felski has become the poster...

Balzac, Flaubert, Clarín: Practices of Symptomatic and Surface Reading in Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta

Balzac, Flaubert, ClarínPractices of Symptomatic and Surface Reading in Leopoldo Alas's La Regenta Matt Johnson Recent debates in the humanities regarding symptomatic reading, surface reading, and the limits of critique have drawn attention to the ways in which scholars read now, and have also impelled us to revisit the reading practices of previous historical periods. This essay studies how Spanish author Leopoldo Alas's novel La Regenta (1884–1885) synthesizes major nineteenth-century practices of reading literary texts, and of reading the social world as a text. More specifically, I read the plot of La Regenta, which depicts social life in the fictional Spanish city of Vetusta, as a literary dramatization of a theoretical debate concerning the relationship between what, following French philosopher Jacques Rancière, I position as the two principal practices of reading that emerge in the nineteenth-century. The first is a symptomatic practice in which the novelist treats society as a vast web of social hieroglyphs which must be deciphered to discover latent meanings. The second is a surface-oriented practice in which the novelist simply aspires to register the surface phenomena of the social world. Drawing on Rancière's study of the emergence of these competing practices in the works of two foundational novelists, Honoré de Balzac and Gustave Flaubert, I show how Alas (commonly known by the pen name "Clarín") builds on their contributions by using free indirect discourse to link ways of reading to processes of characterization. He converts some characters into symptomatic readers and others into surface ones, and in this way his theoretical concerns regarding proper and improper ways of reading bleed into the social relations at the heart of La Regenta. While my own reading of Clarín's novel is thus symptomatic in nature, it nonetheless points toward an important aspect of his novel. Although the novel's narrator relies on a highly symptomatic approach in his reading of Vetustan society, he also produces a sustained reflection on the limits of symptomatic reading through a simulataneous, broad-based deployment of techniques of surface reading. La Regenta is a realist novel that, at least on the surface, begs to be read as a faithful representation of social reality. It is also, however, a highly self-reflexive work of fiction composed of a vast web of literary and discursive referents. This tension between the novel as a historical document and as a literary text is reproduced [End Page 261] on its interior through characters whom the reader encounters as representations of historical subjects living in nineteenth-century Spain, but also as readers whose thoughts, behaviors, and actions are determined by the texts they have consumed. The question of how to reconcile these two sides has long been central to La Regenta scholarship, as Lou Charnon-Deutsch highlights in "Between Agency and Determinism: A Critical Review of Clarín Studies." Charnon-Deutsch identifies two overarching trends in studies of Alas's novel. In a "postmodern" moment stretching through the 1980s and 90s, scholars privilege the textual nature of La Regenta and arrive at a radically deterministic view of subjective agency in which characters' lives are ultimately determined by language and discourse. Most importantly, these "postmodern" readers show that the novel's central character, Ana Ozores, whose slow fall into adultery forms the novel's principal plot, exists not as a willful human agent but as a "discursive playground, where a conglomeration of disparate, often contradictory discourses and desires determines her every word and thought" (146). If these readings tend toward a hyperbolic determinism in which characters are, in a sense, what they and the people around them read, Charnon-Deutsch signals a renewed discursive historicism as a way out of this "postmodern malaise" (150). More recent works by authors such as Jo Labanyi conceive processes of subject-formation in terms of systems of interrelated social practices "that impinge on human subjectivity, but do not construct it totally" (150). By treating La Regenta as a historical document which registers diverse aspects of these subject-forming practices, recent readers have been able to restore an important degree of agency to the subjects who populate the pages of Clarín...

Politics or Romance: Students of 1956

Student unrest of 1956 in Soviet universities is examined based on the example of the Ural State University and the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk. Student attitudes are analyzed in terms of social and critical thinking, and the reaction of authorities — in light of the policy towards the intelligentsia. The theoretical and methodological frame of analysis is constructivism, with emphasis put on aspects of bilateral, reciprocal design and temporality. The empirical base consists of documents from the collections of the Documentation Centre of the Social Institutions of Sverdlovsk Region, the University Museum, as well as materials from local and national press. The mid 1950’s were marked by a radical revision of the limits of acceptable criticism, which was unfolding until the end of 1956. Unorthodox activity was not regarded as seditious up until a point. The gap, interval between the original action and the resulting stigmatizing mark shows how such a notion crystallized. At some point it seemed as if you could criticize everyone and everything. It is shown that the most crucial effect was produced not by the theme of student statements but rather by a mismatch in the magnitude of the subjects and objects of public criticism. The position of authorities was to depoliticize student activity, while using such a relatively new course as pathologizing objectification: the younger generation was treated as a bearer of specific problems requiring special attention. “Labor education” with emphasis on hard physical labor was used as the universal lifesaver. Sundays at construction sites, hedgehog-fit visits to farms, as well as sending expelled students to factories inform the phenomenon of organic intellectuals “on the contrary” (in the words of A. Gramsci and N. Savelyeva). At the same time, the pragmatic benefits of resolving to admit to universities only those who had sufficient work experience was not reduced to disposing of students’ “unhealthy moods”, but rather “postponement” of higher education was to attract the youngsters to the virgin lands and construction sites. Students themselves insisted on the political connotations of their actions. The desire of the young generation to “catch the winds of history in their sails” was gradually accumulated in the concept of romance, which had yet to displace the patriotism and heroism that prevailed within the ideological orientations and the official rhetoric of the 50’s.

„Księgi Justynine”. O biografii Justine Frank

The article is devoted to the biography of Justine Frank (1900-1943), a marginalized member of the surrealist movement, a painter and writer who combined Judaism with pornography, a critic of the Zionist project who tragically died in Palestine. Written by an Israeli artist and an expert on the interwar avant-garde, Roee Rosen, it is not only an artistic provocation – a part of a larger experiment in the field of the so-called parafiction also including editions of Frank’s novel Sweet Sweat and exhibitions of her paintings – but also an interesting statement in the discussion on the possibilities and limitations of feminist criticism, as it points out the problem of fabrication of the indispensable precursors.

Students of history, masters of tradition: Josse Clichtove, Noël Beda and the limits of historical criticism1

AbstractKennerley investigates the relationship between tradition and historical criticism in France during the earliest years of the Reformation. Its key sources are two polemics between Josse Clichtove (1472–1543) and Noël Beda (c. 1470–1537) over the cult of Mary Magdalene and the Exultet hymn. A student of Jacques Lefèvre d'Étaples, Clichtove enunciated modern‐sounding criticisms of received traditions. His opponent Beda is instead famous for his scholastic defences of inherited doctrine against humanists like Clichtove and Erasmus. Drawing on an in‐depth reading of Clichtove and Beda's tracts, this essay will contextualize the clashes between these two scholars and analyse their respective methods and conclusions. While demonstrating the sophistication of Clichtove's historical thought and Beda's own surprising skill as a historian, this essay will contend that the central issue of these polemics was not history, but whether tradition was a legitimate subject for historical criticism. It will conclude by considering the implications of these polemics for the study of sacred history in the Reformation, as shown in the change of Clichtove's method after his conflict with Beda.

Berman, Joshua A., Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism

Berman, Joshua A., Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism

Resonant Reading

Reading is a key source of anxiety in the college literature classroom. While recent debates about critical reading have reimagined the work of the literature scholar, they have not engaged the work of the literature teacher. This article explores the pedagogical limits of critique and the pedagogical potential of postcritical reading practices. Reimagining the dynamics of reading addresses, engages, and reorients students’ anxiety in the literature classroom. Diversifying the models of reading we teach allows students to more deeply engage the pleasures and anxieties of reading literature. This article concludes by offering strategies for approaching reading in the college classroom, including collaborative digital reading, creative response assignments, and publicly oriented writing.

Towards a Legal Framework That Protects Freedom of Expression in Electoral Processes

Abstract In democratic countries, attention is devoted to the issue of freedom of speech and freedom of expression and the role of public authorities during elections. Today, freedom of speech and freedom of expression are guaranteed at both the international and national levels. The international community has created a significant number of international agreements and acts of “soft law” on standards of freedom of expression. In particular, the Code of Good Practice in Electoral Matters establishes as the first general condition for democratic elections the respect for fundamental human rights, and particularly freedom of expression, assembly and association, without which there can be no true democracy. On the one hand, the problem of ensuring freedom of expression during elections is caused by the wider limits of permissible criticism of candidates and the importance of coverage of the election process. On the other hand, it is caused by restrictions on the conduct of election campaigning and the necessity to provide equal access to the media for the subjects of the electoral process. In this context, it is important to find a balance between the right to free elections, freedom of speech and other rights, freedoms and interests of the subjects of the electoral process. This article researches the modern problems of national legal guarantee of the freedom of speech and the freedom of expression and international electoral standards on the protection of freedom of speech and freedom of expression in the electoral process.

The Nature and Limits of Skeptical Criticism

Is there something wrong with the way we form beliefs about our surroundings? Most people assume not. But there is a character, the skeptic, who disagrees. What, exactly, is this skeptic claiming, and why should this concern us? We are, after all, just humans doing what humans do: forming beliefs on the basis of our faculties. In what sense could this be wrong, and how could it matter if it is? By considering the way in which the notions of vice and criticism can express these questions, we can clarify them and discern some potential answers. These answers, I will suggest, can explain not only why we shouldn’t worry too much, but also the lasting appeal of skeptical problems. The idea is that we can accept, or grant for the sake of argument, that we fall short of some important standard while insisting that it is entirely unreasonable to criticize people, or ourselves, on that basis.

The Answer is Paracritical: Caribbean Literature and The Limits of Critique

I argue that both Rita Felski’s postcritical model (as articulated in The Limits of Critique) and its academic reception are made possible only by ignoring or erasing African-American and Afro-Caribbean modes of engagement with art that predate and complicate the critical-postcritical binary. To counteract the vanguardism of this trend in literary studies, I pair Caribbean philosopher-poet Edouard Glissant’s meditation on the origins of Creole speech as an indirect language of “detour” with Nathaniel Mackey’s theorizing of black art as “paracritical”—a mode that assimilates performance and critique, language and metalanguage, and that sits adjacent to (and not against or behind) traditionally academic discourses of engaging with literature. If Glissant provides the cultural and philosophical frame for an Afro-Caribbean way of reading literature, Mackey supplies the artistic metaphor par excellence of the paracritical hinge, voiced in the idioms of jazz and blues. Finally, I examine how Glissant and Mackey’s ideas find formal and aesthetic expression in Trinidadian-Canadian author Dionne Brand’s 2005 novel What We All Long For, paying attention to the reader response engendered by the adjacencies of violence, empowerment, possibility, and desire in the novel. In order to analyze What We All Long For, we must promote the liveliness and vivacity of the reading experience and put the text under ethical scrutiny, evincing the paracritical faculty that Afro-Caribbean art demands: commingling the twin pleasures of reading and interpretation, establishing a counter-hegemonic model of literary engagement that implicates the reader without stripping away reading’s pleasure.

Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism, written by Joshua A. Berman

Inconsistency in the Torah: Ancient Literary Convention and the Limits of Source Criticism, written by Joshua A. Berman

A Reply

Abstract My essay on “The Limits of Critique and the Affordances of Form” had its origin in a study group at the University of Freiburg in Germany in which we tried to get a sense of the current state of literary studies. Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) and Caroline Levine’s Forms (2015) were the two books that impressed us the most, so much so, in fact, that I decided to have a second look at their arguments and their underlying premises. My subsequent readings confirmed a first impression that these books offered original and constructive contributions to current critical debates. Despite my critical comments on a number of issues, I still hold this view. My own essay has therefore been written with the purpose of clarification, not dismissal or rejection. That is why I am glad about the generous responses Felski and Levine have provided. As Leonard Cassuto puts it in his response, “[w]e can be grateful for their books.”