How Should We Read Now?1 Matthew Mullins (bio) Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, eds., Critique and Postcritique, Durham: Duke UP, 2017. 329 pp. The title of Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski's new book, Critique and Postcritique, sets the tone for a thorough study that charts the changing landscape of literary studies without throwing out the old maps. While the "post-" in postcritique might seem like a rejection of critique, the "and" at the heart of the title indicates from the outset that these two concepts can and should be understood together as consonant categories of reading. The primary purpose of this volume is to develop nuanced views of these categories. Anker, Felski, and their contributors offer a comprehensive view of critique as both a method and a mood, answering a broad range of questions: What is critique? How is it practiced? What is its history? What are its politics? Why has it become so ubiquitous in the field of literary studies? The authors are also interested in ways of reading that are not coterminous with critique. These are the modes they would call postcritical, and their sources are found in such disparate figures as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Jonathan Swift, Eve Sedgwick, and Walt Whitman. Finally, many of the essays, including Anker and Felski's introduction, explore the implications of the critique-and-postcritique phenomenon for the disciplines of literary studies in particular and the humanities in general. Why has this conversation picked up steam at this moment? What are the implications for research in the field? How does it relate to the crises the humanities face at the apex of neoliberalism? Before questions of such scope can be addressed, some may object to the very notion that critique, as Bruno Latour has claimed, has indeed run out of steam. In a well-known 2004 essay, Latour asks whether the critical equipment of the humanities might need to be updated periodically like the physical and intellectual apparatuses of other fields. He goes on to analyze critique itself as a process whereby antifetishists debunk the objects they mistrust by way of objects they do trust without ever making the connection: "We explain the objects we don't approve of by treating them as fetishes; we account for behaviors we don't like by discipline whose makeup we don't examine; and we concentrate our passionate interest on only those things that [End Page 485] are for us worthwhile matters of concern" (241). He finally argues that we need a critique that gathers as much as it debunks, that we need something more, not less than, critique. Latour is certainly not alone in questioning the vitality of critique. Paul Ricoeur saw the need to pair suspicion with faith in the 1970s. Eve Sedgwick explored the restrictions of paranoid reading and the promises of reparative reading in the 1990s. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus examined the dominance of symptomatic reading and the need for alternatives in their oft-cited "Surface Reading" issue of Representations in 2009. And in her 2015 book The Limits of Critique, Felski argues that critique has become synonymous with a hermeneutics of suspicion and that it has become so preeminent in literary studies that "literary scholars are confusing a part of thought with the whole of thought" (5). Add to these the many influential voices gathered in this volume, and the chorus grows quite loud. While these critics do not all agree on what the problem is, there does seem to be a consensus that we are experiencing what Caroline Levine calls in her endorsement of the book a "moment of methodological upheaval." In their introduction, Anker and Felski begin by surveying the various generic forms of critique. They explore critique as theory, critique as rhetoric, and critique as metafiction. The commonality across these various forms is that critique is always diagnostic in nature, whether it is demystifying or calling attention to its own status as discourse. But for Anker and Felski, we misunderstand critique if we think of it exclusively as a method, for it is also a mood. The best place to go for a more detailed discussion of the affective...