Rita Felski Research Articles

Doubly disenfranchised: the experience of paternal grief following medical termination in Jérémie Szpirglas’ Pater dolorosa

ABSTRACT The term ‘disenfranchised grief’ is increasingly being used to designate grief experiences that are overlooked by wider society. In the French context, this term has overwhelmingly been applied to perinatal loss. Focusing on medical termination (IMG), a somewhat liminal category of perinatal loss, this article considers the doubly disenfranchised experience of paternal grief in such circumstances. While IMG-related grief is, in itself, disenfranchised, not least because it lacks societal recognition, paternal grief following IMG is doubly so, since the male voice is seldom heard. Taking as its focus Pater dolorosa (2019), author and journalist Jérémie Szpirglas’ narrative of medical termination, this article will consider the value of the term ‘disenfranchised grief’ in naming the experience of grief to which Szpirglas’ text attests; the capacity of the text to give voice to that experience and to offer a textual transposition of it; and the role of male grief writing following medical termination in beginning to carve out an alternative space for the sharing of a grief experience that defies established social norms. The article will therefore suggest, in line with Rita Felski’s argument, that ‘a literary text could know as much, or more, than a theory’, particularly when it comes to individual experiences of grief.

Rita Felski’s Uses of Literature Applied to the Old Testament

This article converses with Rita Felski’s Uses of Literature as it applies to the Old Testament. First, I explore a loose correspondence between Felski’s “aestheticism” and “theory” and the most bankrupt versions of personal, devotional Bible reading and historical-critical interpretation of the Bible, respectively. Second, I apply Rita Felski’s four uses of literature—recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock—to the Bible. I suggest her reading strategies add to the hermeneutical toolkit of the modern Christian.

From Romanian Communism to Capitalism: the Representation and Ideology of Women’s Bodies

This article analyses the representation of women’s bodies in the narratives of Și se auzeau greierii (And Crickets Could Be Heard) by Corina Sabău, ca și cum nimic nu s-ar fi întâmplat (as if nothing has happened) by Alina Nelega, and Viața e a mea (The Life is Mine) by Emilia Faur. It explores how the portrayal of maternity, sexual abuse, abortion, and gender identity changes from Romanian Communism to the capitalist democracy. If the socialist women were submissive to the pronatalist desiderate, being oppressed because of the insalubrious abortions (Sabău) or because of the fear to affirm their gender identity (Nelega), the capitalist advertisement with its sexist standards of beauty, doubled by the postnatal depression, imposes the fatality of death (Faur). My objective is to connect feminist aesthetics with ideological critique by identifying the abstract model of a feminist Bildungsroman (Rita Felski) in the three novels under consideration. However, on a formal level, I will analyse how in the case of Faur's and Nelega's novels, the free indirect style, a blend of affect translated into impersonal form (Moretti), mediates a socio-political commentary for increased awareness and active engagement in dismantling the adaptable patriarchy inherent in any political system, while the first-person narrative (Sabău) shows how the social fabric is internalised by the narrator, following her inner turmoil.

Beyond an Environmental “Hermeneutics of Suspicion”

This essay engages debates about hopeful critical scholarship in the environmental humanities via an analysis of the figure of the Babushka of Chornobyl in literature, film, and photography. The argument for hazardous hope unfolds in two steps. First, the article discusses how contaminated environments like the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, where the Babushkas live, invite an interpretative move that models what Paul Ricoeur and, more recently, Rita Felski have problematized as the hermeneutics of suspicion. Such a move involves a mistrust of what is at the surface, calling for the exposure of hidden material agencies beyond what can be sensorily perceived. This suspicious disposition is also the critical stance of much environmental humanities scholarship, even when it attempts to be hopeful. Second, the article proposes that the cultural texts it examines not only model a suspicious gaze but can also easily be read suspiciously—as glossing over the harrowing realities of a precarious life in a sacrifice zone. Yet they also show us pockets of beauty, joy, and community and hint toward reformulations of environmental futurity that cannot easily be accounted for via such suspicious criticism. In that, they invite us to leave behind, if only temporarily, the hermeneutics of suspicion and to explore hazardous hope in a contaminated environment.

Literature Manuals in Times of New Mediacy in Sweden

The present article focuses on the role of the teaching and learning of literature in a large-scale Swedish, professional development programme for teachers called the Reading Lift. More specifically this study, using qualitative content analysis, examines the educational function of the most prominently referred to literary didactic theory and method developers in the program: Judith Langer, Aidan Chambers, Louise M. Rosenblatt, and Rita Felski, but also the relationship between literary didactics, literacy, and fiction. The results show a strong domination of Langer-inspired manual and strategy-based approaches, primarily promoting efferent reading stances. More holistic hermeneutic and dialogic approaches in support of aesthetic reading, represented by Chambers, Rosenblatt and Felski, are less common. Further, there is a strong alliance between the literacy concept and the systematic and manual-based literary didactic approaches. Also, in the literacy discourse, literary works of art have become not just texts amongst other texts, and foreign, but are also framed as hypermediacy. Based on our results we tentatively suggest that a shift in paradigms of literature education has taken place, from literature pedagogy, grounded in print culture, to literature didactics, situated in new mediacy and the digital.

More Than Implied: Reading Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back. Carl’s Book

Contemporary autobiographical fiction, especially in Scandinavian literature post-Karl Ove Knausgård, challenges traditional literary interpretation. This article examines interpretive strategies for Naja Marie Aidt’s When Death Takes Something from You Give It Back, advocating for a shift to empathetic, engaged reading, aligning with Rita Felski’s idea of postcritical reading.

Paul Tillich, Rita Felski, and the Impossible Necessity of Believing in Science

ABSTRACT The following article addresses a recent tendency in popular discourse to unite “science” and “belief.” Following a discussion of the theologian Paul Tillich’s distinction between belief and faith, I claim that what “belief in science” actually means is something rather more like “faith in science”—an attitude which must finally, by making science into an ultimate concern, be detrimental to both terms. Rather than abandoning the injunction to believe, though, I propose the adoption of an attitude that is simultaneously critical and absorbed, an attitude akin to the “postcritque” of the literary critic Rita Felski.

Teraźniejszość manifestów. Strategie i obszary działania

The article is an attempt to trace and comment on the recent turn toward the manifesto as a genre that continues to be effective for emancipatory and artistic gestures. The author, drawing on Julian Hanna’s „The Manifesto Handbook” (2019), briefly reconstructs the origins of the manifesto: first, as a political form of authoritarian speech that was subversively abandoned during the 19th-century rise of democratic ideas in France; second, as an artistic tool, pioneered by Filippo Marinetti, for proclaiming art’s contemporary desires for social transformation. Inspired by Hanna’s periodization of the three waves of manifesto existence, the author of the article considers 2008 as the moment of renewed interest in the meaning of manifestos. The essential analysis develops around selected examples of manifestos of the 21st century, both artistic and scholarly (from the field of humanities). Key-words: artistic manifesto, performative statements, Krzysztof Wodiczko, Artur Żmijewski, Rita Felski

‘“But will I write disgustingly?” The Shock of Transmission in Martin Amis’s The Zone of Interest’

This article explores the way British writer Martin Amis approaches the issue of the transmission of the trauma of the Holocaust in his novel The Zone of Interest (2014). Amis offers to engage once again with the genre of perpetrators fiction as the novel adopts the point of view of Nazi officials and recounts the daily lives of officers working in a nameless camp meant to resemble Auschwitz. Amis thus returns to a literary tradition that has long been reflecting on the possibility and ethics of writing about the trauma of the Shoah. This article will recontextualize the publication controversy that erupted after Amis’s French and German editors refused to publish the text. It then intends to follow Marianne Hirsch and Leo Spitzer’s injunction to ‘scrutinize the “acts of transfer”’ so as to identify the narrative mechanisms used in the novel to transmit the horror of the Holocaust. This paper will examine how Amis uses the paratext of his novel to question his approach to the memory of the Shoah and to situate his position regarding the matter. Yet the publishing controversy suggests that Amis’s intention of creative transmission might be threatened by the very way of telling history. In light of Rita Felski’s work on the reader’s engagement with a text, this paper will therefore determine how Amis resorts to using shock and disgust as a way of letting something of the Holocaust ‘pass through’ while challenging the aesthetic pleasure one might experience in reading those testimonies.

What is Post-Criticism? Reconstructive Interpretive Strategies

This introductory article examines the transition from conventional criticism to post-critical methodologies in literary and cultural studies. It discusses Bruno Latour's compositionist approach for cultural preservation and Rita Felski's advocacy for a postcritical, curatorial method focusing on the unique qualities of texts. The paper highlights the significance of surface reading, object-oriented criticism, and their influence in contemporary ecocriticism and intermedial studies, underscoring a reevaluation of critical practices in light of aesthetic and ecological considerations.

The Orange Tree and Postcritique in Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos

Abstract This essay proposes that Valeria Luiselli’s Los ingrávidos rethinks modes of critical reading in the twenty-first century, arguing that the writer trains her reader in a mode of reading which anticipates Rita Felski’s opposition to critique, relishing acceptance and deference over suspicion and interrogation. By focusing on Luiselli’s intervention into readerly practice in this way, the essay moves beyond stringent national and historicist frameworks which often risk obscuring that novelist’s experimental forms and avant-garde project.

The Poetics of Re-Enchantment: Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring

ABSTRACT The essay offers a reading of Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Beginning of Spring (1988) and relates it to the cultural conception of Modernity as an age of “disenchantment,” and to the potential contribution of the “subtler language” of literature (to borrow Charles Taylor’s phrase) to a “re-enchantment” of the world. Following a brief theoretical introduction of the concept of Disenchantment, as framed by Lukács, Weber, Taylor and, more obliquely, Roland Barthes, the essay offers a close reading of The Beginning of Spring. This novel, I suggest, encapsulates the tension between the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and the “hermeneutics of restoration,” initially coined by Ricoeur and more recently developed in the work of Eve Sedgwick and Rita Felski, and orchestrates the reading experience through its intertextual relations with Tolstoy, the subtle strategic navigation of the narrative between the register of the ridiculous and that of the Sublime, and the consequent shift from a mode of disenchantment to a poetics of re-enchantment. The closure of the novel may thus be read in the spirit of “restoration,” by no means simplistic or naïve, but clearly oriented in the direction of the Sacred.

(Post-)Modernism and Cyborg Writing in George Egerton’s “The Regeneration of Two” (1894)

(Post-)Modernism and Cyborg Writing in George Egerton’s “The Regeneration of Two” (1894)

A Postcritical Approach to Literary Aging Studies: Older Women's Responses to Dimitri Verhulst's NovellaMadame Verona Comes Down the Hill

AbstractScholars in literary aging studies typically engage in oppositional readings that reveal the often-hidden age ideologies of texts while addressing points of exit from these ideologies. This form of research is ethical and political in that it aims to clarify cultural meanings of aging and how to negotiate and subvert them in a world characterized by structural and everyday ageism. Inspired by Rita Felski's plea not to go too far in our suspicion toward the hidden meanings of a text and to value uses of literature other than the strictly ideological, this article focuses on the figure of the older lay reader and their reading practices. It presents field work involving a 2017 reading and writing club of women over sixty who responded to the novella Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill (2006) by the Flemish author Dimitri Verhulst. Analyzing the reading diaries, group discussion, and creative writing exercises of the participants will show how these readers draw on both form and ideology when making sense of and coming to terms with the life and death of the main character, an eighty-two-year-old widow who descends from the hill to die and to follow her beloved to the grave.

Jagger, Jasmine. Rhythms of Feeling in Edward Lear, T. S. Eliot, and Stevie Smith

At the heart of this book are a very alert, informed listening to the music of poetry and a focus on how it communicates and contains emotion. Attentive to various kinds of worry and intense anxiety – Edward Lear’s ‘morbids’, T. S. Eliot’s ‘nerves’ and Stevie Smith’s ‘scratches’ – Jasmine Jagger examines how each of these three poets draws on imagery and acoustic devices that might appear ridiculous, but in fact serve to communicate emotional disturbance beyond the bounds of what is considered ‘normal’. In particular, Jagger shows that an edgy interplay between the often unsettling rhythms of speech and the measured predictability of metre allows poets to hear and feel in their work emotions that they are impelled to communicate, and lets readers hear and feel these too. This is an unusually writerly book, and, in its nuanced sense of verse, an outstanding study. While not engaging with the work of Rita Felski and a number of other American-influenced writers on ‘affect’, Jagger takes some of her theoretical bearings from Isobel Armstrong, Derek Attridge, Christopher Ricks, Ann Stillman and other (mainly British) critics alert to the fusion of emotion and word-music. Jagger is not afraid to draw on biographical, anthropological and psychological material as she articulates her close readings and close listenings to poems as apparently different as ‘The Dong with a Luminous Nose’, ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ and ‘Not Waving But Drowning’. Without in any way reducing her chosen poets to one template, she shows how, by exploring ‘individual tendernesses as dramatized by poetic rhythm’, these poets demonstrate the ways in which ‘poetic composition can also indicate an attempt to translate affect into a bodily state. In so doing, affective poetics becomes a way for poets to plumb their own depths, reconnecting with, and becoming tender to, their emotional complexity’ (p. 202).

Print Internationalism's Uneasy Adjacencies

Print Internationalism's Uneasy Adjacencies

Companion Texts and Spaces of Encounter: Reading Experiences in Shazia Majid, Ivo de Figueiredo and Yohan Shanmugaratnam’s Life Writing

ABSTRACT Analyzing reading experiences represented in transnational literature clarifies how the author’s story connects to a larger world literature. Building on the feminist and postcolonial work of Sarah Ahmed, and Elleke Boehmer, Rita Felski's study of the uses of literature, I investigate the signification of the representations of reading experiences in three contemporary Norwegian works. These center thematically on gendered and racialized identity processes, as well as politics and history, in the aftermaths of colonialism and migration: Shazia Majid, Ut av skyggene. Den lange veien mot likestilling for innvandrerkvinnene [Out of the shadows. The long road to equality for immigrant women]; Ivo de Figueiredo’s A Stranger At My Table [En fremmed ved mitt bord. En familiehistorie] and Yohan Shanmugaratnam’s work Vi puster fortsatt [We are still breathing]. My analysis of the reading experiences and the intersectional aspects in these works, explores how their stories refer to and enter into various networks of book communities: Feminist, imperialist, antiracist, Norwegian, English, American, Asian, African, 19th-century, colonial, black, white and more. The authors use their family history to tell a larger transnational story, leading to further explorations of how gender, ethnicity, nationality, class and religion form identities in transnational Norway.

The Art of Feeling: Subjective Criticism and Emotional Resonance

This article is a personal reflection on the importance of ‘feeling’ and affective response in Hilary Fraser’s work, focusing on her chapter, ‘Writing in the Margins and Reading Between the Lines in Vernon Lee’s Library’, in Dalla stanza accanto: Vernon Lee e Firenze settant’anni dopo (2006) and her article, ‘Grief Encounter: The Language of Mourning in Fin-de-Siècle Sculpture’, published in Word & Image (2018). It considers the similarities between the kind of subjective criticism adopted by Walter Pater and Vernon Lee and Rita Felski’s advocation of postcritical reading as a means of coproduction to highlight how, in Fraser’s work, reflective emotion and critical analysis coalesce.

Reframing Rousseau: Art, Literature and Attachment in Émile

Abstract This article sheds light on both Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s aesthetic thought and his role in the emergence of modern ideas of littérature, by revisiting his novel-cum-treatise, Émile, ou de l’éducation (1762). Contrary to much scholarship that has minimized Rousseau’s interest in aesthetics, and in the visual arts in particular, the article reframes Rousseau as a fundamentally aesthetic thinker. With reference to Jacques Derrida’s concept (via Kant) of the parergon, it argues that Rousseau uses the image of the frame – literal or figurative – to delineate his ideas about the ideal visual and literary arts, and how they should affect spectators or readers. By reading Rousseau alongside Rita Felski, the article historicizes the affective turn in postcritique today. Focusing on Émile’s encounters with the literary arts, it shows that the modern idea of literature as aesthetically pleasing texts that (by dint of their aesthetic quality) induce an affective and ethical response, was attached to the French word littérature earlier than has been claimed, by an author often considered ‘anti-literature’.

Translating Dark into Bright: Diary of a Post-Critical Year.

This is an account of a reading project that began in February 2020. Australia was burning, a pandemic was simmering, the two of us were early in our PhD journeys at the Melbourne Law School. Already, we felt exhausted by critical theory which seemed to amplify the affects we felt all too intensely. Our reading project began as an attempt to find and inhabit texts that might move beyond critique, that might allow us to find wonder and vitality in legal theory. Taking up the literary critic Rita Felski's invitation to craft a post-critical reading practice, our reading list evolved iteratively to encompass themes and concerns that we identified as possibly correlating with said practice. It evolved too, in conversation with Melbourne, as the city journeyed through different stages of the pandemic. Constantly changing restrictions changed the ways in which we met and conversed, influencing in turn the texts we chose to read and the manner in which we read them. In this account, we pay attention to the time and place of our encounters with these interlocutors, and to the feelings these encounters generated. As such, this article takes the form of a series of (revised) diary entries: first written in 2020, then revisited in the corresponding months of 2021. What we hope emerges from these entries is a sense of how these theoretical texts train us to live in a world undergoing a compounding series of crises - and, perhaps, to imagine that world otherwise. In a more jurisprudential register, we hope that our experiment will identify the methods these texts might give us for (re-)engaging with law in a spirit of wonder and vitality.