Rita Felski Research Articles

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

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 Novella Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill

Abstract Scholars 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.

Print Internationalism's Uneasy Adjacencies

In 1908, traveling from Scotland to South Africa, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi began writing a fiery manifesto. As has been recounted ever since, he wrote with such feverish intensity that he switched to his left hand when his right grew tired. This transnational document, written by a figure who was both a British colonial subject and a member of the diaspora in South Africa, gathers in its sails a restless anticolonial and ambulatory energy that defiantly exceeds the boundedness of the Indian colony. Much as the ship attains a haunting freedom for Frederick Douglass in his autobiography, Gandhi's ship offers one evocative site of what Madhumita Lahiri calls “print internationalism,” a mode of transnational imagination that refuses the boundaries of either imperial might or national feeling. Instead, Gandhi's manifesto does something counterintuitive—it moves between the linguistic registers of Gujarati and English by refusing to translate its title Hind Swaraj for a Western audience, “creating an Indian version of Home Rule” and “declaring his politics nonequivalent to all existing agitations” (Lahiri 82). Tracking disparate, pivotal instances of “untranslatability,” Imperfect Solidarities collects what Nico Slate calls “missed opportunities” for theorizing transnational, anti-imperial solidarities.Lahiri's monograph ties together three figures from postcolonial and US history—Rabindranath Tagore, M. K. Gandhi, and W. E. B. Du Bois—in the network of the “global Anglophone” to reframe Benedict Anderson's famous theorization of print nationalism. If Anderson is interested in the newspaper and the novel as mass artifacts of the national, then Lahiri turns to journals and magazines that, despite their sometimes-meager subscriptions, self-consciously address international audiences. However, Lahiri acknowledges the vexed discursive terrain that all three writers traverse in their creation of new political solidarities, particularly Gandhi's writing on Black South Africans and Du Bois's representation of the high-caste Hindu princess in his novel Dark Princess (1928). The study “demonstrates how flawed connections across continents can, through the unpredictable medium of the global Anglophone, generate dramatic transformations in how we understand our world” (15). Lahiri's work expands mainly social science discourses into the terrain of literary thought by foregrounding the genre of print internationalism as the fundamental vehicle for the development of crucial political thinking. The writing of these three figures unspools a tangled web of rhetorical flourishes and comparisons that attempt to leverage the diverse analogies between race, caste, and nation. For Lahiri, neologisms like the “global Anglophone,” “people of color,” and “Brownies” all recast the work of philology in “seek[ing] linguistic origins” toward a language that is from the very beginning “beset with opportunism and impurity” (17). If philology can be understood as the ballast of colonial linguistic models, then the neologisms coined within the early twenty-first-century texts at hand, as well as contemporary borrowings, function to disrupt its work through “the romance of unpredictable possibilities” (17).Lahiri joins a growing list of scholars of history as well as literature who query elisions in political thought generated between India and the United States. In Un/common Cultures (2010), Kamala Visweswaran critiques twentieth-century anthropological and sociological discourses that create imperial epistemologies of common and uncommon cultures, having recourse to figures like Du Bois and B. R. Ambedkar, among others, to highlight an alternative formation of cultural collaboration by dissecting categories like race and caste. In Colored Cosmopolitanism (2012), Nico Slate attends to the intersecting stories of Gandhi and Du Bois. For Slate, the main dilemma of transnational evocations of race and caste is that the historical record is rife with mistranslations and deliberate reconfigurations for disparate ideological purposes. Meanwhile, J. Daniel Elam argues that anticolonial thinkers like Frantz Fanon, Gandhi, and Ambedkar began to fashion an impossible politics that imagined a world free of colonialism. Instead, they cultivated a studied form of the disavowal of mastery that challenged colonialism not just as imperial domain but as method. Lahiri's Imperfect Solidarities sits alongside these complex texts limning the space between utopian, exemplary, and impossible projects of envisioning the world. Lahiri places us methodologically within a burgeoning early to mid-twentieth-century print sphere that complicates strict delineations between the exemplary, the strategic, and the fanciful in a distinctly literary zone.Comprising three sprawling chapters, Imperfect Solidarities works its way from Tagore's Gitanjali (1910) onward, to Gandhi's Hind swaraj (1909) and finally Du Bois's Dark Princess, to understand each thinker's reliance on neologism and deliberate mistranslation. Lahiri tracks complex maneuvers that evade easy ethical categorization and unearths a much more difficult, and occasionally unpalatable, politics undergirding the world-historical vision of each figure. For example, Lahiri meditates on Gandhi's deliberate infantilization of Black South Africans in his attempt to render a spectrum of racial discrimination, an uncomfortable moment that moves Black South Africans from an initial “phobic” racial register to a metaphorical realignment as children who become “repositor[ies] of virtue” (a move that he would later replicate in the appellation of harijans or “children of God” for Dalits). Rather than evading Gandhi's overt racialization strategies, Lahiri highlights how his flawed rhetoric is deployed as a scalar vision of antiracist thinking against white supremacy. Unpacking another neologism, “people of color,” the author shows how Gandhi becomes deeply interested in “the suffering of Black people because their predicaments could be replicated on the bodies of others, including Indians” (96). Similarly, while scholars have been skeptical about Du Bois's use of caste in Dark Princess, particularly the representation of the Indian princess of the fictitious Bwodhpur as a high-born Brahmin woman, Lahiri both acknowledges and reframes the interpretive limits of such ambivalence by activating caste as global racial solidarity between India and the US through the figure of a mixed-race child as “the child of history” (119).In a striking turn that adds an entirely new, complex layer of interpretive density around gender and print internationalism, Lahiri showcases the role of three women who remain obscured from view behind the “three great men”—Sister Nivedita, Sonia Schlesin, and Jessie Redmon Fauset. The author highlights how all three women had a significant hand in furthering the print internationalism at play here, emphasizing that the grand political visions woven by these unabashedly male historical figures owe an unacknowledged debt of labor and gratitude to a buried, protofeminist sensibility: “the women of print internationalism” demonstrate “[their] rapidly changing status in the currents of early twentieth-century feminist movements [that] sometimes enabled their innovations across the boundaries of race and nation” (4). This is developed most powerfully in Lahiri's third chapter on Du Bois, where she examines the editorship of Jessie Redmon Fauset and the careful curation of a genre of mother-daughter readership that relies as much on orality as it does the print medium. In the closing moments of the chapter, Lahiri veers away from Du Bois to leave us with the close reading of an image of an ambiguously racialized young girl in The Crisis. The image shines through as a powerful emblem of print internationalism, asking us to reframe not only the historical failures of its illustrious figures but also to pay attention to the tireless feminist work that continued in spite of them.As might be expected of a nuanced account of print culture, Lahiri's methodology is rigorously archival; the best arguments in the text stem from moments of intense scrutiny of literary-historical material, whether the pages of Gitanjali or the various correspondences between Du Bois, Tagore, and Gandhi. However, even as Lahiri asserts the outsize debt to unacknowledged female intellectual labor, it is not entirely clear how this crucial insight develops a deeper understanding of imperfect commitments in the Anglosphere. Ania Loomba has argued that one must consider “the violence of Gandhi's non-violence” and places her critique precisely through the erasure of women in the development of satyagraha. For instance, Gandhi's “grotesque” advice to women in the face of sexual violence is to “cultivate courage” and that “[p]arents and husbands should instruct women in the art of becoming fearless” (qtd. in Loomba 26). While Lahiri is direct in her departure from “symptomatic reading” and her investment in “critical complicity” (Lahiri 13), a fuller appreciation of the urgent implications of painstaking archival work might have come from a closer engagement with such feminist scholarship (such implications are fully in evidence in Lahiri's engagement with race critique in her chapter on Gandhi).Most intriguingly, Lahiri dares to reframe the global Anglophone not as a market phenomenon but as a political evocation, one that bridges linguistic, national, and racial divides to imagine a new terrain of historical inquiry. It is a risky gambit to put this particular scholarly neologism on a continuum with historical neologisms—such as gitanjali, satyagraha, and Brownies—that Lahiri examines in print internationalism. Since the advent of the term “global Anglophone” in the mid-2000s, particularly after 9/11 and the 2008 global economic crash, the postcolonial has been weathering the charge of institutional decline. Debates around the term have now become commonplace—special issues and online forums have been litigating the fate of the field. For instance, Nasia Anam tracks how the term “entered into literary critical discourse foremost as a problematic substitute for established disciplinary terms like postcolonial and World Literature,” shaped by “the invisible hand of the academic job market.” In contrast, Yogita Goyal disputes the assumption of the global Anglophone's inevitable neoliberal ascent by emphasizing the continuing relevance of the postcolonial as a necessarily political category. Similarly, Sangeeta Ray refutes the salience of a “post-postcolonial” but by gesturing, like Anam, to the neoliberal market as creating the conditions for this new global frame. Given a continuing post-critical suspicion to the postcolonial, exemplified by Rita Felski in The Limits of Critique, one might hazard that an overlooked method war has been brewing between the postcolonial and the global Anglophone, signaled by the separation of MLA forums, even as both terms seem to be used interchangeably in both scholarship and job market ads. It is quietly, and perhaps hastily, assumed institutionally that the global Anglophone has entirely displaced the postcolonial in English literary studies.This is what makes Lahiri's reconfiguration of the “global Anglophone” an intriguing strategy. In asking us to consider the global Anglophone as one neologism among many in the spirit of Tagore's or Gandhi's linguistic maneuvers, Imperfect Solidarities productively evades why we must rehabilitate this particular scholarly neologism from its current association with the market. Tilting it toward a more political orientation, Lahiri acknowledges and relies on the importance of the postcolonial, paying attention to rejoinders by scholars like Goyal, Ray, and many others. Renovating the use of the “global Anglophone” in startling ways, Lahiri realigns debates around the term to return to the international commitments and anticolonial energies that animate theories of the postcolonial. In fact, Lahiri's archive covertly suggests that returning to the postcolonial (incidentally, also an anachronism for Lahiri's study) against the global Anglophone might draw a comprehensive through line between tenuous, pre-Independence solidarities. In the chapter on Gandhi, the author offers the powerful framework of “international comparativism,” which is not only furiously active in these pages but also renegotiates our understanding of the Anglophone in significant ways, particularly by calling attention to the constant, stubborn, and productively unsettling presence of South Asian languages like Bengali and Gujarati and global cultural contexts like Japanese woodcuts within repositories of English-language print writing.Yet Lahiri's cogent and timely analysis of print internationalism holds back from commenting on one towering figure of postcolonial history, B. R. Ambedkar. The omission is surprising because Ambedkar has been an important transnational interlocutor of figures such as John Dewey and Henri Bergson (Elam 54–59). Scholars like Visweswaran and Slate have also emphasized Ambedkar's proximity to African American thought, noting in particular his deployment of caste and slavery as commensurate optics of oppression, with Ambedkar inverting Lala Lajpat Rai's claim that caste was a greater mode of oppression than slavery (Visweswaran 156). Ambedkar also briefly corresponded with Du Bois in 1946 and was likely very familiar with his work (Visweswaran 154–55; Slate). I bring this up to note that, not unlike the primary figures of Imperfect Solidarities, Ambedkar was deeply interested in creating networks of solidarity that transcended the nation-state. Much like Du Bois, Ambedkar was committed to opening up the associative networks between caste and race by weaving analogies with the international register of slavery.In fact, one of Ambedkar's most frequently cited texts, The Annihilation of Caste, emerges in distinct opposition to print nationalism. When barred from addressing a conference by the Jat Pat Todak Mandal, Ambedkar famously self-published copies of the speech and distributed it as an act of protest. The speech ends with Ambedkar effectively declaring his exit from Hinduism and turn to Buddhism. Far from engaging this protest, Gandhi's main reaction was to fault Ambedkar for overpricing his pamphlet, a criticism that was meant to cannily undermine Ambedkar's ability to connect with India's majoritarian Hindu masses. Lahiri's analysis shows that Du Bois seemed to favor figures like Tagore and Gandhi over the lesser-known Ambedkar, despite the latter's reaching out to Du Bois in 1946 to discuss the resonances between caste and race. At the same time, Ambedkar's pamphlets do not quite correspond to Lahiri's tightly conceived framework of print internationalism and operate in a register that seems to move between national and international spaces. In other words, the omission of Ambedkar points to the historical record's inability to accommodate Ambedkar's polemic, especially as one of the fiercest critics of Gandhi. It demands that we simultaneously attend to the arguments of Dalit intellectuals like Mata Prasad and Gopal Guru that the experience of humiliation in England and South Africa by upper-caste Indian elites led to a form of national awakening. As Guru notes, it was only the disruption of their “feudal complacency” that “awakens them to their own subordination within this framework of power” (qtd. in Rawat and SatyanaRayana 3).Ambedkar's place in Anglophone studies is also of special note given that Ambedkar wrote copiously in English. The fact that Imperfect Solidarities makes no mention of Ambedkar is not to fault the author but to invite reflection on South Asian Anglophone literary scholarship's continued minoritization of caste within the framework of the national. Given that there is not even a passing reference to Ambedkar in Lahiri's book, we might read this not as an oversight but as a deliberate and silent counterargument that requires us to grapple with Ambedkar's defiance of the nation form not through print internationalism, as with Tagore or Gandhi, but by circulating within the nation as a critical force, what Sara Ahmed theorizes as the recalcitrant stance of the “willful subject” of politics. This is also exemplified by Akshya Saxena's Vernacular English, which devotes considerable time to language debates and the place of Dalit intellectuals in advocating for anti-casteism by repurposing English. The thinking and writing of Ambedkar, one of Gandhi's fiercest critics, loom like a large shadow over the implications of imperfect politics; it demands an interrogation of both thinkers's divergent world-historical visions. Lahiri's work opens up these contradictions as fertile ground for literary and political scholarship.Weighing such contradictions in a different but resonant context, Yogita Goyal finds that “[w]hile we tend to see African-American and colonial modernity as converging only in the era of Civil Rights and Black Power, Du Bois and Tagore both notably attempt to conceive of a non-imperialist universalism prior to Bandung” (“Transnational” 58). Lahiri's monograph not only returns us to these visions of universalism but goes one step further in asserting how the circulation of internationalist texts, literary objects that refute the primacy of the novel or the national newspaper, were pivotal in weaving together anti-imperialism, racial justice, nationalist critique, and an articulated urgent need for transnational solidarities. These insights did not always come to pass; some of them remain deeply flawed in their ideological deployment. Yet, Lahiri emphatically shows that these shortcomings, failures, and misprisions are the very stuff of political thought. The result is a complex study that is rich in implications for the future of global Anglophone scholarship, implications that will hopefully build on its reframing of caste as an international optic in furthering the work of focalizing racial solidarities.

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.

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).

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.

The notion of criticism at the present time: from postcriticism to an ethics of reading well

ABSTRACT This article reads Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) as an exemplary effort to move beyond paranoid 'critique' in literary study – an effort that oddly echoes the ongoing intensification of postmodernity, or a socio-economic state no longer capable of imagining a future. Alternative modes of expression and identity are now only ever, in Mark Fisher’s terms, 'precorporated' – structured and anticipated by an always exploitative capitalist culture. Literary criticism’s on-going investment in micro-genres and increasingly atomized modes of criticism seems, in this sense, troublingly and paradoxically caught in the inertia of 'depthlessness.' The postcritical turn, more specifically, presents as both a consequence and an overt advocation of imprisoning surfaces. It strives to reclaim the experience of authentic expression and true, authorial affects by actively eschewing distance, or depth; but this refusal of distance and depth is tantamount to a refusal of otherness and incommensurable affect. To be affected by otherness is to touch upon what is unknown and unnamable. If we are to begin 'reading well' we cannot simply bask in the coherence of a surface. To 'read well,' we must instead tarry with the infinite potential of unmappable depth, a kind of Hegelian negative.

Hooked: Art and Attachment

Hooked: Art and Attachment

Stories of Songs, Choral Activism and LGBTQ+ Rights in Europe

This paper attends to choral activism and LGBTQ+ rights in Europe. Drawing on models in a post-Stonewall US context, LGBTQ+ choirs have appeared since 1982 in urban centres throughout Europe, employing a range of repertoire, adopting innovative performance practices, and enacting public interventions. These choirs can affirm positive LGBTQ+ identities, create safer spaces, build local LGBTQ+ communities, offer sites of healing and sharing about different LGBTQ+ experiences, and increase visibility in the aid of LGBTQ+ rights (Balén 2017; De Quadros 2019; MacLachlan 2020). While LGBTQ+ rights may have  become “a powerful symbol of Europe” (Ayoub and Paternotte 2014: 3) in the popular imagination and in the EU public discourse, in the last decade, new nationalist formations, increased violence toward LGBTQ+ people, and divisions within an apparent LGBTQ+ community have rendered queer Europeans at a critical juncture just as the project of Europe itself begins to crumble. As an activist within, and researcher of a European LGBTQ+ choral music scene, I will share with this paper stories of songs, choirs, festivals and choral networks inspired by Rita Felski’s notion of “hooked” (2020). Drawing on several years of ethnographic research in the UK, Italy and Poland, I ask: How have LGBTQ+ choirs shaped and been shaped by the struggle for LGBTQ+ rights locally, nationally and transnationally? What stories do these choirs tell us about the power of songs to bring about wider social transformation? How might LGBTQ+ choirs offer models of care, community and advocacy in a continent in crisis? Discussing an array of issues and cases – the Various Voices festival, the London Gay Men’s Chorus and the Cromatica network – and the potentials of applied methods, I invite us to listen to LGBTQ+ choral singing as a form of activism that continues to transform European 21st century politics and society.

Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name as a Feminist Bildungsroman

In accordance with the increasing confirmation within feminist literary and cultural studies on women’s literature and the rumination of its social function to provide a sympathetic as well as a critical analysis of contemporary feminist fiction, this paper explores the attempt of women writers to reconfigure and reformulate established fictional genres to create more responsive genres that better represent the heterogeneity of women’s experiences. Focusing on the way Audre Lorde incorporates individual and collective memories as well as erotic and traumatic memories in her literary works, I use the literary category of feminist Bildungsroman to examine her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in which she presents an alternative model of female development. The paper traces the strenuous personal development and transformation of Audre as a black woman endeavouring to challenge marginalization and resist the various forms and layers of abuse and subjugation practiced against her in a racist and sexist society. Taking into consideration that the political implications of women’s writing can only be theorized when it is related to the cultural and ideological processes that shape it, I employ Rita Felski’s analysis of women’s modern writing as a area where female political identities and collective consciousness are treated and depicted.
 In accordance with the increasing confirmation within feminist literary and cultural studies on women’s literature and the rumination of its social function to provide a sympathetic as well as a critical analysis of contemporary feminist fiction, this paper explores the attempt of women writers to reconfigure and reformulate established fictional genres to create more responsive genres that better represent the heterogeneity of women’s experiences. Focusing on the way Audre Lorde incorporates individual and collective memories as well as erotic and traumatic memories in her literary works, I use the literary category of feminist Bildungsroman to examine her biomythography, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name in which she presents an alternative model of female development. The paper traces the strenuous personal development and transformation of Audre as a black woman endeavouring to challenge marginalization and resist the various forms and layers of abuse and subjugation practiced against her in a racist and sexist society. Taking into consideration that the political implications of women’s writing can only be theorized when it is related to the cultural and ideological processes that shape it, I employ Rita Felski’s analysis of women’s modern writing as a area where female political identities and collective consciousness are treated and depicted.

Father Brown, Charity, and Christian Contributions to Critique

Abstract: This essay approaches the topic of Christian poetics via a postcritical reading of the figure of Father Brown. I look to Chesterton's literary creation as an opportunity for thinking about Christian charity and its importance for the way in which literary critics practice critique. Along the way, the essay explores the meaning of the postcritical, plays with the conventions of the detective genre, and focuses on some of the recent contributions to the so-called method wars by scholars such as Bruce Robbins and Rita Felski.

Keeping Faith with Literature

Powerful institutional pressures can impede scholars of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Anglo-American literatures from talking about religion. The essays that Mark Knight and Charles LaPorte collected for this special issue suggest to splendid effect that these intellectual communities are inclined to break that silence. But our fields’ alliance with the modern is a prime factor in the reticence that these authors must have had to challenge even in 2022.Scholars who work on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have, of course, very good reasons to claim jurisdiction over “middle modernity”—a useful term Theresa M. Kelley coined some twenty years ago.1 We have been reluctant to sit on the sidelines of our English departments while our colleagues the early modernists and the modernists share out between them the prestige that accrues to teachers of the modern. To claim the modern for ourselves—however counterintuitively that claim proves for those undergraduates who as often as not think that the works of the Brontës or Keats are written in “Old English”—is a way to avoid our being squeezed out of the curriculum altogether. The problem, however, is that religion continues too often to be treated as though it were irreconcilable with the modernity that middle modernists study. Too often religion is sidelined because it is assumed to be ensconced in the “tradition” that exists before and apart from the secular modern. The assumption is that even as revolutions are made, empires rise and fall, and new modernity-defining literary genres emerge during this era (the realist novel, for instance), religion remains historically immutable and inert.Since the start of the millennium, the religious turn in the humanities has begun to make this assumption less tenable. This is because advocates of that turn—among them contributors to this issue—increasingly emphasize the imbrication of secularity and religion, proposing, variously, that modern secularization might represent the realization and repetition of tendencies already latent in Western Christianity, or that the history of unbelief is inextricable from the historical development in which belief was identified anew as the most salient aspect of Christian lives. That rethinking has had a significant impact for the periodizing schemes and the stories of progress that regulate, explicitly and implicitly, the practice of literary history.In recognition of the fact that MLQ is, as its masthead declares, “a journal of literary history,” I want to begin this afterword by briefly sampling the impact of this rethinking. I am motivated by my recollection of a 2021 special issue of Representations, “Practices of Devotion.” The essays it collected explored the contributions that devotional thinking can make to humanistic inquiry, leaping as they did that exploring from the High Middle Ages to the twentieth century and dropping in only briefly, in an essay about Sir Philip Sidney, on the early modern (Craig, Hollywood, and Trujillo 2021). Here in this special issue of MLQ, however, we find multiple arguments for how a focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries might profit the subfield of religion and literature. Readers of these essays will, I predict, be compelled by those arguments for including rather than squeezing out the middle modern. They will also, the concluding paragraphs of this afterword suggest, be compelled by the redescription of literary studies’ defining methods that emerges from this issue.▪ ▪ ▪As a first example of how attention to religion can reframe the periodizing schemes that govern literary history, consider the recent discussions of a “long Reformation.” Literary scholars and historians now propose that, rather than confining the Protestant Reformation in England to the decades between 1529 (when Henry VIII and Thomas Cromwell summoned the Reformation Parliament and initiated England’s break with Rome) and 1559 (the coronation of Elizabeth, the new defender of a new English faith)—rather than, that is, understanding the Reformation as a punctual event bookended by watershed moments in the political realm—we should think of it as something more protracted and plural: a series of small-r reformations that over the centuries have needed recurrently to be remembered, renewed, and reformed in their turn. For this mode of scholarly inquiry, as for many of the essays collected here, religion, far from inert, is in motion too.2 Hence James Simpson (2019b) mobilizes the concept of a “very long” Reformation as he spotlights the ecclesiological doubts that open Elizabeth Gaskell’s 1854 novel North and South. The heroine’s father, the Reverend Richard Hale, is prompted by conscience and his unwillingness to confirm his conformity to give up his Church of England living and uproot his family. (The Reverend Hale has also been reading seventeenth-century Presbyterian texts.) Gaskell’s use of these doubts to kick-start her novel’s plot and to motivate the Hales’ move from the south of England to the north evidences, Simpson argues, the durability of a restless, kinetic Reformation tradition in which, repeatedly and compulsively, dissent elicited ever more dissent.To similarly revisionist effect, literary scholars now challenge with some regularity the notion that the modern is defined by disenchantment—that modernity is shaped indelibly, as Max Weber proposed, by the triumph of instrumental reason and by the scientific revolution that made the world measurable, predictable, and objectifiable as mere matter. Contesting paradigms for historical analysis that pivot on desacralization and demystification, some of these scholars trace, with Courtney Weiss Smith (2016), for example, how Restoration and eighteenth-century practitioners of natural science believed that acts of close observation and fine-grained description of the natural world were themselves acts of devotion. Faith helped legitimate empiricist science, Smith proposed.There have been other ways to counter the assumption that the story of modernization is a story of disenchantment and debunking—the assumption writ large within the “subtraction” story, as Charles Taylor (2007) calls it in A Secular Age, in which, first, you take away from the picture the church, with its vested interest in cultivating superstition and credulity; then you go farther and take away the God that the priests fabricated to keep human beings in line; and, finally, after these subtractions, you create a world in which people are emancipated from their false consciousness and able to see things as they are. (That is the triumphalist version. The story can also be told wistfully and nostalgically, as a eulogy for lost plenitude.) Significant challenges to this scheme for demarcating the premodern from the modern have been mounted by some scholars of fictionality—for instance, Nicholas Paige (2009), Sarah Tindal Kareem (2014), and Emily Ogden (2018)—who, rather than trace disenchantment and reenchantment as successive phases in a linear and teleological historical process, present the modern story as one in which disenchantment and reenchantment are simultaneous and mutually dependent. It is crucial to note that within this account of “permanent re-enchantments” (the splendidly tendentious title that Paige [2009] gives one of his essays), a lot of importance is ascribed to narrative fiction, precisely because its formal intricacies enable readers and writers to work through that tangle of epistemological attitudes and affective dispositions.3▪ ▪ ▪The essays collected here offer additional models of how and why literary scholars in particular should treat religiosity as part of the ongoing history of modernity rather than as the static residue of an unenlightened premodernity. Consider, for example, Jan-Melissa Schramm’s account of the realist novel, the genre that literary studies often treats as quintessentially and indisputably secular and modern. Things change, she shows, when theology is treated as a dynamic part of cultural history. Ian Watt (1957: 31) famously proposed that the novelty of the eighteenth-century English novel lay in part in how its formal realism invited its readers to think of themselves, while they engaged with minute particulars, as akin to “another group of specialists in epistemology, the jury in a court of law.” Schramm complicates this proposition, however, when she reminds us that theology was as important a contributor as the law to the epistemological debates of the eighteenth century: just as the protocols governing the rules of evidence altered in English courtrooms, Protestant theologians were thinking in forensic terms about the eyewitness testimonies gathered in the Gospels. Likewise engaging the history of the novel, and drawing on the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger’s Religion as a Chain of Memory, Dawn Coleman traces how in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s transhistorical, multigenerational bildungsroman Oldtown Folks (1869) religion comes to be valued as a vehicle of group memory. The departed spirits that in secular modernity religion is charged with sheltering represent in new ways the connections linking the present to the national past.This issue of MLQ does more, however, than alter our understanding of individual texts or genres from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. After reading these essays, the discipline of literary studies, another product of that era, looks different as well. Where Timothy Larsen’s essay, for instance, demonstrates how twenty-first-century scholars’ illiteracy about scripture and Christian theology causes them to misread allusions that Victorian texts’ original audiences would have grasped immediately, other essays collected here center on the possibility that religiosity is intrinsic to literary studies’ methods as well as to literature’s contents. Lori Peterson Branch describes how the students in her course on postsecular studies and the novel are invited to identify the overlap between “spiritual practices and the rituals of literature.” Colin Jager points out how the discipline’s defining protocols of aesthetic reading require us while we read to treat invented, bodiless worlds and characters as though they were real and commanded our belief. If there is something “in our object of study that resists the terms handed down to us by our secularization stories” and that preserves literature’s special role in creating religious meaning, it “ought to be here.” Peter Coviello uses the case of the novelist Herman Melville to track two processes that, he contends, proceeded in tandem in nineteenth-century America: the stabilization of a secularist regime and the solidification and autonomization of the category of literature.▪ ▪ ▪“The very practice of Anglo-American literary criticism and pedagogy depends on presenting literature as resistant, anti-hierarchical and anti-institutional,” James Simpson (2019a: 3) writes in Permanent Revolution, a book that takes issue, much as Simpson’s essay on Gaskell’s very long reformation does, with the conventional account of how historical periods are formulated. Simpson in this passage identifies a secret code of “Protestant triumphalism” (3). He proposes that this code continues to be deeply embedded in the everyday praxis of literary studies, to the point that it ultimately determines the discipline’s governing definitions of its object of study. Simpson is also, of course, gesturing at the reasons why practitioners of literary studies cannot own up to the Reformation roots of their praxis, why literary studies as a discipline for so long defined itself against religion, insisting that it was a modern, impartial, and secular enterprise. For antitraditionalism is itself an English department tradition, something we confirm with regularity whenever we hunt out indications of dissent and subversion in texts or we privilege as exceptional the figures from the past whom we (mis)recognize as being (so Jager states in his description of this critical habit) in “the avant-garde of advancing secularization.”But over the last decade something has changed in our praxis. It has become easier to see the critical ethos and critical agon that Simpson describes as normative for the discipline as instead merely one of many variants of the literary-critical enterprise. Readers of this issue of MLQ encounter alternative descriptions of how our literary doings register the history of religious practice, descriptions that confirm that criticism is increasingly open to exploring the nature of the critic’s relational fidelity both to texts and to other readers. When, in her contribution to this cluster, Emma Mason describes the importance of kenosis, the spiritual practice of self-emptying, to nineteenth-century poets like Christina Rossetti and Gerard Manley Hopkins, she links this mode of receptivity and vulnerability to current speculations about how “weak theory” might reshape critique (see also Saint-Amour 2018). Winter Jade Werner and Mimi Winick propose here that decolonizing Victorian studies will depend on jettisoning a Victorian model of world religions. They then model a mode of “connective” reading that bypasses the national and ethnic categories privileged by that older set of comparative methods. Alex Eric Hernandez demonstrates that the devotional practices of people who pray with Jane Austen (a saint substitute) should be studied not as examples of untutored (and bad) lay reading but for their overlap with a critical practice that also acquires, through its care and devotion, “the power to materialize spirits.” (Hernandez takes an interest in departed, disembodied spirits, just as Jager and Coleman do.)Even while operating at a distance from the religious turn that engages the scholars who appear in this issue, critics like Rita Felski have over the last few years helped us realize that devotion is as worthy of analysis as dissent. To arrive at that realization, Felski (2020: 9) says, means reappraising the account of the modern as a “drama of scission and separation” (Taylor’s separation story) in which individuals are incrementally sundered “from any form of taken-for-granted community or unity.” Endorsing the premise that modernity has been productive of new modes of attachment (or the premise that it is literature’s capacity to solicit those attachments that makes it a key modern institution) is not tantamount to agreeing that the discipline of literary studies should now proceed to a postcritical phase. I think that it is important to maintain that devotion has an autocritical component (an edginess I tried to keep in view in Loving Literature [Lynch 2015]). I share the conviction of a number of contributors to this issue that religious readers are as often as not critical readers.Yet I have found especially helpful here the pages in which Hernandez calls to our attention the arguments made by those practitioners of religious studies whose definitions of religion bracket credal content and focus instead on a pragmatics—scholars who stress that faith is not a set of propositions to which the believer assents but that it is best seen as a way to do things and bind oneself to others. Hernandez’s alignment of this work with the so-called descriptive turn in literary studies (spearheaded by Heather Love, Sharon Marcus, and Stephen Best) occasions the thought that literary studies seems right now to be developing, without quite calling it this, a concept of “lived literature” that might be the counterpart of religious studies’ concept of lived religion (see Love 2010; Marcus, Love, and Best 2016). Explicitly claiming this concept might help the field acknowledge more readily how the literary text is not only an assemblage of signs to be interpreted but also a nexus of connections, at once aesthetic, erotic, moral, and spiritual. To be a lover of literature is to construct the aesthetic relation as though it put us in the presence of other people; to take the measure of that as though is to realize that this relation involves a kind of faith. I conclude by offering up this reflection as one last testimony as to why I think that eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary studies should welcome further talk about religion. As an early reader of these essays, I discovered that by listening to this talk, literary scholarship can learn new things about the distinctive sociality that literary reading involves. We will be better at recognizing how literature is, among other things, a medium through which we forge our relations with others—immaterial spirits included.

"En helt annan upplevelse"

“An Entirely Different Experience”: The Audiobook’s Bond to its Readers Audiobooks have in recent years become widely popular. The format accordingly impacts how many contemporary readers use and experience literature. The article examines this tendency, departing from Rita Felski’s theoretical conceptualizations of uses of literature (Felski 2008). Felski represents a new attention within literary studies toward the ways in which so-called lay readers use, experience and form attachments (Felski 2020) to literature and art. Drawing on Felski’s work in combination with Lutz Koepnick’s concept of resonant reading (2019), we study how the medial affordances of the audiobook impact uses of literature among empirical Swedish readers. In this way, we combine the theoretical perspective introduced by Felski with an approach informed by literary sociology (Svedjedal, Murray), in order to draw attention to the importance of considering the significance of media and formats in broader discussions about uses of literature. The article is based on a survey of 1400 Swedish audiobook users, which was published during the fall of 2021, in the Facebook-group Snacka om ljudböcker. We focus on a qualitative analysis of answers to the free-text question “Why do you choose to listen to audiobooks?” Our findings demonstrate that the medial affordances of the audiobook, its mobility and the mediation of literature through sound, impact both why and how readers listen to audiobooks: Respondents report among other things that audiobooks make it possible to integrate literature into everyday life, and that, consequently, it adds value to everyday activities, while the format’s mediation though sound, and especially the voice of the performer “adds a dimension” and “deepens” the reading experience. Thus, while the existing debate often associates audiobooks with distracted or passive reading and, in Felski’s terms, with detachment from the surroundings, and from the text, our findings suggest that the format also helps readers form attachments to and through literature.

Pandemics as the great levellers? Class, community and capital in US-American short stories

This article focuses on literature’s potential for healing – both medical and sociopolitical – in times of severe crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Affect is an important literary tool to make people aware of social inequalities, in particular reading or writing short stories with the experience of a simultaneous real-life pandemic. Reading is an embodied act through which the reader enters into a dialogue with both the author and the text. Emotions emerge that are often more deeply stored in memory than the words as such, and that changes our perception of the world. This effect is also encapsulated in Siri Hustvedt’s analysis of reading practices, Sara Ahmed’s affect theory and Rita Felski’s four ways of engaging with texts. I analyse John O’Hara’s short story ‘The Doctor’s Son’ (1935), situated in rural Pennsylvania at the time of the 1918 Influenza, and Victor LaValle’s ‘Recognition’ (2020), resonating with the COVID-19 pandemic in an isolated apartment building in New York City. Both stories question the concept of pandemics as the great levellers by pointing out social injustice due to class and ethnic hierarchies. Taking Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ (1842) and Poe’s emphasis on the preconceived and single effect of fear and subsequent horror caused by the ‘Red/Black Death’, as a starting point, the article presents O’Hara’s story as a manifestation of the medical, social and ethnic phenomena at work in 1918: social distancing, facial masks, closed public institutions, people’s resistance to these measures and medical treatment along ethnic and class lines. LaValle’s ‘Recognition’ allows readers a glimpse into the relationship between an unnamed African American woman, who is also the narrator, and Pilar, a Colombian American woman, who dies of the virus. As part of a contemporary Decameron project, ‘Recognition’ stresses the human need for community, communication and, thus mutual human recognition, giving the dead – whether rich or poor – a name and demanding to undo systemic social inequalities. In that sense, literature can heal the nation.

On the literariness of working-class literature

This article argues that even if working-class literature has often been marginalized within literary studies, scholars interested in it – including scholars within the field of working-class studies – should not alienate themselves from that discipline. Instead, they should claim a space for the study of working-class literature within it. The main reason for this is that the insistence on working-class literature’s literariness will contribute to a more solid theorizing of it, which will also benefit its study within other contexts, such as working-class studies. The argument is based on a discussion of Swedish working-class poet Stig Sjödin (1917–93) and his reception by literary historians. Sjödin was active both on the book market and within the labour movement. However, the latter part of his oeuvre has been largely ignored within literary studies, which illustrates the narrow understanding of literature within the discipline. Drawing on theories put forward by Marjorie Perloff and Rita Felski, the article argues that the study of working-class and labour movement literature can function as a catalyst for challenging this understanding and for promoting a more inclusive conceptualization of literature and literary aesthetics.