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    The Limits of Critique
    The Limits of Critique
    The Limits of Critique
    Ebook323 pages3 hours

    The Limits of Critique

    By Rita Felski

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    “Felski frees critics from relying on critique as the gatekeeper of literary studies and offers a prescient guide to life in a postcritical world.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

    Why must critics unmask and demystify literary works? Why do they believe that language is always withholding some truth, that the critic’s task is to reveal the unsaid or repressed? In this book, Rita Felski examines critique, the dominant form of interpretation in literary studies, and situates it as but one method among many, a method with strong allure—but also definite limits.

    Felski argues that critique is a sensibility best captured by Paul Ricoeur’s phrase “the hermeneutics of suspicion.” She shows how this suspicion toward texts forecloses many potential readings while providing no guarantee of rigorous or radical thought. Instead, she suggests, literary scholars should try what she calls “postcritical reading”: rather than looking behind a text for hidden causes and motives, literary scholars should place themselves in front of it and reflect on what it suggests and makes possible.

    By bringing critique down to earth and exploring new modes of interpretation, The Limits of Critique offers a fresh approach to the relationship between artistic works and the social world.

    “Perhaps the most ambitious reappraisal of the discipline to appear since theory’s heyday.” —Times Literary Supplement

    “A book that will get all of us to take another look at what we’ve been doing. The Limits of Critique will shock some and elate others. No one will feel neutral, and no one can afford not to read this book.” —Wai Chee Dimock, author of Weak Planet: Literature and Assisted Survival
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateOct 20, 2015
    ISBN9780226294179
    The Limits of Critique

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      The Limits of Critique - Rita Felski

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