“Recognizing critique's pedagogical forces in my own teaching, I briefly sketch out some of the costs and constraints of critical reading in the college literature classroom:
Critical reading is exclusive. At a basic level, critical reading requires a specialized language that creates boundaries between insiders and outsiders and reinforces exclusionary power dynamics. Critique's exclusivity frames alternate vocabularies as suspect. Students learn to internalize "the assumption that whatever is not critical must therefore be uncritical," too emotional, too naive, or too personal, raising the personal and affective stakes of students' encounters with literature (Felski 2015: 9). Critical reading's exclusivity encourages students' anxieties about reading in the classroom.
Critical reading encourages students to consume rather than engage texts. As Timothy Aubry (2011: 47) argues, students' anxieties about whether they are "getting it" promotes consumption because it "analogizes the act of interpretation with the act of consumption." Reading becomes a high-stakes game of comprehension: either the text remains impossibly other, alien, and inaccessible to you, or you "take possession of it, view it as your property" (47). "Getting it" becomes a myopic version of learning, closing both reader and text to the kinds of learning that comes from more generous and exploratory modes of reading. Critical reading stokes students' anxieties about being wrong in ways that limit their capacity to be open to intellectual risk. Anxious about being wrong, students miss all the ways they can be "right."
Critical reading is impersonal. We ask students to occupy neutral, objective positions of critical distance even as we acknowledge the impossibility of objectivity and the fiction of neutrality. The pretense of critical distance brackets the specificity and diversity of students' motivations and responses while reading, foreclosing the possibility of forging connections with broader communities of readers (including other readers in the classroom) and denying the often unpredictable and unruly resonances of our encounters with literature. Neutrality can be passive-aggressive, demanding a specific orientation toward the text while limiting readers' sense of agency.
In mapping a few of the pedagogical limits of critique, my goal is not to get rid of critical reading altogether but to reimagine critical reading as one approach among many possible approaches to engaging literature, each with its own set of choices, investments, and relationships. Rather than disciplining alternate orientations toward the objects of our study, we should embrace the full range of attachments and orientations to the texts we read. In doing so, we invite different, less anxious affects into the classroom. Diversifying our models of what counts as "serious" reading can engage the kinds of readers and reading already at work in our classrooms. The task then becomes to build a classroom pedagogy in which students can explore the pleasures and anxieties of reading without necessarily becoming anxious readers.”
-- Katie Dyson, “Resonant Reading: From Anxiety to Attunement,” in Pedagogy 19:3 (October 2019)