#rita felski

[violentdevotion]

The “death of the author” thesis— a ubiquitous slogan in literary studies for several decades— has come to seem increasingly outdated, as authors become ever more visible, voluble, and inescapable. They give interviews, hold forth on blogs or Twitter, opine on the latest political events, talk back to prize committees, appear in full or half- empty auditoriums— not titans to be worshiped but promoters of their work and participants in numerous networks.

Rita Felski, Identifying with Characters

[muscone]

The role of the term “postcritical,” then, is neither to prescribe the forms that reading should take nor to dictate the attitudes that critics must adopt; it is to steer us away from the kinds of arguments we know how to conduct in our sleep. These are some of the things that a postcritical reading will decline to do: subject a text to interrogation; diagnose its hidden anxieties; demote recognition to yet another form of misrecognition; lament our incarceration in the prison-­house of language; demonstrate that resistance is just another form of containment; read a text as a metacommentary on the undecidability of meaning; score points by showing that its categories are socially constructed; brood over the gap that separates word from world.

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015, p.173)

[desescrita]

“Literature is one of the cultural languages through which we make sense of the world; it helps to create our sense of reality rather than simply reflecting it. At the same time, it also draws on, echoes, modifies and bounces off out other frameworks of sense-making. No text is an island.”

— Rita Felski, Literature After Feminism

[magneto666666]

Filip's Summer 2021 Reads! Murakami, Cusk, Gwynne, and More!

...In which I talk about too many books in too long a time! 

[florizels]

Literature is one of the cultural languages through which we make sense of the world; it helps to create our sense of reality rather than simply reflecting it. At the same time, it also draws on, echoes, modifies and bounces off out other frameworks of sense-making. No text is an island.

Rita Felski, Literature after Feminism

[sharpened--edges]

That certain texts survive, and others do not, is not just a matter of particular texts resonating with individual readers, but also of structures of gate-keeping and evaluation, of selection and omission. These screening processes, enacted daily in discussions over what to publish, where to allot marketing dollars, or how to revise the undergraduate curriculum, enable some works to circulate widely while overlooking others. From this point of view, transtemporal mobility is at least partly related to institutional inertia. Citations generate more citations; graduate students teach the texts they were themselves taught; canons—whether of fiction or of theory—reproduce themselves over time. Indeed, even as new texts filter into the classroom and ways of reading gradually shift over time, it is difficult to imagine how education might proceed without a base level of continuity, repetition, and transmission of prior knowledge.

Rita Felski, “Context Stinks!”, New Literary History 42.4 (2011), p. 580.

[days-of-reading]

These are some of the things that a postcritical reading will decline to do: subject a text to interrogation; diagnose its hidden anxieties; demote recognition to yet another form of misrecognition; lament our incarceration in the prison-house of language; demonstrate that resistance is just another form of containment; read a text as a metacommentary on the undecidability of meaning; score points by showing that its categories are socially constructed; brood over the gap that separates word from world.

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique

[findepartida]

A work of art is a potential source of  knowledge rather than just an object of knowledge—one whose cognitive impact and implications are tied up with its affective reach. We are intertwined and entangled with texts, in ways that require further consideration.

Rita Feski, The Limits of Critique