(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Felski is a scholar and author.
She argues that the meaning of literature lies in how actual readers use it, so its aesthetic value is inseparable from its use (Felski 2008, 8). Yet the dominant mode of literary criticism is negative and suspicious, so literary and cultural critics are beginning to ask “what is lost when a dialogue with literature gives way to a permanent diagnosis, when the remedial reading of texts loses all sight of why we are drawn to such texts in the first place” (p. 1)? As readers, we may ask: what value is criticism to us?
Literary criticism is predominately negative in that its ultimate aim is critical reading, which assigns all the value of reading to the act and reader, rather than what is read; Felski counters: “Do we gain nothing in particular from what we read” (pp. 2–3)? This criticism is suspicious through its over-engagement in the hermeneutics of suspicion1: reading texts in a paranoid fashion (Felski 2008, 3). In this way,”[t]he negative has become inescapably, overbearingly, normative” (ibid.).
So, there are problems with current criticism and it seems disconnected with the needs of the reader. Felski wonders, therefore, whether we can retain a critical stance yet also consider the positive merits of a work of literature. She suggests that we should “combine a willingness to suspect with an eagerness to listen; there is no reason why our readings cannot blend analysis and attachment, criticism and love” (p. 22).
To describe these positive uses of literature, Felski proposes that “reading involves a logic of recognition; that aesthetic experience has analogies with enchantment in a supposedly disenchanted age; that literature creates distinctive configurations of social knowledge; that we may value the experience of being shocked by what we read” (p. 14).
Her approach comprises a neo-phenomenology of the varied and sometimes contradictory reasons we value literature (p. 135). This is attentive to the first-person perspective, and “insists that the world is always the world as it appears to us, as it is filtered through our consciousness, perception, and judgment” (p. 17).
This teaches us to question our prejudices and beliefs because we realise that our reactions are not spontaneous but shaped by cultural factors: acknowledging the historicity of our experience. But it also reminds us that we cannot escape our vantage point from which we evaluate texts (ibid.). By tying literary analysis to the first-person, phenomenology can clarify how and why particular texts matter to us (pp. 19–20). It calls upon us “to honor our implication and involvement in the works we read, rather than serving as shame-faced bystanders to our own aesthetic response” (p. 20). Instead of always digging for a deeper, hidden meaning, we should pay more attention to what the text offers on its surface: “look at, rather than through, the literary work, to attend to the act of saying rather than only the substance of what is said” (ibid.).
This broader consideration of the values of literary experience undermines the dichotomy between high and low art. Reading is evaluation in that we’re condemned to endlessly select, sort, distinguish, and privilege, so are incapable of favouring texts equally. By leaving our “emphatic experience”, and its evaluative criteria, wide open, Felski grants a broad range of aesthetic response: readers can be affected by many different works for many varied reasons, so we have permission to be moved by the low-brow (pp. 20–1).
It’s widely believed that we can learn about ourselves through reading (p. 12). This use of literature, termed “recognition” by Felski, is a “perplexing and paradoxical” thing: “in a mobile interplay of exteriority and interiority, something that exists outside of me inspires a revised or altered sense of who I am” (p. 25). Recognition can provide self-intensification, through awareness that our experiences are distinctive but not unique, and self-extension, by showing us ourselves in what initially seems strange (p. 39). We have been cautioned against this by critics who assume that if readers align themselves with fictional characters then they will necessarily adopt that character’s ideologies wholesale, yet there’s clearly much more nuance involved (p. 34). By developing our ability to see ourselves in the text we develop a greater awareness of the Other.
When literature is used for enchantment, it can be absorbing and intensely pleasurable such that it “confounds our deeply held beliefs about the rationality and autonomy of persons” (p. 54). Again, this powerful experience is demeaned by criticism which upholds the ideal of demystification: “the modern dogma that our lives should be thoroughly disenchanted” (p. 76). The modern literary critic, that is, whats to puncture this enchantment by explaining how the text has this effect, how it draws us in, with the implication that to be enchanted is to be tricked or deceived. Enchantment has been portrayed as a regression to the primitive/childish or nostalgic ways of experiencing fiction, so has been associated with sexism, classism, and iconophobia (pp. 53, 71). The enhcanted reader is depicted as a credulous simpleton who acceedes entirely the book’s ideological influence, but in fact we can both acknowledge that these worlds are imaginary, and also enjoy their absorptive effects (pp. 74–5). We can perhaps fall in love again with this type of reading by rejecting the outdated understanding of enchantment, and placing ourselves at the mercy of the text.
The antithesis of enchantment is shock: “Instead of being rocked and cradled, we find ourselves ambushed and under assault”—it breaches our defences (p. 113). Modern criticism assumes that the shocking is synonymous with the new, but this can’t account for classic texts managing to shock us. This speaks to an enigma of textual transmission: “how do we hold fast to the idea that works bear the imprint of their historical moment, while also accounting for their potential to resonate across time” (pp. 114–115, 119–120)? Here, then, Felski is raising a broader question involving literary meaning.
Historical criticism “enriches our understanding of the provenance of a work of art, but it can also inspire a stunted view of texts as governed entirely by the conditions of their origin” (p. 120). Instead, Felski suggests, texts are temporally volatile: they “do not disclose themselves irrevocably and absolutely at the moment of their first appearance”, but their meaning is “washed forward into the future”; they may even “experience a hectic, even frenetic, afterlife characterized by new convergences and mutating constellations of meaning” (pp. 115, 119). Texts can “speak across centuries” because: “[t]heir very untimeliness renders them newly timely” (p. 119). Perhaps we can take from this insight two reminders: not to write off older texts as being outdated or untimely, and to avoid historically-stunted interpretation of them. A text can be both ancient and modern.
Reading in general “often calls for a cross-temporal leap, a destabilizing shift from one time frame and cultural sensibility to another” (p. 92). We can negotiate this encounter by “attending to the salience of what is said and what is left unsaid, by reading looks and gestures, attending to half-voiced thoughts and inchoate sensations, we become attuned to criteria of distinction that seem at first glance to be baffling or opaque, that may surprise us in their sheer arbitrariness.” (ibid.). This is a careful, observant reading that stabilises us not by skimming past foreign elements but through cultivating awareness that these kind of details have relevance in the world of the text, and by extension in other people’s lives. Through this inter-subjectivity we gain “a view of particular societies “from the inside”; we come to know something of what it feels to be inside a particular habitus, to experience a world as self-evident, to bathe in the waters of a way of life” (ibid.). This is one way literature can reveal knowledge when read with an open mind and perceptive curiosity.
Books are also used for political knowledge. They are sometimes defined as ideology, which implies that we have assumed they “can be objects of knowledge but never sources of knowledge. It is to rule out of court the eventuality that a literary text could know as much, or more, than a theory” (p. 7). It’s valuable to ask political questions of texts, but Felski wonders”what is lost when we deny a work any capacity to…challenge or change our own beliefs and commitments” (pp. 6–7)? How do we navigate “the Scylla of political functionalism and the Charybdis of art for art’s sake, striving to do justice to the social meanings of artworks without slighting their aesthetic power?” (p. 9). We can say, at least, that to read literature as ideology is to marshal it for or against our cause rather than allowing it to challenge us (ibid.):
Texts…lack the power to legislate their own effects; the internal features of a literary work tell us little about how it is received and understood, let alone its impact, if any, on a larger social field. Political function cannot be deduced or derived from literary structure
Texts only act through their readers, passing through “densely woven filters of interpretation and affective orientation that both enable and limit their impact” (p. 18). By explaining some of these filters and how texts can impact us, Felski both suggests different aspects of a book to attend to, and that the influence of popular criticism can diminish our reading experience. We’re also invited to read different kinds of books to experience these effects. Reading for enchantment, say, may necessitate very different reading material for a hidebound adult.
See Ricoeur, Paul↩︎