We, Reading, Now

archived

"We, Reading, Now" invites participants to rethink the status of critique in literary studies. We seek to explore three key areas of concern—collectivity, method, and temporality—raised by the contentious phrase "post-critical interpretation" and summarized in our title "We, Reading, Now." Who constitutes the "we" invoked in contemporary accounts of the ways we read? What do such practices of reading entail? How do we define, periodize, and consider the historicity of this "now" in which we read?

In posing these questions, the Colloquy enters into a web of ongoing debates about reading and the scholarly activities carried out under labels like critique, criticism, the humanities, the liberal arts, hermeneutics, interpretation, and literary and cultural study. The Colloquy’s sustained interest in temporality derives from the fact that the authors of its core essays were all graduate students or junior faculty members at the time of writing. As scholars who trained after the heyday of theory, the burn of the culture wars, and the torque of the linguistic turn, these participants have felt called upon to reconstruct the field’s recent past to make sense of the current disciplinary surround. The importance of collectivity for "We, Reading, Now" emerged from similar grounds: despite a wide range of ideas, we shared a sense of generational recognition. What kind of "we,"what kind of new and contingent collective—this Colloquy seeks to ask—can be gathered together in the place marked out by the pronoun?

"We, Reading, Now" grows out of a New Literary History workshop on "Post-Critical Interpretation" held at the University of Virginia in the fall of 2014. Prompted by a shared desire to continue conversations begun in the workshop, its participants have convened this Colloquy. We hope to inspire and collect new accounts of reading practices, accounts that reflect the links between the history of literary study and the ways in which we understand, teach, and talk about literature in the present. As the initial contributions attest, efforts to take stock of critique and to imagine what might succeed it result in divergent narratives, various articulations of relevance, and contrasting intellectual histories. What connects them is the shared historical moment of their conception (now), their interest in whom reading gathers together (we), and their common engagement with how literature is studied (read) during the "turn away from the linguistic turn," the "crisis in the humanities," the moment of "post-critical interpretation," or the perceived exhaustion of the "hermeneutics of suspicion."

Curators

Dalglish Chew

Julie Orlemanski

Reading for the Moment

Essay

By Invitation

Eric Eisner

What if our accounts of the way we read “now,” as well as our narratives of the discipline’s history, were to set out not from a catalog of eras or turns, but instead from more particularized, more fluid temporalities?

I'm Just Normal

Essay

Jean-Thomas Tremblay

In Noah Baumbach’s 2015 national-millennial fable, Mistress America, “I’m just normal” bespeaks dissatisfaction. It’s an identity that Tracy claims in an effort to project her way out of it.

From Suspicion to Solidarity?

Essay

Stephen Squibb

What comes after suspicion? My answer is solidarity—or allied reading. I prefer this to ‘surface reading,’ ‘generous reading,’ or the ‘hermeneutics of trust’ which Ricoeur originally intended to discipline with suspicion, chiefly because solidarity is strategic, rather than simply charitable, virtuous, or advisable (though it may be these as well).

Critique, Neo-Kantianism, and Literary Study

Essay

By Invitation

Ross Knecht

I contend that critique is not solely and perhaps not even primarily negative in character: it also has an important synthetic function, uniting historical and interpretive modes of inquiry in such a way as to invest its objects of study with cultural and historical significance.

Risking Complicity

Essay

Mitchum Huehls

Historical forces have replaced older modes of meaning-making that rely on representation and critique with new modes of meaning-making that rely on connection, adjacency, being, transmission, and presence. It’s not surprising, then, that today’s authors and readers have changing notions of what it means to mean.

Critical Immodesty and Other Grammars for Aesthetic Agency

Essay

Tyler Bradway

Post-critical methods of reading promise to apprehend the forces of aesthetic objects in their own terms. By granting that aesthetic surfaces speak in a different language than literary criticism, post-critical reading permits us to broaden the aesthetic forms that count as “critical” and the ways in which critique functions through aesthetic form. I call for new grammars of aesthetic agency, ones that more expansively account for the critical and creative forces that aesthetic objects harness to press back against the impasses of their contemporary moment.

We Have Never Been Critical

Essay

Dalglish Chew

Via a reading of two fictional dialogues by Bruno Latour, I suggest how generational structures of transmission inflect our attachments to critique, and thus also our understanding of its alternatives.

Critique: The History of a Premise

Essay

Patrick Fessenbecker

Recently, much has been made of the fact that “critique,” as practiced in literary criticism, is an attitude. But critique is also an argument, and I want to think about the nature of that argument. The real question I want to ask is this: if there are so many problems with the assumption that literary form represents an imaginative solution to real contradictions, then why do so many people find it so compelling? Why, in other words, do the problems seem both surmountable and worth surmounting?

Post-critical Reading and the New Hegelianism

Essay

Matthew Flaherty

One doesn’t need a metaphysics of history to sense when a form of life with its attendant rituals, pieties, and practices has grown old. Theory’s reign in literature departments has long been past the point when its claims arrived with salutary shock in the profession.

In this Dawn to be Alive: Versions of the “Postcritical,” 1999, 2015

Essay

Nathan K. Hensley

It seems to me that any genealogy of the postcritical undertaken in 2015 should map not just the personal experiences and dispositional idiosyncrasies that have led us to our current procedures as individual readers and thinkers. It should also plot those individual stories within a larger institutional narrative of critical activity in the American academy.

On Not (Yet) Getting It

Essay

Sarah Tindal Kareem

I don’t think that in the English language we possess a good vocabulary for talking about the pleasures of readerly discomfort and difficulty: the feeling that one part of ourselves leaps ahead while another part lags behind.

Who Cares?

Essay

Anahid Nersessian

My purpose is to think provisionally about what it would mean to look down the barrel of criticism’s bleakest destinies and say, “who cares?” In what follows, I group the comic indifference of “who cares?” with cognate terms and phrases from other critics, whose work might join Heti’s to build a vocabulary for confronting auguries of obsolescence on something other than their own terms.

Race, Thick and Thin

Essay

Kinohi Nishikawa

There has been a noticeable doubling down on critique in African American literary studies. But postcritique is thriving in less-recognized work in the field: namely, scholarship that is oriented around empirical analysis of textual objects and that is animated by theoretical and practical reflection on archival research.

Hermeneutic Construction

Essay

Julie Orlemanski

Why do we do what we do? Why do we labor to read, and teach students to read, slowly, attentively, philologically, and speculatively? What are literary studies’ practical epistemologies? My hypothesis is that answers to questions like these are sedimented in disciplinary activity.

Double Agency: Knowledge | Performativity

Essay

Rebekah Sheldon

“What does knowledge do?” exposes our impoverished vocabulary for discussing how what appears political inside of a particular interpretation generates political change in the broader world. Sedgwick’s question gives us license to ask: What if we took these expressions literally? What if discourse is a thing whose unfoldings we can modulate both through its meanings and through its materiality? Answering these questions requires a more strenuous examination of what we mean by the material, of how meaning matters. This is my post-critical turn.