Contemporary police brutality toward black Americans is the historical context of this poetry book. I thought, at many moments, of a book I’m reading for my C Course, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen. Wouldn’t the varying contexts of these geographically and temporally specific performances be precisely-or at least partially-what makes them interesting to examine together? Context is in fact critical to the type of literary analysis Felski seems to be advocating at many points in her essay, not in opposition to it. She writes in one moment, for example, that “the performance of Macbeth in early seventeenth-century London boasts no special priority or privilege compared to the play’s many afterlives on the stages of New York or New Delhi, Sydney or Singapore” (p. She wavers between arguing that any type of response to a text is valid, and that a certain type of reading-a historically specific one-is insufficient. But I did not buy her argument that using ANT and Latour’s theoretical models would solve the issue of a hierarchy of critical conversations. She argues that we shouldn’t use historical periods as “coffinlike containers” for literary criticism, because literary works can in fact elicit a host of readings and responses that defy temporal demarcations. I do agree with Felski’s claim that overly relying on periodization can be disadvantageous for literary criticism, and English departments in particular. 585), she in fact substitutes one type of interpretation (historical) for a different, theoretical one (actor-network theory). While Felski’s essay at time seems to support Sontag’s notion of the eminence of our actual experiences with a text (“ …no longer a matter of looking through such experiences to the hidden laws that determine them, but of looking squarely at them, in order to investigate the mysteries of what is in plain sight,” p. Ultimately, though, I felt that these essays fundamentally contradict one another. – I’m interested in discussing the relationship between Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” and Felski’s “Context Stinks.” Both of these essays argued, in different ways, for increased attention on a work of art’s actual, apparent qualities, rather than the conversations around the work (in Sontag’s case, conversations of interpretation, and in Felski’s case, conversations of context). Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation” (1966)įor examples of the format and style of pre- and post-class notes, see:.Eve Kosofksky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading” (2003).
Adam Phillips, “Against Self-Criticism” (2015).Dorothy Hale, “Fiction as Restriction” (2007).Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, “Surface Reading: An Introduction” (2009).Lauren Berlant, “’68, or Something” (1994).
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