A critical summary of critical reading with Rita Felski

Felski’s article, coming after Warner’s complex piece, was refreshingly succinct and summarised the counter arguments towards critical reading that Warner’s investigated to some extent.  She also enforced Warner’s idea about the difficulty of instilling the practice of critical reading in students without diminishing their enthusiasm and attachment to literature.  By discussing the analytical way academics and their students are trained to see the traps that texts conceal from their readers though, Felski puts up a strong argument for students to continue to use critical reading methods.  At the same time, she also managed to say, more effectively than Warner, why this technique would then add to a text’s value.  According to Felski, critical reading through the close attention it pays to the ‘pitfalls of masterful interpretation’ is a way of respecting a text’s literary merits and skill. This is a very straightforward analysis of what critical reading is supposed to do and something that, however simple, I’m glad Felski highlighted. While I think this applies to our appreciation of texts, it does not necessarily apply to our enjoyment of them. Felski and Warner both make the point that critical and uncritical reading are related, but as we have discussed in class, students regard them as very different methods, with both of them holding greater importance, according to the time of semester. But at the same time, Warner’s theories about critical reading focused more on the different types of reading and ways of recognizing them, than Felski’s brief article.

 And Felski makes another interesting observation; that by recognizing certain literary devices and fallacies in the text, the reader’s job is already done-we, as students need not look for these faults, as the text is already confirming our suspicions regarding it. I also think that Felski makes a relevant point regarding the future of literary study, that critical reading influences. She points out that many students ‘turn away’ from literature as they find the nature of the theories they encounter to be too ‘tongue-tied’ about the importance of literary theories-there is nothing in their studies that justifies their initial enjoyment of a text.  I have already discussed in other blog entries my feelings about how literary theories seem to be always be recycled from older, established models and how this denotes a lack of true creativity or insight into literary ideas. Although Felski does not explicitly say this, I believe another argument of hers could be that literary study could be in danger of becoming outdated or unpopular. This is compounded by Warner’s idea that critical reading needs to first distinguish itself as a definite, tested practice, before any further ideas or conclusions can really be drawn from its practices.

Critical Reading with Michael Warner

The point of Michael Warner’s article, ’’Uncritical Reading’’, it seemed, was to question whether  there is ever any point in trying to develop the practice of critical reading-when what critics deem as ‘uncritical reading’ appears to be the same thing, but perhaps more beneficial.  I was intrigued upon reading it to discover that Warner’s arguments about upholding critical reading, are connected to Donald Pease’s ideas about authorship. In the sense that, that while critical reading is regarded by academics and its upholders as an inherently ‘known’ and understood concept, the way that Warner has explained it emphasizes its connections to  ‘all other works and, ultimately to the idea of art.’ Much like the creative image of authorship is dependent on its being defined by rules and limitations in the author sphere, critical reading, which is all about understanding creative works, is also defined by similar restrictions and rules.  As a result,one of the questions I encountered after this reading was:  Are most literary concepts reliant on their connections to pre-existing codes of literary practice and procedure, in order to survive? A simplistic question  perhaps, but it did make me question the possibility of truly new literary theories ever being able to surface-when all we encounter, it seems, are recycled versions of past edicts and ideas.

  As I mentioned before, I found it interesting how so-called creative practices are always governed by very strict methods of reading and understanding. The article also addresses how other critics respond to the idea of critical reading, with Warner mentioning Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s theory of how critical reading distorts reader’s perception of texts.  The emphasis, she notes, on reading texts in the ‘correct’ critical manner instills in the mind an unnatural wariness and scorn against literary techniques, that are then wasted. To counter these crippling methods of reading, Sedgwick suggests ‘reparative reading’-a practice of reading that seeks to engage with texts in a more attached and sincere manner.  Reparative reading is a mode that is ‘not preoccupied with critical distance towards their interpretative objects’.  Yet, this approach, while conducive to a greater enjoyment of the texts, does not offer its readers much insight into its value, Warner argues. To him, a text’s value is dependent on whether its critical value  is evident upon being read-if a text does not allow itself to be analysed in this way, it is then impossible for it to have any impact on the reader at all.                This point then really brings up the whole point of Warner’s article: Is it possible for readers to censor their emotional bias when reading a text and only view it critically? Moreover, is it beneficial, or right? Warner seems to think so-although he offers examples of texts that seem to overcome these boundaries, they are examples with exceptional circumstances- yet he does agree that in order for critical reading as an approach to work, we must first understand that it is a complex and often unique method.

Is creativity actually dependent on rules? Discussing Donald Pease's ideas

Reading Donald Pease’s article, ’What is an Author’, I felt that it pointed out some unique observations with regards to the popular notion we have of the author and the idea of genius.  With its focus on how the idea of the author originated, and the way Pease then presents his notions about creativity, he also provided us as readers with a lot to reflect on. Pease’s article is not very long, but the issues it addresses are:

How the concept of authorship and genius are in fact controlled by boundaries and set definitions

                             That genius is labeled as such because of its ‘owned labour’.

In explaining the first point, we need to look at Pease’s ideas about how authorship came about. As he maintains, the act of invention began with the expeditions of fifteenth century European explorers into the New World. The world they encountered contained experiences and objects that had no parallel in Europe-in terms of being written about. Words, and later experiences were then invented to try to describe this world. Before this, written experiences were dominated by auctores-an official account of life and its procedures that was upheld by the monarchy. These new, modern accounts equalized the act of writing, and created the author; at the same time imbuing them with cultural and social authority. Pease makes the point though, that while the author was now freer in terms of their expression, their efforts became tied into, in turn, upholding social, economic and political structures of their civilizations.

Although authorship had started out as an inventive, independent means of expression, it soon turned into a collaborative, industry-run endeavour. This contrasts with the classical idea of the author; as an independent, totally self-sufficient source of creativity. This description, Pease argues, better fits the ‘genius’. The genius is labeled such, because of the fact that he owns his own ‘labour’.  His work was undertaken purely for cultural and creative reasons-he did not work with other authors. Therefore, his work was truly his own and nobody else’s. This brings up the question: Is creativity devalued if it has been brought about by collaborative means? And does truly independent creative work actually ever exist? I do not agree with Pease’s ideas here about genius being justifiably different from authorship, on the basis on these questions-to me, even if produced individually, creative work always has traces of other works and influences in it.

After reading Pease’s article, it was fascinating to note how fixed ideas that we have about authorship, creativity and their nature, can be seen as being defined by rules and boundaries in these arenas and discourses.  While their contributions formed the last part of his article, I will only mention them briefly: Barthes and Foucault both had different ideas regarding the complexities of creativity and the problems authorship faced. Barthes’s famous response was that the death of the author’s presence in the text  then enables the reader to really be free, while Foucault insisted on the idea of the ‘fundamental author’. Wherein, the solution to this confusion surrounding the author’s identity and his role, is to enable the reader to connect with this dilemma-and from there, originality would occur.

The first blog entry: Michael Foucault's '' What is an Author?''

In this article by Michael Foucault, the concept of authorship is brought up again. Throughout the course, the theme of the importance of authorship keeps recurring, with its stress on cultural value and commodity. Foucault takes this issue further with his exploration of these ideas. What I found interesting was how he compared the way authorship was previously regarded, with modern day ideas about it and then analysed their differences. To this extent, Foucault explained the idea of authorship as being divided into different factions and concepts. There is the common idea of branding and authorship and then there is the notion of how authorship and common perception of it can open up theoretical discourse.

Reading the article, I felt that Foucault blurred the lines between these two concepts; although his ideas are logical and open up a lot of distinctions in the idea of authorship, the way he discusses them still manages to be convoluted. For instance, he starts his discussion with the idea that the disassociation of an author’s name to a text does not render it untrue or worthless; people’s perception and understanding of writing goes beyond a piece’s author. This is not an irrelevant idea, yet I felt that Foucault then contradicted himself slightly by later stating that the author’s name is the only thing that validates a piece’s authenticity and cultural value. With this point, he explained how the author’s name becomes a sort of seal of approval in theoretical discourse, in modern discussions.

 Here was where the article then went into the differences in the way we consider author status today, as compared to previous eras. Foucault discussed how, previously a text’s connection to an author was not seen as important, more of a convenience for readers; locating the author did not add anything to a reader’s perception of the writing. As Foucault maintained, ‘Literary anonymity was of interest only as a puzzle to be solves, as in our day, literary works are totally dominated by the sovereignty of the author.’ This quote goes some way in explaining the distinction between these different times, but Foucault summarises their contrasts by noting that the status of the author’s name and its reception are controlled by the culture it occupies.

Now that I have defined how these differences are discussed in the article, I want to talk about the second interesting point of the article, which is the way the author’s name lends itself to various causes. To this extent, Foucault explains how author’s names may then act as ‘initiators of discursive practises’. With this point, he maintains that an author can become more than just a name or indicator of a product’s worth or content-rather, the author’s critical background and prominence in their areas already certifies them as authorities on the subject. Therefore, with the examples Foucault uses, Marx and Freud have both developed the ‘endless possibility of discourse’. New ideas and theories in both of their fields are thus possible because, through the theories they themselves formulated, they have created a standard against which different ideas can be tested. This notion and the attention Foucault gave to comparing our different ideas of authorship, is what makes the article both compelling and conflicting, in my opinion.