A Study Of Rita Felski’s Literature Criticism

This paper studies the critical theory of Rita Felski from the perspective of The Limits of Critique.Felski is an literary theorist in the United States,whose critical theory,has aroused wide discussion in the United States and gradually attracted domestic attention.This paper first introduces the life and academic achievements of Felski,as well as the research status at home and abroad.Then the etymology of the word criticism and the meaning evolution of the concept in literary history are sorted out."Post-critical" originates from criticism,and the arrangement of the concept of critique is helpful to understand the context of "post-critical",which is the basis of the discussion in Felski’s The Limits of Critique starting from Paul Ricoeur’s "hermeneutics of suspicion",Felski points out that doubt has become the default emotion in literary studies.This kind of doubt is not only reflected in the critique,but also reflected in the reflection on the critique,that is,"critique of critique".Both the critique and the critique of critique,in Felski’s view,are sceptical and unfruitful,showing "a vicious circle: the more sceptical we are of the criticism,the more we are attracted to its style".Felski divides the current critical reading into two kinds.One is "digging down",that is,deep reading,which is often related to freudian and marxist theories.One is "standing back",or surface reading,which is often associated with postmodern theory.But Felski points out that both "digging down" and "standing back" take place in this mood of suspicion,with critics interrogating the text like detectives.Based on this,Felski Outlines the five characteristics of critique.Through the discussion of these five characteristics,Felski points out the contradiction in modern criticism,a mode of binary opposition.At the same time,she lists the ideas of other theorists who want to break through this criticism,especially the new aestheticism,but she thinks it’s still a binary mode of thinking,and the problem will always be there.Therefore,she adopted Latour’s theory of actor-network theory(ANT),and believed that these originally regarded as opposite subjects,such as text,context and readers,were actually actors,and jointly constructed the network of meaning in the interaction of mutual influence.The text is not a passive intermediate,but an actor who can feedback the connotation.The context is no longer limited to the moment when the text was born in history,but with the length of time,the transtemporality of the text is also explained clearly.Emotion and understanding also coexist in the process of criticism.This way of criticism is exactly the "post-critical reading" advocated by Felski,and the reflection on criticism is never to deny the criticism,but to consider more possibilities of it.