Critical shmitical

Reading: Warner’s “Uncritical Reading” from Polemic: Critical or Uncritical (2004)

Warner persuasively problematises the academy’s unwillingness to embrace forms of reading other than “critical reading”: a hazy (mission-statement-esque) and thorny construct anyway.  (Sedgwick cites “paranoid suspicion” as the “dominant mode” on the critical landscape.)

I think we must question this anxiety in literary criticism to be too attached, which seems to stem from a view that getting too close might subsume our views to that of the text.  That it might hinder the forming of a parallel critical creation, a recolouring of a text, the coating of it in a publishable critical mindset. 

One danger of this is solipsistic distanciation, in the sense of the distant critic coming up with an answer to “solve” the text, and cherry picking bits of text that back up his ambitious rationale, and removing himself from so much content that might undercut his claim.  This could involve getting the text to bend to the pre-determined interpretation.  What comes first?  Perhaps it is naive of me to think that a text should precede interpretation.

Cavallo and Chartier’s idea of reading “through” a text is infinitely more appealing than distanciation, and it speaks to the insides of literature, which is surely where professors of literature want to be.  Yet perhaps this is more time-consuming and too “soft” because the inside of a text may be an overwhelming place where the critic is a subordinate, and might get stuck.  This place may not be as lofty or cutting edge as zipping around the outskirts of the text, so perhaps reading “through” a text is untenable in a manic competitive academic climate.

I affirm Warner’s argument that the academy needs to be open to types of reading other than "critical reading".  I do not think that what academics dub as uncritical reading practices (self-identification, immersion, daydream, sentimentality) are dead-ends in and of themselves.  I cannot believe that affect is solely a hindrance.  In any case, it can never be taken out of the equation entirely.  (Unless no reading takes place but rather, Bayard’s “active non-reading”, but that is taking distanciation to the extreme.)  Affect can stir a critical response.  Though I concede this may be the long route to critical reading; a circumlocution via affect.  Still, affect may inject particular force into one critical avenue.  What about consciously “loosing” oneself in the text?

(Affect is how I formed my essay idea, "the coming into discipline of the self", for the Brontës unit.  The disciplined self had been at the back of my mind since the outset of the course, when I reread Jane Eyre, and, in all of the uncritical ways of reading that we are advised against, such as self-identification, immersion and daydream, I found myself mapping and embedding my own character into that of Jane and of Charlotte.  I was captivated by, and flattered myself with identification with, the complex and enthralling disciplined self: small, pale and irregular, and yet a heroine, although I read this within a secular light.) 

I agree with Harold Bloom that the self should not be banished from the critical equation.  (We have to make do, in any case, with the fact that the self is compulsory; the critical self as reader-writer, if we sidestep Barthes, Derrida, Bayard and so many others for a minute.)  The self should simply be aware of the “cultural matrix” in which it is oriented, and of the ethical frame in which it has been inculcated.  Like Warner, I affirm Mahmood’s point that the ethical informs the critical.  Just as the self informs the critical, the ethical informs the self.  Warner makes the excellent point that we need to explore these other territories we currently see as uncritical.

Vanessa Smith mentioned in a Brontës seminar that there has been an “ethical turn” in recent criticism.  She said that some critics make judgments about characters as if they were people.  I think, moreover, that we should not see the critic as a “character”.  We should not see the critic as one character, as the critic, constituted by a hazy across-the-board negative potential, but in terms of the indefinite article?  One critic is not the same as another critic.  This is not so as to elevate the ego of the critic as persona-individual, but perhaps as part of a plural “critic-function”, which is getting to what Foucault talks about in “What Is an Author”.