Critique and Postcritique

Contents: Introduction. I. Countertraditions of Critique: 1. "Nothing Is Hidden": From Confusion to Clarity; or, Wittgenstein in Critique/Toril Moi. 2. The Temptations: Donna Haraway, Feminist Objectivity, and the Problem of Critique/Heather Love. 3. The Eighteenth-Century Origins of Critique/Simon During. II. Styles of Reading: 4. Romancing the Real: Bruno Latour, Ian McEwan, and Postcritical Monism/Jennifer L. Fleissner. 5. Symptomatic Reading Is a Problem of Form/Ellen Rooney. 6. A Heap of Cliché/C. Namwali Serpell. 7. Why We Love Coetzee; or, The Childhood of Jesus and the Funhouse of Critique/Elizabeth S. Anker. III. Affects, Politics, Institutions: 8. Hope for Critique?/Christopher Castiglia. 9. What Are the Politics of Critique? The Function of Criticism at a Different Time/Russ Castronovo.10. Tragedy and Translation: A Future for Critique in a Secular Age/John Michael. 11. Then and Now/Eric Hayot. Bibliography. Index.

This book attempts to evaluate the structural, methodological, and political potential and limitations of critique. The contributors assess the merits of the postcritical turn while exploring a range of alternate methods and critical orientations. They look at how critique-based theory has shaped the development of the novel; they examine Donna Haraway's feminist epistemology and objectivity; look at the positive outcomes of critique; highlight the difference between reading as method and critique as genre; and question critique's efficacy at attending to the affective dimensions of experience. In these and other essays this volume outlines the state of contemporary literary criticism and shows how this can be updated to include the intellectual and political challenges of the present. (jacket)