As Rita Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker put it in the introduction to Critique and Postcritique, "the intellectual or political payoff of interrogating, demystifying, and defamiliarizing is no longer quite so self-evident.
At other times, it might focus on issues of reception, explore philosophical insights gleaned via the process of reading, pose formalist questions of the text, or seek to resolve a "sense of confusion.
"In the long run," she argues, "we should all heed Ricœur’s advice to combine a willingness to suspect with an eagerness to listen; there is no reason why our readings cannot blend analysis and attachment, criticism and love.
[6] Postcritical approaches to texts are often experimental, concerned with discovering new styles, postures, and stances of reading, as well as "testing out new possibilities and intellectual alternatives" to the standard operations of critique.
He claims that it offers practitioners both "positive language and methods from which to make a case for why the humanities matter at a moment when higher education faces threats from forces such a privatization and utilitarianism.
According to the French philosopher Paul Ricœur, the style of thinking associated with critique began with the work of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud.
"[13] Sedgwick called on critics to abandon the "dramas of exposure" that so often motivate textual interpretation, and instead emphasize the various beneficial roles that texts can play within particular readers' lives.
[14] Rita Felski has argued that Sedgwick's account of reparative reading calls for "a stance that looks to a work of art for solace and replenishment rather than viewing it as something to be interrogated and indicted.
He claims that the rise of conspiracy theories and conspiratorial thinking means that the dominant mode of enquiry entailed within the "hermeneutics of suspicion" can no longer be relied on to dismantle power structures.
He suggests that realising the truth of Felski's claim that "aesthetic works have nothing to hide and that there is no ghost in the machine" will allow the field of literary studies to "reacquire the pleasures of criticism.
[28] Contemporary literary critics associated with postcritique include Toril Moi, Rita Felski, Elizabeth S. Anker, Matthew Mullins, Christopher Castiglia, Russ Castronovo, Simon During, Jennifer Fleissner, Eric Hayot, Heather K. Love, John Michael, Ellen Rooney, C. Namwali Serpell, Sharon Marcus, Tobias Skiveren, Colin Davis, Deidre Lynch, Timothy Bewes, John Schad, and Stephen Best.
Felski lists Ludwig Wittgenstein, Stanley Cavell, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Michael Polanyi, Paul Ricœur, Bruno Latour and Jacques Rancière as proto-postcritical figures.
Lewis, George Steiner, Pierre Bayard, Susan Sontag,[30] Manny Farber,[31] Louis Althusser,[21] Walter Benjamin,[21] Alain Badiou,[21] Gilles Deleuze,[21] F.R.
"[35] Robbins also finds "a passive aggressive tone" in the work of many postcritical scholars, along with an "extreme self-satisfaction with their beliefs, attachments, and feelings (which can't be disputed) and with the comfortable perch in the world where divine providence has seen fit to place them.
"[38] Likewise, Merve Emre has claimed that Rita Felski and other scholars associated with postcritique overstate the dangers and limitations of paranoid reading, based on a misunderstanding of Sedgwick's argument.
[41] Similarly, Dan Weiskopf suggests that Latour's model is not "much of an advance" on critique, and points out that it is "a little hard to square this slightly wonky scientism with her call for a renaissance of humanistic values in criticism.
"[42] For Weiskopf, Actor-network theory is an example of the kind of theoretical framework that "run[s] counter to the impulse that drives criticism in the first place, which is to record the private, idiosyncratic act of figuring out for oneself what one thinks and feels about an artwork.
"[45] Finally, since critique is often synonymous with critical theory, many scholars have warned against a too-hasty retreat from various theoretical frameworks designed for the analysis of literature and culture.