How we Think

Truth and method

Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

Thank you for downloading the collected poems. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have search hundreds times for their favorite readings like this the collected poems, but end up in malicious downloads. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they juggled with some infectious virus inside their laptop. the collected poems is available in our digital library an online access to it is set as public so you can get it instantly. Our books collection spans in multiple countries, allowing you to get the most less latency time to download any of our books like this one. Kindly say, the the collected poems is universally compatible with any devices to read.

The Collected Poems

The hermeneutics of suspicion is a term coined by Paul Ricoeur to describe the practice of reading texts against the grain to expose their repressed or hidden meanings. This essay examines the distinctive features of such a hermeneutics as they have shaped literary theory and criticism in recent decades. Suspicious reading, it proposes, is not only an intellectual exercise in demystification, but also a critical style and scholarly sensibility that offers specific pleasures. These pleasures include the aesthetic and ethical satisfactions of fashioning detectivefictionstyle plots. The literary critic, like the detective, interprets clues, establishes causal connections, and identifies a guilty party: namely, the literary work accused of whitewashing or concealing social oppression. Deconstructionist critics like Shoshana Felman seek to expose the dangers of such a suspicious hermeneutics but remain thoroughly entangled in the very method they seek to repudiate. The goal of the essay, then, is not to critique and be suspicious of suspicion. Rather, it seeks to take the hermeneutics of suspicion seriously and to understand why it has proved so attractive to contemporary scholars. At the same time, it also suggests that the presentday ubiquity and predictability of this critical method makes its claims to intellectual novelty or political boldness ever harder to sustain. Recent discussions of affect (Radway 1997; Thrailkill 2007) have emphasized literary criticism’s distrust of emotion, but there is little acknowledgment of criticism’s own affective registers. How are method and mood, argument and attitude intertwined? The typical Introduction to Criticism and Theory course in the United States or United Kingdom classifies its content according to intellectual tenets or political convictions (deconDownloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf by guest on 14 May 2019 216 Poetics Today 32:2 struction, queer theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies). Yet styles of academic reading are affective as well as cognitive, inviting us to adopt attitudes of trust, impatience, reverence, or wariness toward the texts we read. Academic criticism contains its own structures of preevaluation (Smith 1995), encouraging readers to adopt a certain disposition and to approach texts in a specific frame of mind. In presentday literary studies, this frame of mind is frequently one of wariness, vigilance, and distrust. Drawing on Suzanne Keen’s invitation to think of genre as an “affectproducing template,” I apply this idea to contemporary academic genres of suspicious reading. What are the distinctive formal devices and rhetorical strategies of a hermeneutic of suspicion? And how do these features help establish an affectladen as well as analytic relation to texts? Suspicious reading, I argue, is not just an intellectual exercise in demystification but also a distinctive style and sensibility with its own specific pleasures.1 The hermeneutics of suspicion is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur, who famously identified Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the founders of a “school of suspicion,” the primary architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that is driven by a desire to demystify, an adamant refusal to take words at face value. In spite of their many differences, Ricoeur (1970: 32) argues, these thinkers share a common commitment to reducing “the illusions and lies of consciousness.” What drives such a hermeneutic is the conviction that appearances are deceptive, that texts do not gracefully relinquish their meanings, that manifest content shrouds darker, more unpalatable truths. It is a mode of interpretation that adopts a distrustful attitude toward texts in order to draw out meanings or implications that are not intended and that remain inaccessible to their authors as well as to ordinary readers. In his argument, Ricoeur develops a key distinction between a hermeneutics of trust, which is driven by a sense of reverence and goes deeper into the text in search of revelation, and a hermeneutics of suspicion, which adopts an adversarial sensibility to probe for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings (ibid.: 9). The difference between these approaches, we might say, is the difference between unveiling and unmasking. Ricoeur’s model of a suspicious hermeneutics offers a valuable reference point for assessing the recent history of literary studies in the wake of several waves of literary and cultural criticism that have encouraged styles of vigilant and mistrustful reading. Here we can point to the influence of structuralist and poststructuralist modes of thought, with their builtin 1. This essay focuses on the suspicious dimensions of contemporary styles of criticism. It does not address the related issue of how works of literature encourage suspicion in readers via the use of techniques such as unreliable narrators. Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf by guest on 14 May 2019 Felski • Suspicious Minds 217 wariness of commonsense or everyday meaning; the impact of an identity politics of race, gender, and sexuality that encouraged readings of canonical texts against the grain in order to expose their hidden biases; the influence of Marxism via the models of symptomatic reading developed by Macherey (1975), Jameson (1981), and others, and, finally, the takenforgranted nature of Freudian schemata, which made it easy for scholars to transfer such schemata to the study of literature and culture via analogies such as the political unconscious. The hermeneutics of suspicion, in other words, is a term applicable to a diverse range of critical frameworks. While psychoanalytical feminism, New Historicism, and postcolonial criticism, to name just a few current approaches, are characterized by obvious differences in focus and method, they share the conviction that the most rigorous reading is one that is performed against the grain, that the primary rationale for reading a text is to critique it by underscoring what it does not know and cannot understand. The influence of such approaches, moreover, reaches well beyond the confines of literature departments; when anthropologists unmask the covert imperialist convictions of their predecessors, when sociologists read the texts of Weber, Marx, or Durkheim against the grain, when legal scholars challenge the purported neutrality of the law to lay bare its hidden agendas, they all subscribe to a style of interpretation driven by a spirit of disenchantment. To be sure, not all literary theory manifests an adversarial and distrustful attitude to the literary work. Indeed, quite a few voices—often those associated with deconstruction or with recent Lévinasinspired work on the ethics of reading—extol the alterity of literary texts, testifying to their radical singularity and enigmatic strangeness. And yet suspicion is not so much dissipated in such arguments as it is displaced. We do not need to be suspicious of the text, in other words, because it is already doing the work of suspicion for us, because it is engaged in the negative work of subverting the selfevident, challenging the commonplace, relentlessly questioning idées fixes and idées recus. The literary text thus matches and exceeds the critic’s own vigilance, performing a metacommentary on the traps of interpretation, a knowing anticipation and exposure of all possible hermeneutic blunders. Critic and work are bound together in an alliance of heightened mistrust visàvis commonsensical forms of language and thought (Felski 2009). While the term hermeneutics of suspicion with its obligatory footnote to Ricoeur, is often invoked in current literary debates, the features of such a hermeneutics have, until recently, received attention mainly from scholars working in religious studies, intellectual history, legal theory, and related fields (Stewart 1989; Thiele 1991; Bermann 2001; Josselson 2004; Farmer Downloaded from https://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf by guest on 14 May 2019 218 Poetics Today 32:2 2007). In the current climate of retrospection, however, as critics reflect on the intellectual legacy of recent decades and reassess methods of reading that have come to seem stale and unsurprising, the hermeneutics of suspicion is shifting from a mode of analysis to an object of analysis within literary studies. A style of interpretation that once seemed entirely selfevident and selfexplanatory now finds itself squirming under the spotlight (Sedgwick 1997; Latour 2004; Strowick 2005; Best and Marcus 2009; Felski 2009; Love 2010). Why do so many scholars feel impelled to unmask and demystify the works that they read? What sustains their certainty that a text is withholding some vital information, that they must authorize their commentary by highlighting what is concealed, repressed, unsaid? Such convictions owe much, as I have noted, to contemporary styles of intellectual politics that, following the reception of Althusser, Lacan, Derrida, Foucault and others, have largely relinquished affirmative or utopian projects of worldbuilding in favor of the rhetoric of subversion, estrangement, and critique. The U.S. reception of French theory, François Cusset (2008: 83) observes, helped to encourage a “suspicion without limits” in which scholars increasingly edged away from any espousal of positive values or norms, preferring to present themselves as “champions of subversion.” The pervasiveness of this mindset also testifies to the increasing pressures of professionalization and the scramble to shore up academic authority: the hermeneutics of suspicion, after all, assigns a unique depth of understanding to the trained reader or theorist, equipped to see through the illusions in which others are immersed. According to John Farrell (2006: 4), this radical 

On suspicious minds.

Paul Muldoon's “Madoc: A Mystery” remains his longest poem and most thorough vision of an alternative history. This article argues that Muldoon's poem works to stage not only a visionary history of America but also, via the uneasy relations that develop between its two main characters (semi-fictionalised versions of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey), a dramatisation of the conflict that obtains between competing modes of historical understanding. Muldoon's Coleridge and Southey represent stances that may be usefully regarded as parallel to positions advanced in the famous debate regarding interpretation between Hans-Georg Gadamer and Jurgen Habermas, thinkers whose names appear in the poem itself. To read the poem in light of this connection between its fantastical transatlantic history and the history of critical theory allows a reading of Muldoon's treatment of both literary and political histories as secondary to the work's playful exploration of struggles between modes of historical interpre...

Tradition and critique in Paul Muldoon's “Madoc: A Mystery”

Another Apocalypse: Digital Ecologies and Late Pynchon

Ecology and the Environment

In a number of essays published between 1988 and 1993, David Foster Wallace presented a vision of contemporary American fiction that broke in some important regards from then-typical definitions of...

/pdf/introduction-american-fiction-after-postmodernism-5c5t9xglwy.pdf

Introduction: American Fiction after Postmodernism

The rise of the New Sincerity in contemporary American fiction has largely been read on terms provided by a handful of early proponents. This article contends that more complex formulations of the ...

Christopher K. Coffman

Papers

Tradition and critique in Paul Muldoon's “Madoc: A Mystery”

Another Apocalypse: Digital Ecologies and Late Pynchon

Ecology and the Environment

Introduction: American Fiction after Postmodernism

Feverish fictions: William T. Vollmann and American literary history after postmodernism