Rita Felski’s postcritical method replaces analysis with unruly enumeration

Evidence

A recent luminary of literary and cultural studies smartly enacts an enterprise of empirical enumeration that evinces this dissonance. The decorated critic Rita Felski argues, in Hooked, on behalf of the complexity of aesthetic attachment and for complexity as the best conclusion at which theoretical inquiry can arrive. Her commitment is to “the irreducible nature of phenomena,” her prescription for criticism is to attend to the complexity and variability of aesthetic experience: of “attachments to artworks … considered for their own sake rather than as effects of a more fundamental reality,” thereby “combatting the intellectualism of recent theory.” While Felski claims that her program “is not a matter of discarding thought in order to embrace a rapturous state of vibrating, throbbing, and wordless gaping,” her method yields something “much messier” than analysis: a catalog of “messy realities” and long streams of unanswered, ungeneralizable, and even rhetorical questions. — Anna Kornbluh, Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late…, 301