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brynnaverse · 7 years

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Last Night’s Dream

Foreward:

No one likes hearing about other people’s dreams, I know that. I remember hearing Noel Fielding once say something like, “listening to other people’s dreams is dreadfully dull.” But I can’t find the source for that quote, so I may be wrong. Therefore, I don’t expect you to read this. It’s written badly anyway.

Preface:

I have apocalyptic dreams all of the time. They’re usually extremely vivid. Pieces of these dreams sometimes sneak into my consciousness and it will take me half the day to realize they’re fake dream-memories and not memories of actual events. Typically, in these apocalyptic dreams I either (a) accept my fate relatively quickly in a wave of calmness or (b) find the group of people I trust, who I can hold up with and survive the impending doom[*]. You would think that my brain would register these biological hallucinations as nightmares, but 90% of the time, it doesn’t. Ninety-percent of the time dream-self is either completely at peace with the situation or is excited to bring my important people together to solve the puzzles/ problems at hand until my eyes decide to wake up. When my brain has decided to survive Armageddon, I wake up inspired. I can solve anything, even if I don’t become the leader of the team, I know that I’m important to survival (not the survival of mankind, to say, but the survival of my team...they’re the important ones anyway).

So here we go. From this point forward I will be writing in first person: I, Me, Mine, blah blah blah, are all going to be in reference to the dream-self. All footnotes are in reference to my real life, or day-self.

The Dream:

I was living in California[**]. I ran a small business managing performing artists[***] while spending the other half of my time learning about marketing and performing contortion. I was making a decent living, I wasn’t worried about bills and taking courses to help further my career came across as affordable. My life was entirely ran from my laptop, my external hard-drive, & my phone. The world was in a relatively troubled state. There were horrific events happening around the globe, but none of them directly effected me or my happy little life on the fringe. Ignorance is bliss. My dad was in the Air Force[****], if I needed to worry about anything, he would tell me. My dad is also the sort of person who believes in independence, problem solving, adventure, and working things out on your own: therefore, he’s likely to withhold information if HIS interpretation of said information will irrationally scare you and hold you back from your own freedom.

I was reading about a cruise. It was a small networking cruise that was intended to be packed with people in the variety-show industry. There would be performances, seminars, socials, and other general conference things. The focus was to get professional performers to present themselves better, on the back-end, to improve their footing in their desired market. I wanted to go. I felt like I needed to go! I had never been on a cruise, and this was the ideal opportunity to brush up on my skills as a manager.

With the world in its current state, I called my dad and asked him if it was the appropriate time to go on a cruise. He had mentioned a few countries that weren’t ideal to visit & that things on the American front were a little rocky, but that it should be okay. So I enrolled.

When I called to schedule my booking the lady on the phone told me that the ‘Performers & Networking Retreat’ was on a larger ship than the flyers proclaimed and it was due to the fact that we would be sharing the boat with an ‘Adult Christian Retreat’. She assured me that both conferences were on opposite sides of the ship and it was unlikely that the two groups would mingle. I didn’t care. I wasn’t even sure why she thought it was so important to go on about. I took a mental note of it and registered for the conference.

The weather was beautiful the day the ship left. I was a little intimidated going on this networking retreat by myself. Usually at conferences I have one of the performers that I manage with me and simply speak on their behalf, and I’ve never presented my performer-self in such an established environment. I packed lightly, we would only be on the water for 48-hours and the dress code said casual. Thus, my packing consisted of 2 clean black tank tops, a pair of clean jeans, structured sandals, my laptop, my external hard drive, a notebook, a pen, a water-proof disposable camera, & a crappy little Nokia phone that I would be able to keep signal and be used while at sea. I left my real phone on land. I kept my clothes and major electronics in my backpack in my room and carried the other things with me in a hip-satchel as I wandered throughout the ship taking in the full retreat experience.

For a long time, everything was running smoothly. The social events were ran a lot like raging college parties with a speakeasy vibe. You needed passwords and handshakes to get into certain areas and the only way to get those was to meet the right people and ask the right questions. You were forced to make friends, otherwise you were basically excluded from the conference. Each of the event spaces was set up like a performer's wonderland. There were a few traditional stages with lush velvet curtains. Some were small lit platforms where people could gather around and watch the showcase. Others were improvised stages set up on the backs of broken down trucks in warehouse caverns in the heart of the ship. There was beautiful graffiti, sparkling lights, small private bars in hidden rooms, and mazes of color, each area was its own rabbit-hole where you had to gather information from various people and collect your own unique-clique of industry-individuals. It was getting dark, the weather was turning gloomy and the waters a little choppy.

I ended up in a section furnished with classic cars that had been gutted and modified to create seating areas, bathroom stalls, bars; even flipped over and covered in a layer of acrylic to become a stage of gears, engines, and tubing. The group I had bonded with was made up of magicians mostly, a few people who owned venues, and a sprinkling of actors with a small awkward array of skills. There were one or two agents that I wanted to talk to and a manager who was an ancient juggler who really made it big back in the day, but wasn’t interested in being on stage anymore. There was a magician on stage. He kept complaining that the waters were too rough and that it was ruining all of his tricks. I assumed that he was just too drunk to perform them well. Every once in awhile a new person would wander in, look appalled, and storm off. The magicians rotated. I was happy to have finally found some sort of routine. As much as I loved the rabbit holes, it was nice to be somewhere comfortable for a little while.

I wandered off through a maze, a beautiful magician was leading me by the hand swearing that he needed to show me something. We ended up on the deck of the ship. The water was black, the sky thick with clouds, and a thin cold mist filled the air. I liked the way it felt when I breathed it in, but the way the boat was rocking hurt my ankles. I caught glimpses of stars through breaks in the clouds. The planes flew low into the city. You could tell the airlines by the colors of the wings. We were close enough to port that you could still see a line of lights and buildings, but it was too far away to make out definite shapes. I noticed a few other boats in the water. Big freight ships slowly bobbing along next to giant military vessels. They made our cruise ship seem insignificant. I guess it was romantic. We didn’t talk much, just listened to the thunder rolling in and kissed hard like we were really in love even though we barely knew each other [*****].

---I don’t have much memory of the next part of this dream, knowing the way that I dream it was probably sexy stuff but it’s not integral to the story---

Struggling to remember puzzles and passwords, I was determined to find my way back to the stage of deconstructed cars. The events were dying down as the night went on and less and less people were out and about. Everyone I saw seemed to have sour looks on their faces like they didn’t want to be there. It wasn’t the vibrant retreat that I’d left... but it was. I stumbled through a curtain onto the acrylic stage floor, the tides turning for the worst. Standing there was a woman in a black pant suit swaying back and forth holding a book. The audience, though a mere 20 or 30 people, was mostly made up of people in white tank-tops and grungy jeans, a few of them wearing blazers nodding along to the string of hate flowing from the woman’s mouth. I noticed the clique I had created sitting high on top of the roof of a car in the back of the room looking-on with confusion.

The woman was going on about how, “magic is all lies and deceit given to man by the Devil” preaching how, “God would be ashamed if he knew what we were congregating over.” and that “we would be cleansed by fire and brimstone if we did not beg for forgiveness.” This went on continuously as more and more nodders trickled into the space. After a while of sitting at the back of the stage I stood up and asked her, “If you’re so offended by all of this, why are you here?” She looked back at me with hatred in her eyes as if to say, “it’s the only thing I’ve ever known.” but her voice shrieked with profanities as she had her minions drag me off stage.

My emotion at this point, confused. I didn’t have much time to question the situation. A loud crash that echoed through the ship. The colorful lights that once lit the rabbit holes became a violent, fluorescent white blinking between red. I squirmed out of the clammy hands of the security guards and ran through the maze that my temporary love had shown me. The space was small, filled with quick turns and dead ends so I didn’t worry about anyone following me, not many other people would fit. Especially not the nodders.

I returned to the deck of the ship. There was a scattering of people emerging from their rooms, obviously performers awakened from a deep sleep, still coated in their glitter and hairspray. There were also a few people in white tank-tops and grungy jeans adorned in their thrift-store blazers. Everyone looked out into the ocean. A hundred yards away, if you looked really hard, you could see the black curved top and periscope of a U-boat. It was facing the wrong way, the tides had turned it around, it had rammed into the side of one of the giant barges that seemed so peaceful before. The percussive waves from the collision began to reach the cruise ship and we rocked at mercy to the sea. I thought to myself, “Maybe the freight ship is okay, maybe everyone is okay. It wasn’t a head on collision and the barge is so much bigger than the U-boat that it wasn’t enough force to have any real effect. Maybe! the water absorbed most of the shock and everything is fine!” I wound my disposable camera and took a picture placing the strap around my wrist.

It was raining pretty heavily at this point and lightening was littering the sky. I asked a few people if they had seen more of the situation and if they could explain it to me. They said there was a loud rumble and everything shook before the U-boat ever reached the surface, other people mentioned that there was a smaller military boat behind the barge & that they collided as a result of the U-boat’s interference. I had noticed that there were more ships in the water now than there were earlier. Everyone was talking at this point. Every story was different. The planes were getting lower.

I ran to a stairwell and called my dad.

Out of breath and covered in rain I opened with, “Hey! so, I know it’s late but I have a few questions.”

Concerned he responded, “Is everything Okay?”

I was becoming worried, “I don’t know....but you may know more about the situation than I do. I don’t know if it’s made it to the news yet, but a U-boat has just crashed into a barge off the coast...”

“It hasn’t made the news yet, but I knew about it, I just got called into duty”

“What?! You’re never called into duty?”

“We don’t really have time to talk about this.”

My father quickly explained to me that war was on the horizon and that tensions were so high that almost any catalyst would be seen as a direct threat and initiate an international war. Though the military knew that it was a large earthquake that caused the U-boat to veer off course they would announce it to the public as aggression from international powers leaving them with no choice but to use nuclear action. He said that he had been “On Hold” from the Air Force for deployment. That he knew he would probably be leaving soon, but that no one knew when.

“How could you not tell me this?!” I screamed into the Nokia brick. People on the cruise ship and transitioned from gossipy-confusion to actual panic.

“I didn’t think it would happen so soon! I’ve been on hold before and nothing has happened, it wasn’t worth worrying about. You going on a cruise wasn’t going to change any of that.”

Ocean water was sloshing onto the lower decks, people were running around scrambling and screaming. I’d never been on a cruise, but I’d been on a lot of ships. For the most part, they were pretty self correcting. At this point our best option was to ride the waves until we made it through the storm.

Dad asked, “Are you okay? I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, please say something.”

I hadn’t noticed my silence, eventually I responded, “Yeah, I’m okay, I understand.”

Someone grabbed my hand and pulled me up-stairs to the captain’s deck [******].

Dad yelled, “Bryn! are you okay?!”

“I think so, I don’t really know what’s going on anymore.”

I looked out over the edge and saw smaller ships get swallowed by larger waves. It had seemed that the port had deployed every boat it had, like everyone was fleeing the city.

Dad barked, “Stay on the line as long as you can, I need to know you’re okay!”

“I’m trying!” I quickly responded out of breath, as the few people on this deck began adorning life jackets. I snapped pictures of the city burning in the distance. I looked up, most of the rain had stopped but lightning was booming all around us. It struck one of the wings of a plane which came barreling into the ocean slicing into the sea like a steaming butter knife made of screams.

I tried to stay calm, but I was scared, I was legitimately was scared. This was real! The world was going to end with a huge storm opening for nuclear holocaust and there I was on the top floor of a ship with a bunch of strangers wearing life preservers like they were playing dress-up. Our ship jerked as Captain Alex [*******] tried to stay on top of the waves. People shouted information at me to relay to my Dad, he was our only contact to the outside world at this point, he was our best bet at being saved.

We had been turned around so many times that the end of the barge was swinging toward the bow of our ship. The sea was saturated with vessels and chunks of metal.

A metallic boom echoed through the ship, water violently drowned the lower decks.

---At this point, I was terrified, I wanted to hope that I would survive this, but I thought about how useless survival would have been. My notes, laptop hard-drive, my professional life was in my room. My room was filled with water. Even if I survived I would have nothing, the life I had spent so long building was over. It was hard to accept that. All I had was a crappy Nokia phone, my ID, and a waterproof disposable camera. Livid at myself I thought, “What the fuck is wrong with you? This isn’t how the world functions anymore! All of these things you feel like you need to carry with you are archaic and useless in modern society?! Why can’t you just function like a real person?!”---

Dad was still on the line, “What was that?! Where are you?!”

You could taste the salt of the sea in the air. The ocean was creeping closer to our peaked oasis, Captain Alex knew that our time was up. More planes crashed into the ocean in the distance angering the sea. The group panted and panicked as we inflated the life raft. Everything was slippery and nothing was working.

I cried back onto the phone, “I have to go! I know you and Mom don’t talk but if you don’t hear back from me you need to call her and tell her that I love her-”

A huge wave toppled over the inflating dingy, swallowing my plastic brick and pulling my arm down into the cold void of the angry ocean. I was stuck to something. I gripped the side of the dingy with my right arm and felt the water rush up my nose. After a good deal of struggling, I was pulled up onto the raft by the other people who were on the captain’s deck. That was it, the ocean was destroying everything in sight. I snapped pictures of everything. Debris in the water, planes smashing into the water, explosions off of ships in the distance. I took a picture of the cold, scared group with my camera and began crying. The angry preacher lady was there, the fight completely wiped out of her, the fear I read in her face before radiated throughout her entire body. I didn’t recognize the others. My anxious brain ran through the situation, “Could it have happened differently? What did I do wrong? Was this the end?” A Southwest plane nose-dived into the water less than 50 yards away sending an aftershock that the little raft would never survive... I was scared... legitimately and genuinely scared.

I woke up.

[*]: We all know that the latter is ridiculous, everyone thinks that they’re special enough to collect the perfect team of miraculous misfits who can survive Armageddon. Let’s be real, the likelihood of that is EXTREMELY improbable; no one is a superhero. If the ground fell off the Earth everyone would die unless they were in a plane & then they would die when they ran out of gas; the longest lasting survivors would be the handful of individuals in space, but they too would (most likely) run out of resources and too, meet their demise.

[**] My mother is extremely superstitious, I was raised being taught that California is going to fall off. My mother, though primarily atheist and extremely skeptical, genuinely believes that if SHE goes to California it will fall off due to her presence. She is scared that I have inherited this curse and that if I move there, it will fall off... because of me.

[***] This is what I currently do for a living, though I plan on moving to California, I don’t believe that I will be able to support myself on my current business structure and will require another part-time job to supplement my income.

[****] My dad is actually in the Air Force.

[*****] I love these moments. I’m really into short term, hyper-condensed relationships where both people can really experience that ideal of ‘love’. Everyone involved is 100% a part of the moment and truly wants to be with the other forever. When everyone knows that there are definite factors that will terminate the actual possibility of this never-ending love, but disregard that knowledge because of the moment. “It’s only forever. Not long at all.” My friend once called them “Weekend Marriages”. I’ve adopted this term, even though they rarely happen on weekends for me.

[******] I’d like to say it was the hot magician from earlier in the dream, but I don’t remember. #dreamlogic

[*******] I don’t know why I knew the name of the captain

#dream #end of the world #apocolypse #nightmare #ocean

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thecatwhosleepsin · 7 years

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[Book Review] Sad Girls

Sad Girls by Lang Leav

Genres: Fiction, Young Adult, Contemporary

Date Published: May 30, 2017

Publisher: Andrews McMeel Publishing

Pages: 320

Rating: 2/5

Youth is wasted on the young.

I can’t say I had high expectations for this book.

Over the stretch of time that has lapsed between her last and latest publication, my senior writing peers have taken up the responsibility of removing Lang Leav from the immeasurably high pedestal in my heart. I fell in love with her first book, you see. Love and Misadventures became my holy grail in poetry when I read it when it was first published. Her points when it came to love and loss was so acute, she put stars in my eyes.

after that, I bought more of her books as soon as they were published (despite the obvious hole it left in my wallet). The magic of her words slowly faded. I know where her words were coming from, but I’m not that sure if she was writing for herself now. That’s how I felt after Lullabies, Memories, and The Universe of Us but I brushed the thought the instant it came to mind and thought,

Nonsense. I’m reading too much into it. All writers struggle to write for themselves to justify the truth they know and want to impart.

But deep inside I still asked myself,

Is her poetry the only poetry I know?

And it was true, I never knew the classics. Name one famous dead poet and I wouldn’t even have a clue.

But let’s put aside the matter of my doubts regarding her credibility as a poet, let’s talk about her new book.

In the dying embers and blackened twigs of a ravaged forest, who could distinguish where the first spark was lit? Only the arsonist knows the exact location on which the first match was struck.

It is Audrey Field’s final weeks in school when she shatters the already precarious nature of her life and of everyone she knows with a single, repulsive lie. It leads to a dangerous chain of events -the death of her melancholic classmate Ana, the start of her breathless panic attacks, her best friend Candela throwing her life away, the spark of an ill-timed romance with Ana’s enigmatic boyfriend Rad, and the revelation of a deadly secret.

“I think it’s because we romanticize the past. We give it more than it deserves.”

Sad Girls revolves around writers, the mass effect of uttering a thoughtless lie, the value of friendships, the meaning of true love, freedom, finding one’s place in the world, heartbreaks, (wasting) second chances, dreams, uncovering false appearances and the significance of the truth -which brings me to my admission that I didn’t quite like this one.

Audrey is one of the biggest reasons. You could imagine my incredulity upon finding out what kind of horrible lie that caused, not only hers, but everyone’s lives to fall apart. INCEST. Between her classmate and her OWN father. No lie is more disgusting and I couldn’t believe she said it, so casually and I quote, earnestly to her best friends (one of which was Ana’s close friend), just for the heck of it and didn’t even bother to take it back right then and there. No sane person would ever do that, and I felt that the remorse and guilt that attacked her until the end of the novel wasn’t enough punishment for her ridiculous tongue.

There were handful of times where her words went far out of line. She also didn’t endeavor to completely mend her rocky relationship with her mother. She surreptitiously sneaked around her boyfriend’s back to hung out with the boyfriend of the sad girl whose demise was brought upon her revolting lie. She wasn’t the least honest about her obligated relationship with Duck to him, to everyone and to herself.

There were also a lot of loose ends to tie up. Like the ambiguity of Candela’s relationship with Ana.

Candela:

“I know what you’re implying about me and Ana, and do you know what? It’s none of your fucking business.”

Ana (about Rad):

I know he thinks he’s in love. But he has no idea what love is. Not yet anyway.

So, it’s safe to assume that Ana wasn’t really in love with Rad, and Candela saw her as more than a sister figure from the way she got into a bad crowd, resorted to drugs and became highly sensitive when anyone brought her up. Seeing how intense her grief is, affection for her deceased close friend is definitely possible since Candela’s first fling was also a female, and maybe, Ana also reciprocated her feelings since she had a picture of her in the locket she immensely treasured (enough to be used as a bookmark). Most likely Rad had suspected it, knew it wasn’t him in her locket all along and only looked inside for confirmation and to appease Audrey’s suggestion.

If Duck’s man periods level on extremes (pitiful Audrey putting up with every single one of it), he becomes downright terrifying in post breakups, especially when he’s drunk. He was blinded by love (obsession?) for Audrey, and it was almost touching until he raged in front of her window, his chivalry evaporated into thin air.

I wanted to see more of his character development from when Audrey broke up with him because no matter what, even when there were several moments where I adored his tenderness and sweetness, his lasting impression was a psycho (from his bipolar mood swings), even after he found a new girl and quoted to Audrey,

“Everything happens for a reason.”

Also, WAS I THE ONLY ONE WHO ABSOLUTELY ADORED GABE? I mean, he was the normal one out of all Audrey’s love interests. Optimistic and funny, he was a ball of sunshine and he deeply respected her boundaries as well, completely unassuming and only acting upon his feelings as long as Audrey allowed it. Bittersweetly, he chose to let her go, wishing for nothing but her happiness.

“I don’t think I can do the friend thing. Not with you.”

HE WAS SUCH A KEEPER. AUDREY, YOU IDIOT. YOU MISSED THE ROAD TRIP OF YOUR LIFE.

Rad, on the other hand, was your typical enigmatic hottie with heterochromatic eyes which only intensified the mystery that veiled around him. Witty and well-acquainted with the woes of a writer, he charmed his way to Audrey’s broken, guilt-ridden heart.

From the start, I was always skeptical about him. Initially, I thought that his refusal to talk about anything regarding Ana, his easygoing attitude and his desire to frequently spend time with Audrey were commonplace actions of one who was grieving the death of his love. I believed he was trying to move on from her by ignoring the fact, but it was so much more. He was trying to bury the guilt —through writing, finding someone new, ripping a suicide note from his girlfriend’s diary and keeping it, maybe to convince himself that she wanted the accident.

He was the most cowardly of all the characters in Sad Girls, I concluded. The only answer I could piece together from his inhumane decisions was that his mental health degraded during his relationship with suicidal Ana. It’s toxicity retained in himself and jumbled up the meaning of what’s right and wrong. I mean, after unintentionally killing your own lover and staging it as suicide, guilt was bound to eat you up and squeeze the truth from you. But his conscience didn’t work or maybe, it was long dead anyway. He had no decency, even continuing his life, pursuing his aspirations and a girl who was obviously taken. (She matched his standards —sad, lonely and broken.)

Though the book ended on a really disturbing note, I could say Audrey and Rad were perfect for each other, running away from the grave sins they had committed to start over a clean slate, neglecting their conscience, fulfilling their dreams like the past was just nothing and Audrey leaving her doting friends in the dark.

Two wolves bound to devour each other alive.

The liar and the killer. Bonnie and Clyde. Harley and Joker. Bring on the titles.

And before I come into a conclusion, let me express my rage: WHY DID MY CINNAMON ROLL FREDDY HAVE TO DIE? WHY DID SWEET SWEET LUCY HAVE TO BE MISERABLE? THEY’RE THE MOST DESERVING COUPLE WHEN IT COMES TO HAPPINESS, WHY BREAK THEM APART? The truth will come out eventually. No need to destroy the most lovable (and cheesiest) couple in the book.

Sheesh. My gut was right when it was feeling uneasy as I went through Lucy’s odd mini-speech:

“But he was my first real boyfriend. I don’t have anyone else to compare him with. What if he isn’t the love of my life and I’m just sticking with him because I’ve never known anything else?”

There you go, Lucy.

In Sad Girls, Lang Leav skirts through sensitive subjects with the aloofness and subtlety of a freight train. But I greatly appreciated her raw tribute to writers.

“But I don’t think all writers are sad. It’s the other way around —all sad people write. It’s a form of catharsis, a way of working through things that feel unresolved, like undoing a knot. People who are prone to sadness are more likely to pick up a pen.”

As a debut novel, it wasn't so much of an okay shot, but I would’ve loved it more if she imposed the writing style she uses when composing prose. Despondency, Dead Butterflies, Rogue Planets, The Professor and Three Questions were some of my favorites. Years back when I first read them, I believed I was given a glimpse of how she would write her novel in the near future and I was considerably excited. Now, it’s not that she disappointed me. It’s just that somehow I just knew it would come to this and it’s okay. I’m a patient girl. She will overcome herself, especially when everyone is given chances and has the right to use them (excluding Audrey and Rad though, unless if they did it the right way).

I am always rooting for my childhood favorite and I hope to see her considerably grow in the next years to come. Meanwhile, let me say:

My youth (and money) is wasted on this book.

This has been a quite long review, and I thank anyone who has spent time to read my thoughts!

And one last thing, Ana’s notion of love, though maybe solid truth to others, will continue to haunt me:

The truth is, everyone wants to believe they’re in love but no one really is. So to all the girls out there who are stuck between two minds about some stupid crush, I have news for you. If you have to wonder, if you have to question what you feel, then deep down you actually don’t give a shit. As for the rest of you who don’t get it, welcome to the club. If you know what it’s like to want someone so much you would kill for them. If you know what it’s like to feel someone so deep under your skin you would sacrifice everything to protect them —even if it screws up your own moral compass so you can’t see right from wrong. If you’re like me, then let me leave you with this: That’s what love is. Don’t let them tell you any different. Don’t tell yourself otherwise.

#lang leav #sad girls #book review #contemporary #fiction #romance #mental illness #young adult

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bluewatsons · 5 years

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Ronan McDonald, Critique and anti-critique, 32 Textual Practice 365 (2018)

Is the literary academic destined to become less like Sherlock Holmes and more like Dr Watson? Rita Felski likens those caught in the mood of ‘critique’ to a detective. They decode the literary work for clues and hidden meanings, unmasking criminal complicity with oppressive norms and exposing the nefarious ideologies of patriarchy or imperialism. Yet, Holmes’s brilliance as a detective makes him somewhat lopsided as a human being. He is an obsessively deep reader, hyper-rational, distant and good at decoding, but less so at intimacy, fellow-feeling, attachment. The benevolent but somewhat plodding Watson, by contrast, can form emotional connections and relationships. Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015) calls for literature professors to turn away from clever suspicion and cynical knowingness towards an affirmative and affective mood that encounters literary texts with trust and attachment. ‘Rather than looking behind the text – for its hidden causes, determining conditions, and noxious motives’, she urges, ‘we might place ourselves in front of the text, reflecting on what it unfurls, calls forth, makes possible’.11 Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Reviewed in Textual Practice, 30.4 (2016), pp. 787–90.View all notes Felski, following Bruno Latour, insists on the enmeshment of both the critic and the artwork in networks of meaning-making. These networks produce our sense of literary value, that which drives most of us to study literature in the first place. Teachers and students who study English should approach a text with an open hand rather than a closed fist, a laurel rather than a scalpel. For Felski, the love of literature has been a love that, all too often in an academic field devoted to rigour and radicalism, dare not speak its name.

Critique tends to unravel values and to expose their contingencies. ‘The Zeus of Critique rules absolutely, to be sure, but over a desert’, claims Latour in his famous essay ‘Why Has Critique Run out of Steam?’ (sounding a bit Olympian himself here).22 Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (2004), pp. 225–48, 239.View all notes The turn to ‘post-critique’ marks in part an urge to connect literary studies and the humanities to a language of positive value. A follow-up collection of essays edited by Felski and Elizabeth S. Anker declares that we are ‘currently in the midst of a recalibration of thought and practice whose consequences are difficult to predict’.33 Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, in Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (eds.), Critique and Postcritique (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 1.View all notes Yet, there are strong dissenting voices who suggest that forsaking critique is buckling to reactionary pressure and threatens to strip the discipline of its ethical and political purpose. In a waspish contribution to the PMLA forum on Felski’s book, Bruce Robbins accuses her of putting the discipline through a ‘corporate restructuring’ and even suggests that there would have been less opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq ‘if Felski and her allies were to get their wish’.44 Bruce Robbins, ‘Not So Well Attached’, PMLA, 132.2 (2017), pp. 371–76, 372.View all notes (If only the structuralists had done a better job in clearing out the Leavisites, perhaps we might have avoided Trump and Brexit too.)

If some English professors are turning more to the ‘literary’ than the ‘critical’ side of ‘Lit Crit’, there may be good intellectual and political reasons for it. While understandably many in the profession deplore giving up the role of Batman to play Robin, those who advance post-critique are not trembling liberal humanists or anti-‘Theory’ reactionaries, getting their chance at last to reinstate courses on ‘Great Books’. It is no coincidence that queer theory, schooled in the dismantling of normativity, would be amongst the first to twist the spirit of suspicion back onto itself. Cardinal in this regard is of course Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s classic 2003 essay on ‘paranoid reading’, a sophisticated analysis of how the sclerotic grooves of suspicion and paranoia, in inhibiting shock and hope, can stymie the affective, epistemological and political possibilities of criticism.55 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 123–51.View all notes Other figures with backgrounds in feminism, object-orientated ontology, actor network theory and deconstruction have developed the sense of weariness and fatigue with the dominance of a tone and attitude of cynicism and skepticism.

There are institutional reasons too. As Andrew Hadfield argued in this journal in 2014, the calls in the 1980s for literary studies to expand into an all-embracing political criticism ‘actually made subjects like English inchoate, unfocussed, arrogant, and over-ambitious in their aims and understanding of what they could achieve’.66 Andrew Hadfield, ‘Turning Point: The Wheel Has Come Full Circle’, Textual Practice, 28.1 (2014), pp. 1–8, 5.View all notes In this respect, the renewed openness to the ‘literary’ is actually a sharpening of disciplinary focus and indeed social effect, not because it is a capitulation to a managerial university and neo-liberal ideology but rather because it affords the discipline better equipment to defend its province. Felksi claims:

Literary studies is currently facing a legitimation crisis, thanks to a sadly depleted language of value that leaves us struggling to find reasons why students should care about Beowulf or Baudelaire. Why is literature worth bothering with? In recent decades, such questions have often been waved away as idealistic or ideological, thanks to the sway of an endemically skeptical mind-set. In the best-case scenario, novels and plays and poems get some respect, but on purely tautological grounds: as critical thinkers, we value literature because it engages in critique! (5)

It is precisely this stripping away of evaluative language that has left literary studies shivering on the heath and exposed to the cold blasts of instrumentalism and accountability. In reanimating a language of positive good for literature, post-criticism can contribute not just to the sense of the worth of the discipline and its subject matter, but to its articulation of that purpose to external audiences. Relatedly, there has been a surge in explicit treatment of ‘value’ as a category of analysis in literary studies in recent years.77 For example Cambridge University Press has published a number of ‘value of’ titles designed to encourage affirmative articulations of the point and purpose of a subject. They include Peter Boxall, The Value of the Novel (2015) and my edited collection The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas (2015).View all notes

The critical spirit seeks to perforate disciplinary boundaries, exposing their constructedness and artificiality. Yet, removing the distinct sorts of knowledge that a discipline like literary studies offers makes it hard to protect from institutionalised streamlining and rationalisation: the deforming pressure placed upon subjects like English to model themselves on the sciences. Arguing for literary studies as having an identity and discrete object pushes against this force, preserving the discipline from bureaucratic equivalence. Moreover, from a student’s point of view, if there is no distinction between literature and other cultural products, why not enrol in media studies? If inculcating critical thought is the main goal of the humanities (and everyone on campus, from radical sociology lecturer to the vice chancellor, tends to pay obeisance to ‘critical thinking’), why not gain that skill through a vocational degree?

It is no longer common, as it was in the 1980s, to hold the word ‘literature’ between ideological safety tongs, a loaded and old-fashioned word that should always be ironised by scare quotes. In diverse hands, from Jacques Rancière to Derek Attridge, the literary has made a forceful return to literary studies.88 Jacques Rancière, Politique de la literature (Paris: Galilée, 2007); Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).View all notes But its return tends more to the event than the object, with an emphasis on the sorts of cultural and experiential effects that literary reading enacts. Literary value does not lie in a mummified canon with its eternal verities, but rather emerges through an affective encounter with alternative possibilities, an intimacy with alterity that is incipiently political. Attridge holds that ‘the particular value of literature (which it shares with the other arts at their best) lies in that event whereby closed thoughts, feelings and ways of behaving and perceiving, are opened up to that which they have excluded’.99 Derek Attridge, ‘Literary Experience and the Value of Criticism’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 249–62, 254–55.View all notes

Of course, the idea that the literary work enacts its own struggle with history and ideology, before the knowing critic comes along to helpfully point out the contradictions, is hardly new. The broad-brush caricature of critique that Felski needs for her polemic inevitably underplays the complexities and multiplicities of actual critical work. Political-minded critics have often worked with an attitude of attachment, rather than irony, reading with as well as against the grain of an artwork. These readers (and they include a figure like Frederic Jameson, often a target for post-critical advocates) tease out the instability and multivocality of texts not to expose their ideological collusion or self-contradiction but to see social critique anticipated in the work itself. This tradition of political reading, perhaps best represented by Theodor Adorno, demands a merging of critic with text, not the assertion of distance and difference.

The ebbing of the hermeneutic of suspicion is, therefore, exaggerated both by Felski and her detractors, not least because critique has always been contaminated with affirmative moments, just as post-critique is shot through with the negation it often ostensibly disavows. So critique has not run out of steam. But it may have to share the line with other trains. Felski sees it coexisting with other moods and approaches, as ‘one possible path, rather than the manifest destiny of literary studies’ (9). A wholly non-critical literary studies is impossible to conceive, but it would surely be a shudder-fest, the sloppy fandom that Felski’s detractors imagine. Or, worse, it would turn literary studies into a grimly positivist exercise, involving arid fact gathering and bloodless annotation. Neither approach would help define a disciplinary purpose: that would need some critical grit, some engagement with normative discourse, beyond mere taste or appreciation.

Happily, therefore, the post-critical moment is not a putsch but an extension of the franchise. Felski insists that she is redescribing rather than refuting, decentring rather than demolishing. There is nothing parricidal going on here, no reason for the critical minded to get upset. One reason presumably why she emphasises her project as an expansion rather than an overthrow is to escape the glaring accusation that could be levelled at her project: that hers is simply a critique of critique. That she is guilty precisely of that which she decries. And indeed, Felski’s polemic, like Latour’s, does often have a bracing sense of J’accuse. Even as she seeks to disarm critique of its tonal and attitudinal weaponry, it is hard not to notice that she herself is doing quite a bit of ‘debunking’, ‘exposing’ and ‘demystifying’. If symptomatic reading seeks to reveal hidden structures and assumptions in a text or literary work, then this is precisely what Felski does to critique, exposing its ‘repertoire of stories, similes, tropes, verbal gambits and rhetorical ploys’ (7). Like an assiduous critic, she exposes the tone and mood of the ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’, running her finger around its discursive shape in a metacommentary that assumes the anterior perspective, that gets behind rather than in front. Even as they urge us to own our attachments and to disavow our irony, post-critique manifestos cannot but deploy an attitude of distantiation and debunking.

This seeming bind is inevitable – indeed at the end of her book, Felski tacitly admits the contradiction, claiming that she has sought, ‘through shadings of style and tone’, to lean ‘on the side of criticism rather than critique’ (192). Yet, Felski’s argument, even if it leads her into a performative contradiction, is all the better for its robust suspicion. Her point is that critique has investments and compacts that it represses, an evaluative attitude or disposition behind its knowing ironies. If critique has hidden affects, then, conversely, post-critique deploys the suspicious methods that it ostensibly decries. Critique and credulity are often twisted in the same braid, just as the critical and the creative often interfuse in both literary works and commentary upon them.

Critique is often leery about values and judgments, especially aesthetic ones. Values are there to be ‘interrogated’. Where do they come from? Whose power interests are served by them? Critique produces negation after negation, like a child continually responding ‘why?’ to every answer. The turn against critique emerges in part from exasperation at this tourniquet around evaluative language, including that of literary appreciation. However, even if, as Felski attests, the critical spirit has an ethos that manifests as ‘antinormative normativity: skepticism as dogma’, it does still have an ethos (9). Highly critical movements like Marxism, feminism or post-colonialism clearly have avowed and overt anti-oppressive politics. Though such political and ethical projects deploy critique as a cardinal tool, they also need the vigilance demanded when putting acid in a bucket or handling a Rottweiler. The critical spirit hungers for the anterior, seeks to get outside convention and unveil delusion. All normativity and value judgements are subject to exposure and unmasking by a critical eye, including those held by the watcher. The philosopher who most thought through this dilemma was Nietzsche. Paul Ricoeur, who gave us the influential handle the ‘hermeneutics of suspicion’, identified Nietzsche as well as Marx and Freud as the great triumvirate who founded the ‘school of suspicion’.1010 Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 32.View all notes However, as Benjamin Noys points out, Nietzsche is often omitted by those advocating anti-critique ‘because although he can be read as a “master of suspicion” his orientation to an affirmative thinking provides one of the major sources of anti-critique as well’.1111 Benjamin Noys, ‘Skimming the Surface: Critiquing Anti-Critique’, Journal for Cultural Research, 21.4 (2017), pp. 295–308, 297.View all notes Noys might have pointed out, conversely, that it is Nietzsche who explores the philosophical path of negation most exhaustively. If the great theorist of nihilism reaches an affirmative, anti-critical conclusion, it is only by thinking through to its end the unchecked power of critique as the solvent of human value. Nietzsche spearheaded the genealogical method, but he saw that the will-to-truth would destroy the edifice of value and that it led to a recursive spiral into nihilism.

The most sophisticated thinkers of critique after Nietzsche – figures like Adorno, Foucault and Butler – have variously sought to grapple with versions of this dilemma, even as they recognised the pressing need to think the negative. What and where are the normative bases on which critical judgments are made? How can those judgments avoid reproducing contaminated abstractions from the given truth regimes? For Judith Butler, the solution to ‘these tears in the fabric of our epistemological web’ is precisely more intense critical thinking: ‘the very debate in which the strong normative view wars with critical theory may produce precisely that form of discursive impasse from which the necessity and urgency of critique emerges’.1212 Judith Butler, ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, in David Ingram (ed.), The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy (London: Basil Blackwell, 2002), p. 215.View all notes Nonetheless, if critique starts out as being that which silences and shames cultural value, exposing its historical and social contingency, it can easily throw the basis of its own ethical premises into doubt too. Recent lamentations that post-structuralist theory tends towards evaluative enervation, too suspicious of foundation or normativity to muster a defence of constructive politics, pick up something of the winnowing of ethical judgment in the scorching glare of critique.

‘Surface Reading’: Sharon Marcus and Stephen M. Best’s handle for the way we read now has gained much traction in the post-critical era.1313 Sharon Marcus and Stephen M. Best, ‘Surface Reading’, Representations 108.1 (2009), pp. 1–21. Further references in the text.View all notes According to Marcus and Best, interpretation has shifted to observation, a search for latent meanings in texts has given way to a concern with their manifest and obvious features. The shift is evident, they claim, in a range of reading practices, including formalism and empiricism, the growth in book history and the rise of cognitive criticism. However, as I have argued elsewhere, the phrase ‘surface criticism’ covers over a fundamental division in the contemporary critical scene.1414 ‘Rónán McDonald, ‘After Suspicion: Surface, Method, Value’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 235–48.View all notes It is not a new division, but it is one that has emerged anew with the ebbing of critique, like a previously covered fork in the road. I refer to the division between scientific and phenomenological methods, those dedicated to describing material objects and those geared to capturing experiential events or values.

As everyone knows, literary studies since its inception struggled for acceptance as a serious academic discipline, shaking off its belle-lettristic associations in various empirical or rigorous methodologies. One of the appeals of critique, one of the reasons for its success in the final decades of the twentieth century, is that it had the advantage, in institutional terms of allying intellectual tough-mindedness with ethical purpose, combining fashionable dissidence with soi-disant critical rigour, and thus by and large, passed under the methodological watchtowers of the modern university. The detachment and distance cultivated in critique imparted a sense of solid knowledge acquisition, a dispassionate and serious attitude that chimed with the protocols of the modern university. In other words, symptomatic criticism unified literary studies, offering both methodological rigour through hermeneutics and ethical seriousness through ideological critique. It tended towards convergent solutions and determinist causes to the meaning of a text.

The subsiding of the hermeneutic of suspicion has ended this compact and exposed anew the old split in the discipline between the hard facts that underlie philology and scholarship, as a form of Wissenschaft, and the more numinous and capricious dimension of literary criticism. The concept of ‘surface reading’ seeks to bring together the descriptive aspects of both sides, as if the affirmative dimension of post-critique could participate in a new empiricism. It cannot. Their distinction between ‘surface as materiality’ and ‘surface as an affective and ethical stance’ is too yawning (9,10). The literary phenomenologist, describing the experience of reading John Ashberry’s Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, is engaged in a fundamentally different task to a scholar researching transnational reading distribution in early modern Europe. These projects may both eschew critique, and perhaps both feel freed up in some way by post-symptomatic moment in literary studies, but they are engaged in fundamentally different sorts of knowledge acquisition, even different ideas about what knowledge is.

They do not need to be antagonistic, but we should hesitate before trying to unify them. The differences are of greater significance than that between surface and depth or between description and interpretation. The book history or brain mapping project is likely to sail more easily in institutional terms, explicable as it is to historians, sociologists and scientists. It offers a clear addition to knowledge, its outcomes and methodology are based on the falsifiable claims of empirical research and offer little scandal. I highlight these differences not to set the two approaches against one another or to claim one as more or less legitimate, but rather to identify the institutional difficulties that a non-positivist literary criticism is likely to face. These challenges need to be acknowledged in the wake of symptomatic reading insofar as critique was better equipped to elbow itself some room in scientific company. Whether affective or responsive criticism can do so in a university setting is more questionable. This criticism is not about providing solutions, whether the detective work of symptomatic reading or the factual explanations of scientific criticism, but rather about producing new meanings, about creating divergent values rather than convergent knowledge.

Is there a home in literary studies for that sort of approach? Is there room in university research for the cultivation of varieties of enchantment? Ultimately, the success of the post-critical turn in literary studies will be based on the efficacy of the new mood and method in critical writing (I hesitate to call it ‘research’). Felski et al have shown us the limits of writing against something, precisely by writing against critique. But the institutional challenges of making affective attachment part of the pedagogy and research of academic literary studies remain significant. Yes, there are individual scholars of stature, including those identified here, who have attempted to engage affirmatively with literature beyond the frames and tones of critique. But does the current institutionalisation of literary studies afford room for emerging scholars to write in this vein? Could writing about the effects and affects of one’s reading experience be a legitimate ‘research outcome’? Is this a research project that funding bodies are likely to support with the same enthusiasm as, say, a collaborative investigation into literary sociology or digital technology?

It might seem that this question has already been answered: Felksi has received a widely celebrated $4.2 m grant from the Danish National Research Foundation to pursue her work in the use of literature. Felski’s brand of skilful metacommentary will help build bridges between academic interests and a public who, unlike literature professors, have not had their literary loves trained out of them. But her success does not mean that research funding bodies, with their penchant for clear methodology and rational outcomes, are likely to start funding projects on literary enchantment, unless such experiences have a strongly scientific or empirical dimension. My hunch is that if projects on literary affect or aesthetic attachment attract grants, it will be when they are framed as scientific and instrumental research projects, within such fields as neurocriticism or the medical humanities. Subjective, responsive and evaluative criticism will continue to find its major home outside the university, on the internet and in small magazines.

Felski’s answer to the post-critical challenge, as already noted, is to deploy Latourian Actor Network Theory.1515 Felski co-edited a special issue of New Literary History on Latour and the Humanities in 2016. Vol 47, nos. 2–3.View all notes ANT is dedicated to breaking down divisions between the observer and observed, inside and outside, natural and artificial, science and humanities. The assemblages, affinities and networks of the social produce different institutions and ideologies where knowledge takes place. ANT parades its modesty, its recognition of the complex ecologies of knowledge within which it is enmeshed, and above all the relationality and mutuality of the actors within any system.

Yet, literary studies faces institutional challenges that require it to assert the distinctiveness of the literature, notwithstanding its involvement in the social and normative networks that make it visible. If the close, dense, affective, attached and responsive criticism that is celebrated by post-critique is to flower, then literary studies needs to delineate and defend the discrete mode of knowing that the reading experience offers. This knowing may be formed by networks of complex actors, it may have a social as well as singular side. But it also needs to stake out what it specifically offers to the humanities. Literary studies has been tremendously interactive with other disciplines, and has forged many links with the sciences in recent years. But in order to collaborate, it also needs to cohere. The idea that literature offers a profound and complex form of knowing, distinct from scientific knowledge, evokes the old two cultures debate that marked cultural wars from Coleridge and Bentham to Leavis and Snow. But the lack of a distinctive language of literary value during the theory years means that literary studies was ill-equipped to articulate cultural, as opposed to critical, value against the neo-liberal inflating of STEM subjects (and the implied downgrading of the humanities) within the modern university.

The reanimation of the ‘literary’ in the wake of critique may point a way for the humanities to articulate a non-positive value without collapsing into reflexive negativity and suspicion. In some cases, this project has deployed other intellectual tools, the harnessing of philosophical thinkers who can pressure positivism, or find ways of putting into a critical language the idea familiar from the poetry of Wallace Stevens, that the world is known through imaginative apprehension.1616 Charles Altieri, a key figure in thinking about value in literary study, has written about Steven from this perspective. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Towards a Phenomenology of Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). His recent work has deployed Wittgenstein to think about literary and aesthetic values, Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).View all notes It is too soon to say for sure whether literary studies will accommodate the experiential approach that some post-critical advocates have been seeking, one open to subjective responses such as recognition, enchantment and shock, that will allow a richer variety of aesthetic experiences or allow such experiences as part of the remit of the field. Yet, if Anthony Cascardi is right in claiming that literary values are ‘proxies for the value of the humanities more generally’, then there does need to be an articulation of literary value as a distinct discursive space.1717 Anthony Cascardi, ‘The Value of Criticism and the Project of Modernism’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 13–26, 14.View all notes The subsidence of critique has allowed a concern with literary aesthetics to reappear, albeit rinsed with historical and theoretical awareness. Engaging with the literary, therefore, could also allow the values of the humanities to assert themselves outside the sciences, to choose their agendas and to demonstrate that part of their value resides, in circular form, in the recognition and generation of cultural and phenomenal good.

Notes

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), p. 12. Hereafter cited parenthetically. Reviewed in Textual Practice, 30.4 (2016), pp. 787–90.

Bruno Latour, ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern’, Critical Inquiry, 30.2 (2004), pp. 225–48, 239.

Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski, ‘Introduction’, in Elzabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski (eds.), Critique and Postcritique (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2017), 1.

Bruce Robbins, ‘Not So Well Attached’, PMLA, 132.2 (2017), pp. 371–76, 372.

Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy and Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), pp. 123–51.

Andrew Hadfield, ‘Turning Point: The Wheel Has Come Full Circle’, Textual Practice, 28.1 (2014), pp. 1–8, 5.

For example Cambridge University Press has published a number of ‘value of�� titles designed to encourage affirmative articulations of the point and purpose of a subject. They include Peter Boxall, The Value of the Novel (2015) and my edited collection The Values of Literary Studies: Critical Institutions, Scholarly Agendas (2015).

Jacques Rancière, Politique de la literature (Paris: Galilée, 2007); Derek Attridge, The Singularity of Literature (London and New York: Routledge, 2004).

Derek Attridge, ‘Literary Experience and the Value of Criticism’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 249–62, 254–55.

Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 32.

Benjamin Noys, ‘Skimming the Surface: Critiquing Anti-Critique’, Journal for Cultural Research, 21.4 (2017), pp. 295–308, 297.

Judith Butler, ‘What Is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, in David Ingram (ed.), The Political: Readings in Continental Philosophy (London: Basil Blackwell, 2002), p. 215.

Sharon Marcus and Stephen M. Best, ‘Surface Reading’, Representations 108.1 (2009), pp. 1–21. Further references in the text.

‘Rónán McDonald, ‘After Suspicion: Surface, Method, Value’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 235–48.

Felski co-edited a special issue of New Literary History on Latour and the Humanities in 2016. Vol 47, nos. 2–3.

Charles Altieri, a key figure in thinking about value in literary study, has written about Steven from this perspective. Wallace Stevens and the Demands of Modernity: Towards a Phenomenology of Value (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013). His recent work has deployed Wittgenstein to think about literary and aesthetic values, Reckoning with Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015).

Anthony Cascardi, ‘The Value of Criticism and the Project of Modernism’, in McDonald (ed.), The Values of Literary Studies, pp. 13–26, 14.

#literature #critique #critique of critique #experience #post-critical #post-structuralism #academic reading #academia

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