American · b. 1956
Rita Felski asked why literary scholars read as though every text were concealing something discreditable, and whether the habit was still earning its keep. The Limits of Critique (2015) named the reflex — suspicious reading, the hermeneutics of suspicion inherited from Marx, Freud and Nietzsche — and argued that it had hardened into a professional style in which detecting hidden ideology counts as insight and being moved by a book counts as naivety. Her alternative, postcritique, does not ask scholars to stop thinking. It asks them to describe what actually happens when people read: recognition, enchantment, shock, knowledge. Uses of Literature (2008) laid out those four categories. Hooked (2020) took up attachment directly, borrowing from Bruno Latour's actor-network theory to explain why particular works catch particular people. The argument made her one of the most contested figures in the discipline, accused by critics of disarming the political work of criticism and credited by others with reopening a conversation that had closed. Felski is a professor at the University of Virginia, edited New Literary History for many years, and has led a large research project on literature and social change in Denmark.