Revisiting The Limits of Critique or; Reading and Generosity
by Sara Dahlberg
Introduction
It has been almost a decade since I first came across Rita Felski’s The Limits of Critique (2015). Felski’s book was mentioned as a by-line in the last lecture in a particularly gruelling class on (High) Theory which had taken us on a tour of the most significant critical works from antiquity to the present, but which had focused on twentieth and early twenty-first century critical developments. Though I cannot recall the exact title or theme of this lecture, I remember vaguely that it was very where-do-we-go-from here in tone and content. Having charted the theoretical development of literary theory from the Greeks to the present, with significant focus on the second half to the twentieth-century and the early twenty-first, we were at this point not unaccustomed to uses of the word ‘radical’ or ‘paradigm shift’; those verbose words that are deployed to describe and, to a degree, sacralise and sanctify the work of the structuralists and post-structuralist thinkers and theories. Yet, towards the end of this class, these epithets had lost some of their resonance. Perhaps my enthusiasm had been a casualty of a long, difficult term, or perhaps it was the fact that all the different theories and theorists had begun to resemble one another both in language and in approach. It is this last thing that The Limits of Critique takes issue with.
Back in 2015, and set among these towering figures of twentieth century theory and criticism, Felski can be described as relatively unknown. Relative, again, in relation to giants such as Marx, Butler, or Said. Still, The Limits of Critique sought to position itself amongst these; or rather, it sought to take stock of these. Felski’s text grows out of a feeling that something is rotten in the field of cultural criticism more broadly and in literary criticism in particular. At this point, a little more than a decade into the twenty-first century, Felski declares, criticism is stale and uninteresting. 1 The formerly radical paradigms of deconstruction, the -isms and analyses of the twentieth century, have been institutionalised as the de facto critical methodologies of English departments in the Global North; though criticism still views itself as radical, criticism now is constituted by convention rather than by intervention. As such, Felski’s text is part, “how did we get here” and part “how do we go from here” and serves both as an important retrospective of the critical developments of the twentieth century and as a critique of the same said developments.
Ten years on, it is evident that The Limits of Critique was one of the works that triggered the so-called “Method Wars” in the field of literary studies. In the end, this conflict promoted a reconsideration of the practices and purposes of literary studies that is still underway. This movement is not radical nor even surprising. A glance at historical developments shows that revolutions in critical position(s) happen, and while not frequent, they nonetheless recur with some regularity. In the twentieth century alone, the conservative practices of the Victorians were overhauled by the New Critics, the Structuralists and the (Russian) Formalists, and these were in turn overthrown by the critical paradigms and the ideological critiques of the post-structuralists. I do not wish to push the point that literary history or, for that matter the history of literary criticism, is dialectical and developed by a process of thesis-antithesis-synthesis. And, in the spirit of Felski’s critique, perhaps it is best that I refrain. As we shall see below, Felski’s point is that the issue lies not in the inherent traits and/or value of post-Marxist, Hegelian-inflected critique but in the ease in which literary critics have employed it in the past. Moreover, it is not really my subject here. Indeed, the particulars of who said what on either side of the “Method Wars” is not the purpose of this piece. I have written about it elsewhere, as have others. Indeed, though there is much to criticise about it, John Guillory’s Professing Criticism (2022) does an admirable job accounting for the various causes behind the conflict.2 Here, I want to return to Felski’s argument in The Limits of Critique, the essay by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick which inspired it, and a good example of what Felski and others would now call postcritical reading in Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence (2020). Together, these three texts foreground what I find is the most important, yet still strikingly absent from many academic and literary-critical approaches to literature: the act of reading generously. In reflecting on the project of ark books in general, and the task of reviving The Ark Review in particular, these texts serve as important referents for how we might approach literature from a less pessimistic and sceptical angle than encouraged by the critical paradigms of the paranoid generation(s).
The Limits of Critique and Paranoid Reading
To begin by returning to Felski’s primary argument: When it was first published, The Limits of Critique constituted an intervention in what Felski on the very first page calls “the role of suspicion in literary criticism: its pervasive presence as a mood and method.”3 Here, Felski sets up both the stake and the argument. Grossly simplified, at the time of Felski’s writing, critique had, according to Felski and others, synonymous with what the literary theorist Paul Ricoeur had dubbed “the hermeneutics of suspicion.”4 The reading practices associated with Ricoeur’s suspicious paradigm are “the various techniques of scanning texts for transgressions or resistance.”5 These reading practices are, as Felski points out, the legacy of “the writings Freud, Marx and Nietzsche” and key features of critical projects such as theFrench feminist theory of Cixous or Irigaray, the Marxism of Jameson and Williams, the New Historicism of Greenblatt, the psychoanalytic frameworks of Lacan and the post-colonial ones of Said. and others 6 As Felski describes, these were the kind of critical frameworks used and upheld as standard by the kind of critique practiced in all of the respectable literature departments in the last forty to fifty years.7 In short: this was the critical mood and this shaped the critical rhetoric. 8
As Felski acknowledges many times throughout her text, she is indebted to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s brilliantly titled essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or You’re So Paranoid that You Probably Think This Essay is About You” (2003). Sedgwick’s essay constitutes an early push-back against the paradigms of suspicion which one sees both paraphrased and elaborated on in Felski. The dramatic arc of Sedgwick’s “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading” is simple, yet elegant. It begins with a personal and effective anecdote about a conversation between Sedgwick and a friend at the beginning of the AIDS crisis and about the sense her friend has that the System™ was somehow at fault and/or exacerbated the crisis by withholding care from specific communities or social groups or avoiding meaningful intervention.9 It is a conversation inflected by conspiracy and infected with paranoia. Both are, to a degree, warranted. However, as Sedwick’s friend resignedly remarks, even if she’d be, beyond all reasonable doubt, proven right and the powers that be are at fault, why would it matter: “what would we know that we know then that we don’t already know.”10 This last statement sets the tone of the essay that follows, in which the hermeneutics of suspicion is argued to operate by the mechanisms of paranoia and in which the project of knowledge becomes one of archaeology; of excavation and paranoid affirmation. Tasking herself with querying (or queering) this critical approach, Sedgwick’s text is structured around a discussion of the various “paranoia inflected methodologies” that are both pervasive and particular to their specific moment in time, fuelled by a “’general hypothesis concerning both the process of a false consciousness and the method of deciphering.’”11 All these aspects we might nowadays be inclined to think of as part of the postmodern condition in which the relational structures that hold language together are argued to be arbitrary, lacking an (epistemological) centre and always tethering on the brink of disintegration. It is important to understand that the hermeneutics of suspicion originated in anti-institutional and anti-hegemonic discourse but are now so commonplace and thoroughly institutionalised within the framework of the neoliberal university that its ideological critique has lost most of its force. Like with its radical precursor, Sedgwick’s appeal also comes from theory-formation at the margins: queer studies.
Sedgwick outlines several problems with the paranoid approach. Her essay is, for its difficulty of subject, a relatively accessible read. For those interested, I would recommend it for the ease of its prose and its ability to make legible a complicated matter. Here, I will note the two key points that are most relevant to my essay. The first problem of paranoid reading according to Sedgwick is that it can be argued to be self-affirming or circular. If you approach a text with paranoia or suspicion, or with the sense that the text is concealing or hiding something from you—for example that it reinforces or echoes dominant Power structures or paradigms of knowledge—then your reading will undoubtedly be predicated upon finding evidence of this and you would not be surprised to find out when you do. Put differently, it becomes a type of pre-determined reading operating by confirmation bias, so to speak. Sedgwick’s example here is D. A. Miller’s TheNovel and the Police, which she argues is “entirely circular: everything can be understood as an aspect of the carceral, therefore the carceral is everywhere.”12 Suspicious critique is focused on unmasking and wants to avoid surprise at all costs. As a consequence, this means that there is little to no room for exploration or surprise in the kinds of critique done under the auspicious suspicious paradigm. In and of itself, this is not a problem.
The problem, Sedwick argues, is that this has become the de facto method of critique. Sedwick puts it as follows: “[…] it seems to me a great loss when paranoid inquiry comes to seem entirely coextensive with critical theoretical inquiry rather than being viewed as one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds.13” Felski makes this the cornerstone of her argument too. Indeed, for Sedgwick, and later for Felski, the critical frameworks of suspicion that have appeared and become naturalised and subsequently neutralised as the only ways of doing critique hinder or block other ways of knowing.14 Thus, the most important part of Sedgwick’s essay is the one leading up to her conclusion. Here one finds the encouragement not to abandon the suspicious paradigm but to consider it as one part of a wider array of critical tools and methodologies available to us reiterated. Sedgwick ends her essay with an incentive to think about making use of another kind of reading practice that she calls “reparative reading.”15 Rather than turning to the “infinitely doable and teachable protocols of unveiling,” Sedgwick suggests that one might turn to the “other ways of knowing…that are actually being practiced” often by the same persons who do paranoid reading in the first place but that under the suspicious paradigm are not considered as weighty or important.16
To Sedgiwck, reparative reading is a position that is open and generous. This is not to say that Sedgwick in any way shrinks from acknowledging that reading can be a painful or confrontational experience. Rather, that one is open to the element of discovery, whatever it might be and the fact that this might lead to pleasure.17 Sedgwick argues thus,
to be a reparatively positioned reader, it can seem realistic and necessary to experience surprise. Because there can be terrible surprises, however, there are also good ones. Hope, often a fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organise the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates.18
What is remarkable about Sedgwick’s essay is that not only does it elucidate a problem but also seeks to rectify it. A criticism that is often levelled at the paradigms of deconstruction, most recent by Caroline Levine’s in The Activist Humanist (2023), is that they are so focused on picking apart that they forget to reconstruct and so fail to affect and/or create or lay the groundwork for meaningful or substantial change.19 In contrast, Sedwick’s text, which moves deftly from the deconstruction of the paradigms of deconstruction to the potential for reconstruction buried or unacknowledged within them, manages to lay the groundwork for the work that Felski develops in The Limits of Critique..20
Though it is of course much longer, The Limits of Critique follows a similar dramatic structure to “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.” It begins, like Sedgwick’s text, with what one might call diagnosis—a method which is perhaps the most familiar one of the paranoid paradigms, to identify a nd characterise a problem. The hermeneutics of suspicion is a prevailing critical paradigm which compels one to approach the literary object like a detective in a crime novel approaches a case that needs to be solved. As paranoid critic-police, it is our duty to expose, reveal, and even shame the text and its author for that which it tries to conceal.21
[…] formal devices that systematically block readers from taking words at face value. Suspicion is not merely a matter of content or theme, manifest in the jaundiced perspectives of solipsistic narrators or misanthropic characters. Rather, it is also triggered in readers via the properties of the literary medium. Opening a book, they are confronted with an array of perplexing or contradictory signals that require intensive acts of deciphering. Readers are forced to read against the grain of the text, to question motives and cast around for concealed clues.22
This way of reading requires a “certain disposition” in the reader in which “guardedness rather than openness, aggression rather than submission, irony rather than reverence, exposure rather than tact” become valued characteristics.23 As a consequence, the paranoia that the suspicious paradigm engenders in readers is pervasive. It encourages what Felski describes as “critical detachment” from the literary object.24 Because suspicion is such an all-encompassing paradigm, it has stifled and delegitimised all other ways of doing criticism..25
Positioned as a critique of critique, and as a challenge, The Limits of Critique offers an alternative to the paradigm of paranoid reading.26 Like Sedgwick’s essay, it refuses to stop at diagnosis. Felski both begins and concludes by urging her readers to ask different questions of the literary object. These questions originate in positive affect rather than the negative affect of paranoia and are part of a much gentler, and generous relational paradigm. Felski writes:
What about Love? Or: Where is your theory of attachment?” To ask such questions is not to abandon politics for aesthetics. It is, rather, to contend that both art and politics are also a matter of connecting, composing, creating, coproducing, inventing, imagining, making possible: that neither is reducible to the piercing but one-eyed gaze of critique. 27
By doing this, Felski picks up Sedgwick’s appeal for reparative reading and demonstrates the effective resonance of Sedgwick’s appeal. Felski calls this approach “postcritical reading.”28 The aim of postcritical reading is to “slow down at each step” and “to attend to the words of our fellow actors rather than overriding them—and overwriting them with our own.”29 A decade on, this is now a budding sub-field of literary criticism in and of itself and part of a larger turn to affect in literary studies. As such, Felski, following in the footsteps of Sedgwick, ends The Limits of Critique with an appeal to read in manners different from those that we have been taught.
Suppose a Sentence as an Example of Postcritical Reading
One of the most exemplarily critical exercises of this kind in recent years is Brian Dillon’s Suppose a Sentence (2020). Dillon’s book resembles nothing so much as an eighteenth-century commonplace book. These were notebooks that before printing technology was widely and cheaply available were used as archives or collections of writings that one had gathered and wished to keep or preserve. A collection of scraps, fragments and other writings. In a sense, Suppose a Sentence is the result of a life-time of labour. In the short essay which introduces the collection, Dillon describes how he has spent the last twenty-five years noting down sentences that have captured his eye or invigorated his mind in the back pages of notebooks used for other more directed purposes or projects.30 To briefly describe it: Suppose a Sentence is a collection of twenty-seven sentences which Dillon has selected from amongst these twenty-five years of notebook back pages. These do not necessarily reflect Dillon’s ‘best-of’ or are part of any canon of authors which one should definitely read. The criterion for selection that Dillon imposed on himself was that he chose “sentences that opened under my gaze” and not necessarily those that “do not preserve or project their perfection.”31 The result is an eclectic selection of sentences from literature, criticism, reviews, exhibition catalogues and such miscellanea. The purpose of Suppose a Sentence is not to be instructive. It is not about teaching someone else to write a great sentence. Rather, Dillon notes, it is a book about “all positives, all pleasure, only about good things.”32
A couple of weeks ago, I voiced a personal philosophy of mine to a number of colleagues who were and/or are all literary scholars that one perfect sentence justifies a work. If only one sentence is just right, in that ineffable straight to the gut kind of way, then the rest can be, for all I care, mediocre. This is part of what I mean when I say that I think we should read more generously; to focus on one that makes one tick and think rather than picking holes or thinking about what does work or could have been done better. I do not necessarily mean that we need to be uncritical readers. Neither does Sedgwick nor Felski for that matter. Rather it is that one should be postcritical in the sense that one is open to other ways to read than with suspicion. As such, the governing principle of Dillon’s critical exercise is this: “affinity.”33 It is Felski’s attachment by another name.
The essays that follow in Suppose a Sentence and which all take their departure in a new sentence, are the opposite of paranoid. They are anecdotal yet analytical, personal yet surprisingly universal. Take as exempla Dillon’s three-page mediation on a sentence from George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871). For Dillon, what first draws him in are two strange phrases, “the images which succeed each other like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze” and “’he red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself everywhere like a disease of the retina.”34Here Eliot employs obscure but evocative similes which lends themselves to extended rumination. In his meditation on Eliot’s sentence, Dillon moves effortlessly from a personal anecdote about his student days at UCD, to an expansive and intertextual reflection of what Eliot’s sentence reminds him of. Here we find Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an Opium-Eater, Marcel Proust, Viriginia Woolf and post-Enlightenment medical discourse all jumbled and yoked together simply by the movement of Dillon’s mind.35 While aware of medical discussions concerning eye-diseases and of De Quincey’s drug-fuelled autobiography, Eliot could not possibly have known either Proust or Woolf. As such, Dillon’s leaps of imagination remain just this: leaps. Felski means that one of the core principles of postcritical reading is to allow one’s imagination to roam and “forge links between things that were previously unconnected.”36In a short reflection on a sentence by Gertrude Stein, Dillon offers some thoughts about what “suppose” lends it to. He explains that it means “assume, presume, presuppose” but also and importantly, imagine, posit and believe.”37 Indeed, it is the flights of fancy and leaps of imagination that a well-crafted or beloved sentence enables or makes possible which form the very human centre of of Dillon’s eclectic collection. The point is not to discover or uncover systems of knowledge but to relish in a “[…] combination of oblique self-involvement and utter commitment to the things themselves. For words are also things and things are apt to burst with force and loud report.”38
The brief but startlingly wide-ranging inquiry into the strange word-play that Eliot employs to describe Dorothea’s first impressions of Rome, her inner turmoil and the discrepancy in which the reality of Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon has proven something very much unlike Dorothea’s initial and idealised fantasy constitutes a good example of the rest of Dillon’s text and ties back to the larger argument of this essay. Dillon writes that when he was a naïve twenty-something, this sentence held the “key to all mythologies.”39 Like Casaubon’s uncompleted work, which was supposed to unify all the mythologies in the world and put them into a comprehensible and interrelated system, this sentence would prove the key to Middlemarch, the novel. Yet, as Dillon acknowledges, this was only the naïve ambition of a young man. Dillon acknowledges that joy lies not in unlocking some unifying or underlying meaning. Rather, it is found in the small pleasure of a sentence whose “blindness and insight belong to all of us who convey in [the] capacious and mad sentence.”40 In the spirit of this, Suppose a Sentence does not end on a unifying conclusion. There is no thesis in the work, and nothing which it seeks to prove or disprove. It resists what Sedwick describes as the impulse of suspicious criticism to prove what is already there and thereby avoids becoming a tautology. Rather, it gives itself over to surprise and declares affinity as its central and most significant motivation to read and engage. In this, it is the perfect answer to Felski’s question above about “What’s your theory of attachment?”
Conclusion
In thinking about the project that is ark books in general, and the task of reviving The Ark Review in particular, these texts serve as important referents in the ways in which we as a community can think about and approach literature from a less pessimistic and sceptic angle than the critical paradigms of the paranoia generation(s) who have raised and taught us. ark books was founded as a project in which books would be the entryway into a community of readers. It is an example of the strong förenings-culture that still pervades the Nordics. It is also, as it states on our website, a project with the aim to “provide a space for the exploration of literature.”41 Above all, ark books is a space for enthusiasts. This is the aim of The Ark Review too; to be a place of “hospitality” where the readers’ and the writers’ interests are nurtured. 42As such, revisiting The Limits of Critique, its important precursor in Sedgwick’s work, and its practical enactment in Dillon, seems to me a good place to begin thinking seriously about what criticism has been, and what it could be, both now and in the future.
Notes
1. Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique. (University of Chicago Press, 2006), 16-18.
2. John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organisation of Literary Studies. (University of Chicago Press), 93–102.
3. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 1. The page numbers in the text refer to this work.
4. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 2-3; See also, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. (Duke University Press: Durham, 2003), 125; and Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 20, no. 2, (2004): 228-30.
5. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 3.
6. Ibid., 4; 18-20.
7. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 18-20.
8. Ibid., 21.
9. Ibid., 123.
10. Ibid.
11. Ricoeur qtd. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 125.
12. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 135.
13. Ibid., 126.
14. Ibid., 144; Felski --.
15. Ibid., 145.
16. Ibid., 143–4.
17. Ibid., 144.
18. Ibid., 146.
19. Caroline Levine, The Activist Humanist: Form and Method in the Climate Crisis (Princeton University Press: 2023), 2-5; see also, the entirety of Ch. 1 “Toward an Affirmative Instrumentality.”
20. Love, Heather Love. “Truth and Consequences: On Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” Criticism 52, no. 2, (2010): 235-241.
21. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 30-1, 56-7, 92.
22. Ibid., 42.
23. Ibid., 21.
24. Ibid., 56.
25. Ibid., 17.
26. Ibid., 40.
27. Ibid., 17-18.
28. Ibid.154.
29. Ibid., 158.
30. Brian Dillon, Suppose a Sentence (Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2020), 20–1.
31. Ibid., 25.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., 26-7.
34. Eliot qtd. in Dillon, Suppose a Sentence, 55.
35. Dillon, Suppose a Sentence, 57.
36. Felski, The Limits of Critique, 173.
37. Dillon, Suppose a Sentence, 7.
38. Ibid., 7.
39. Ibid., 60.
40. Ibid., 61.
41. Ark Books, ”About,” accessed April 18, 2026. https://www.arkbooks.dk/about,”
42. Ark Books, ”Renewing the Ark Review: A Manifesto.” accessed April 18, 2026. https://www.arkbooks.dk/ark-review/renewing-the-ark-review-a-manifesto