Hostname: page-component-74656f9884-g96k6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2026-11-09T21:42:39.266Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

Not So Well Attached

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the 'Save PDF' action button.

Faultfinding is the fault that Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique attributes to literary criticism. Faultfinding is also, of course, what Felski's book spends most of its time doing. Had it not abandoned itself so completely to faultfinding, its central insight might have led it to do more interesting things. (The fact that these more interesting things are already being done by much socially engaged criticism is one obvious weakness of her argument, which puffs itself up by expanding its range of targets so as to take in nearly the whole profession and then, sensing a challenge, steps back in mock horror so as to suggest, “No, of course, I didn't mean that!”) As an example of these alternative, nonfaultfinding versions of critique, the book might have tried to explore the reasons the humanities are as susceptible as they are to the holier-than-thou self-righteousness that Felski both accuses and, however reluctantly, also personifies.

Information

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2017