Proseminar: From Suspicions to Surfaces: Critique & Post-Critique in the Contemporary…

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This interdisciplinary seminar is designed to introduce central methods and debates in current humanistic scholarship. Many approaches to literary and cultural study have entailed forms of critique. We can briefly describe critique as interpreting texts and objects against the grain: Marxist, psychoanalytic, deconstructive, and Foucaultian theories seek, in a variety of ways, to expose the ideological underpinnings of power or the operations of unconscious desire or the ways in which language itself never quite says what, or all, it seems to say. Recently, some theorists have questioned the assumptions of these methods; they argue that the humanities have tarried too long with what the philosopher Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” The suspicious hermeneut is always on the hunt for concealed meaning and eager to expose the hidden workings of power. Some literary scholars have claimed that the priority given to “symptomatic reading” has come at the cost of attending to the surfaces of texts. Urging “reparative reading,” Eve Sedgwick wondered whether, in a world where violence and power are often happy to do their work in the light, how effective methods of exposure can be. Other thinkers have also wondered about the political efficacy of critique, seeing it as informed by a pessimism that risks reinforcing precisely the structures of power that these modes claimed to unveil. Has critique really “run out of steam,” as Bruno Latour famously claimed? In this course, we will examine these methodological debates in some detail. Readings will include selections from Marx, Freud, Foucault, Jameson, Spivak, Felski, Marcus, Moten, Assad, Ranciere, Latour, among others.