Uses of Literature (review)

Distinguished scholar Rita Felski’s recent book, Uses of Literature, is published in a series called Blackwell Manifestos. Although Felski expresses reluctance to call her book a manifesto, she has drawn some sharply polemical lines in the sand. Indeed, she has outlined a theoretical position that, as some scholars have already begun to note, has relevance for work in the health humanities—although health humanities is not a subject Felski takes up directly.

In Uses of Literature, Felski proposes that it is time for professors of literature to restock their theory-toolboxes. Students and faculty alike, she proposes, have grown weary of “problematizing, interrogating, and subverting” as the “default option” of literary criticism (2). Poems and novels do more for their readers than offer clues to diagnose social ills, and they do less to their readers than entrap or interpellate them into dominant discourses. Fresh strategies for engaging literary texts are called for to overtake the postures of suspicion and even paranoia that we have settled into over the past thirty years.

In accounting for our current literary-critical predicament, Felski rounds up the usual suspects, French theorists Foucault, Derrida, Althusser, and Lacan, who, over time, have influenced generations of academics to adopt an “intellectual politics” that shies away from affirmative values or norms of any kind, lending prestige only to interpretive gestures of subversion and estrangement. How do we make a turn toward more “reparative reading,” in Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s phrase?¹ Such readings rely upon a positive valuation of literature, of the critical enterprise, of reading, and of the very idea of positive valuation per se. All this places Felski on thin academic ice.

To those outside the insular world of academic literary studies, it might come as a surprise that it is daring or provocative to suggest that literary texts are nourishing to readers or that we find benefit of any kind in our fictions. I personally concur with Felski’s assessment that in English and comparative literature departments efforts to explore the rewards or merits of exposure to a poem or novel are commonly assessed on a negative scale that runs from naïve to reactionary. What feels especially welcome in Felski’s approach is that she wants to open up literary texts to experiential, aesthetic, and favorable social value without aligning herself with the conservative or anti-theory wing of the academic field.

“Is it possible,” she asks disarmingly, “to discuss the value of literature without falling into truisms and platitudes, sentimentality and Schwärmerei?” (22). Drawing on a slim but impressive roster of allies that includes Paul Ricoeur and Sedgwick, Felski asks on what basis we can premise positive readings without discarding the crucial lessons of Foucault and company? Felski’s arguments are complex and multivalenced, and it’s not possible to do justice to them all, but at the core of her book, she proposes that the answer to the question of literature’s value lies in the reading experience. If we desist from teaching our students to disparage their own responses to texts as either rudimentary or entirely beside the point, we will discover the crucial work in which these texts engage us. Indeed, she calls her colleagues to a new obligation, “to do justice to how readers respond to the words they encounter” (17). One has only to observe what readers actually do with texts—what complex, imaginative, self-searching and critical experiences reading can instigate—to locate worth. If we look closely, we may discover what she terms “a phenomenology of self-scrutiny” (35). It’s here, in the reader’s consciousness, that literature’s most potent social value may reside.

As literary scholars and teachers, we need to find new ways to access that resource. Rather than encourage students to become detached from and disenchanted by literature, we ought to examine what takes place within the reader’s immersion in a text. What are the positive uses of enchantment? Of recognition? Of literature’s power to shock us? Felski gives us...