Critique, Tweaked

Do readers, especially professional ones, ever get to be done feeling guilty? Three of the books under review here—Merve Emre's Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017), Vera Tobin's Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot (2018), and Hugh McIntosh's Guilty Pleasures: Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century (2018)—present as elements of their stakes the question of how and whether it is worthwhile to study the kinds of texts and modes of reception we are apparently still to think of as "guilty pleasures." Tobin relates the story of a colleague who questions her project of writing on "plot twists" on the grounds that they are "the cheapest sorts of stories" (270). "It is all too easy," writes Emre, "to dismiss reading that does not look like [scholarly] reading as merely imitative, emotional, information seeking, faddish, escapist, propagandist, or otherwise unworthy of critical attention in its own right—as the genetically 'middlebrow' or 'mass cultural' antithesis to the university's highly specialized literacy projects" (3–4). McIntosh notes "ongoing discussions" among critics about whether we have "fully grasped the merits of . . . genre writers" (25). Are the rubes still reading crap? Or are those ivory-tower snoots pooh-poohing good old-fashioned storytelling again?

There is something strange about that move, however. Haven't the humanities been taking popular culture and its modes of consumption seriously for many years, and in a systematic way since at least the late 1970s? Who dismisses "the cheapest sorts of stories" now, some fifty years after John Cawelti's The Six-Gun Mystique (1970)? Who dismisses nonacademic modes of reading, after reception studies and cultural studies? And who is still hung up on questions of the so-called merits of one writer over another, when the dismantling of such value judgments has been one of the most powerful achievements of recent decades of criticism? Why does the question of the validity of studying popular texts just keep on coming, like a zombie you might find represented therein?

The answer might be found in the subject of the fourth book under review, Timothy Aubry's Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures (2018), which takes up another, related, zombie problematic: the persistence of critique. Eve Sedgwick first published a version of her unraveling of critique, the essay "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading," a year after Alan Sokal fooled Social Text into publishing a hoax critique of physics, in 1997, although her essay's most celebrated version appeared in 2003, as part of the collection Touching Feeling. 2003 was, in turn, the same year Terry Eagleton published After Theory, and a year before Bruno Latour argued, in the pages of Critical Inquiry, that critique had "run out of steam." Yet here, fifteen years later, in a year in which another group of anticritique theorists hoaxed a clutch of journals with their "Sokal Squared" project, we find Aubry challenging anew critique's self-conception as a mode of literary criticism that reveals and thereby attacks the ideological positions concealed in cultural artifacts. Furthermore, he does so in dialog with a whole contemporary postcritical movement, comprising the work of scholars such as Toril Moi, Stephen Best, Heather Love, Sharon Marcus, and Rita Felski, a significant chunk of which is, as Myka Tucker-Abramson has recently argued, devoted to "simply criticiz[ing] critique." What gives? One answer that reading these four monographs together proposes is that critique won't die because it doesn't need to; there's nothing fundamentally wrong with it.¹

The beginning of this answer has to do with the relation between the guilt that attaches to the study of popular culture and the guilt that accompanies critique. Like Best and Marcus (and other postcritics) before him...