“Expert Readers / Amateur Readers: Applying the Principle of Symmetry”
Postcritique has been accused of treating readers as if they were all the same, devaluing intellectual expertise and abandoning aesthetic judgment. This claim, however, is mistaken. Its methodological focus is not on sameness but on symmetry: treating different groups of readers equally. My talk clarifies what such a symmetrical perspective involves and surveys some recent examples of scholarship that carve out promising new paths for literary studies
Rita Felski is the Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at Queen Mary University of London’s School of the Arts. She is also John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia, former Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and former editor of New Literary History. Her most recent books are Uses of Literature (2008), The Limits of Critique (2015), Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020) and a co-edited collection Love Etc: Essays on Contemporary Literature and Culture (2024). Her new book, Selective Affinities: Literature and New Critical Theory, will be published next year.
This event is free to attend but please register in advance.
