A distrust of pleaure; being suspicious of suspicious reading.

I have felt that many of the articles we have have read in this course have been very demanding of us.  That every critic is chastising us for taking pleasure in reading. Or at least, that's the impression I get from browsing the bolgs.  A common response has been of relief; that uncritical reading is sometimes championed as useful, allowed and non-shameful. It is a sentiment I think is mainly a response to Michael Warner; his 'solipsistic distanciation' and 'reading through a text' which betray a fear that closeness with a text is all consuming.  However I do not think that a close alingment with the text equals uncritical reading and I disagree with it being presented as such.

Rita Felski takes up this very point in 'After Suspicion'.  She is interested in many things, aesthetics being one of them.  Conjuring up the aesthetic value of art implicates culture and ethics, both which inform the affect and interpretation of literary work.  Why should critical reading fail to take account of these elements, when, as Felski suggests, we must converse with texts across a 'chasm of historical or cultural difference'?  The 'modality of recognition' must come back to the individual.  If we do justice to the 'singularity and strangeness' of the text itself then we must also do so the reader and critic.  The idea of the 'upper case' Critic denies a nuance of understanding which otherwise might be attributed to a text.

I use the NSW high school curriculum as an example.  Though it was not the procedure when I went to school, others in my English classes tell of the way they studied King Lear in Advanced English.  They were tested on their understanding of feminist, post-colonial and Marxist readings of the play; Mark Edmundson would have a fit and presumably he writes his article in response to such learning techniques.  It is shoehorning of a most explicit kind.  Felski tells us that we need not to be suspicious of the text as it does all the work of suspicion for us, however we do need to be suspicious of the way we read it and the type of criticism we apply.  Being told how to understand a text, being subjected to an instance that there is only one way to read a text deserves a critical analysis.  Though I understand that teaching students about different types of theory is valid and useful, suggesting that models of theory are self evident in a text is not.  King Lear does not fit as neatly into critical theories as the school system would have us believe.  Last year in the Shakespeare unit at university we focused on the presence of animals in the plays; the Ovidian context, the dehumanisation, the similes and metaphors of humans into animals and the implications this had.  Or one could take Wuthering Heights another school/university novel.  Yes you could read it with the curriculum's preordained theories with mind; on the other hand our lecturer told us that she understands the work along side Freud's essays on The Uncanny and Narcissism.  She also told us that we would probably understand the text very differently, for us it would have nothing to do with Freudian thought.

In an essay on migrant and Aboriginal assimilation in Australia Anna Haebich notes that 'fundamental values' would be shaped by the nation's core Anglo-Celtic institutions and when I read it I wondered if we could expect it to be anything else.  I'm not advocating a cultural hegemony which functions to exclude certain groups, merely wondering how history could have shaped culture differently.  Imagining how to comprehend a  cultural phenomena which does not exist.  In many ways this is what Felski warns us against; judging a a text by characteristic it does not posses or produce.  Forcing meaning where the individual finds none.  And for Felski it is always about the individual.  She invites us, not to look through a text like it is a thing, but hold it at arm's length and allow it to keep us company.