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Weird Times

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

C. Namwali Serpell
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Extract

Recently, some literary critics have proposed that we might relate to texts in a different way than we're used to. Instead of plunging into critique, plumbing a text's depths, or coolly analyzing its symptoms, instead of “digging down and standing back,” as Rita Felski puts it, critics might adopt a less skeptical, less paranoid— less critical—stance. We might attend to a text's surfaces, in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's terms. We might get “close but not deep,” as Heather Love suggests. We might practice a new formalism, neither naive nor nostalgic but keyed to the aesthetic and the political.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 5 , October 2017 , pp. 1232 - 1238
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Modern Language Association of America

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References

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