How Not to Talk About Experience, Professor Rita Felski

Why do textbooks of literary theory avoid the concept of experience? And does the postcritical interest in literary experience imply a rejection of interpretation, politics, and theory, as its critics charge? This talk looks to recent German thought and to Hartmut Rosa’s account of the phenomenology and sociology of resonance, as a resource for literary critics interested in theorizing experience.

Rita Felski is John Stewart Bryan Professor at the University of Virginia. Her current research centres on aesthetics, method, and interpretation. The Limits of Critique (Chicago UP, 2015), on the role of suspicion in literary criticism, was widely reviewed and the subject of forums in PMLA, Religion and Literature, and the American Book Review. Similar issues are explored in an edited collection, Critique and Postcritique, co-edited with Elizabeth Anker (Duke University Press, 2017). Hooked: Art and Attachment, which asks how and why we get stuck to works of art, will be published by Chicago UP in fall 2020. She is writing a new book on the contemporary Frankfurt School and its relevance for literary studies. She also has longstanding interests in feminist theory, modernity and postmodernity, genre (especially tragedy), comparative literature, and cultural studies.