The Perils of Studying English

Being an English student is like growing up in book world. We all have a desire to grow up quickly, to gain all the necessary knowledge and acquire enough theoretical confidence to function as a literary adult. But somehow the more we learn, the more we reminisce about a time when reading was simple, uncritical.

For Rita Felski, the process of gaining critical skills is one that encourages the student to read with suspicion. Once you learn to read critically, you can never really trust a text again – texts keep their true meaning hidden and ‘do not willingly surrender their secrets’. One must be paranoid. It is acceptable to admire a text, but one mustn’t be seduced into taking its words at face value. Only the literary text is given any type of concession, a subgenre which Felski concedes as slightly less deserving of vigilante attention due to its own awareness of and pre-emptive response to a critical audience.

The most apparent problem with suspicious reading is the loss/gain sensation that accompanies it: while we gain a new understanding of possible meanings, we are losing our textual innocence. It is a process of disenchantment. There is also the danger that we will get so caught up in the critical mode, in the ‘shinier, sexier, more charismatic vocabularies’ of formal criticism that we will take literary analysis too far. Once you start finding meanings in the hidden, abstract gestures of a text, there is the chance that everything will begin to look potentially meaningful. It is possibly to read into parts of a text that are actually perfectly innocent, if there is such a thing. What you might think is the “key” to unlocking a particular text may be nothing more than a set of unprovable connections made ‘meaningful’ when expressed in highbrow critical terms. You’ll end up like Bunny in The Secret History, with a John Donne essay that addresses Isaac Wharton and the absurd textual concept of metahemarlism instead.

Felski’s remedy to these problems is that of affective reading, a neophenomenological approach to the text. In layman’s terms this refers to feeling first and analysing second. Felski believes that no matter how well-versed in critical commentary we are, we still possess the ability to be struck by that which appeals to us, disarmed by the unfamiliar, put off by that which we find distasteful. In the literary upper class it is cool to be detached, to be able to read things that you don’t “like” but do “appreciate”, to read things that you honestly “love” but can still “see the flaws within”. Felski says – forget this. Take what you like, what you hate, what surprises and angers and enchants you, and then ask why. There is no need to be distant, simply a need to question our attachments.

                                              

I generally agree with Felski’s ideas, but have one problem – what of the books you have already read ‘critically’, that you have already studied and pulled apart? Most people feel a certain bitterness, for example, toward many of the texts that they studied in high school, “ruined” by overanalysis and strict, criteria-based assessment methods. I worry that this experience will be akin to taking in an optical illusion – once you’ve seen the lamp you somehow cannot remember how, at first, all that appeared was two faces looking at one another. Can we truly, as Felski claims, ‘make the familiar newly surprising’? Perhaps with time, and patience. Every time you read a text, you read it slightly differently, meaning that even the most clichéd interpretation can become less cumbersome over time. With any luck the book will eventually regenerate, leaving you fresh to be affected anew.