2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A most illuminating read, April 30, 2010
This review is from: Uses of Literature (Blackwell Manifestos) (Paperback)
This book is an informed and thoughtful discussion of why we read fiction. With its elaborations upon recognition, enchantment, knowledge, and shock it has added substantially to my appreciation of novels. Felski's discussion of reasons why we read literature include informed and nuanced presentations of a variety of current critical perspectives on literature, showing how these both enhance and can be informed by her delineation of different uses of literature. Felski's presentations of these different critical perspectives are rendered clear throughout by the contexts in which she introduces these different critical viewpoints. I found this slim work to be immensely useful as an enhancement to my appreciation of the novel as well as of different contemporary approaches to the study of literature.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Interesting, but not groundbreaking, November 4, 2009
This review is from: Uses of Literature (Blackwell Manifestos) (Paperback)
There is a lot to like in this book, but it does not constitute a breakthrough. Felski's approach is to turn from theory, suspicion, and otherness in evaluating literature toward intimacy, immediacy, and (even!) pleasure. I am sympathetic to Felski's literary aesthetic and thus her turn. But I felt the book was underwhelming in a few important respects.
Felski does not relate the different approaches one can take with literature. She does distinguish the approach that dominates academic work from the approach dominant in private reading. Academic work is very theoretical, is determined to find oppression (or otherness more generally) in stories, and is overall borderline antagonistic toward literature -- or at least toward literature as an aesthetic something. The private experience of literature we may roughly equate to how a non-academic reads books.
But Felski makes the keen observation that, when they find the time, even professors of literature "read for pleasure" in this "layperson's" mode. This is a crucial piece of evidence, because it contradicts the notion that the nonacademic reading mode, while seeming more fun, is just a superficial pastime of people who happen to lack literary sophistication. If sophisticated readers opt to read in the lay mode, it must have some indispensable value. The meat of Felski's book is a description of this nonacademic reading mode. But, the relationship between the two reading approaches is not characterized beyond the fact that they are not the same. This surprised me, considering that Felski sets out to show that the two modes are interdependent and mutually beneficial.
Furthermore, Felski's manifesto seems to be of limited appeal. Normally I don't evaluate books based on whether or not I think someone else will get something out of it -- such an evaluation would be difficult and unreliable, but also beside the point. After all, some books are obscure, some are widely read, but to the people who care about an obscure topic, a good book on that topic is no less good because few people care to read it. However, this particular book's goal is to show the mutualism relating two reading modes. As it fails to relate them, the book fails to show practitioners of either mode what use they could do with the other.
Nonacademics are quite quite unlikely to read this book, and it seems clear Felski did not write with the intention of her book being widely read by nonacademics. The style is simply not accessible. And are academics likely to be interested in Felski's approach? Felski is editor at the journal 'New Literary History' and as a result I would expect at least some academics to try out her suggestion for the simple purpose of enhancing their scholarly productivity. One might suspect journal submissions are more likely to be accepted, and more likely to acquire the citations that come along with attention from prominent colleagues, if the submissions participate in an editor's effort to promote a new way of discussing literature.
In this book Felski herself is candid about the professional challenges for literary scholars: to find something new to say and an intelligent-sounding way to say it. Felski specifically points out that the evaluative frameworks (theories) and the scholarly vocabularies change rapidly; this struck me as reminiscent of fashion, where people copy each other and judge each other according to standards for which no basis is apparent. This is not the only reasonable way to interpret Felski's observations; for example one might imagine literary scholars are simply doing lots of very innovative work. Maybe.
In any event Felski's candor is immensely admirable in a context such as this, especially considering her role as a journal editor, but the critiques she articulates often seem to apply to this very book. Many many sentences and quite a few longer passages were stuffed with verbiage. Felski is especially fond of offering not one point, argument, statement, but of saying one thing in an unhelpful repetition of expressions, phrases, locutions. (A lot like that last sentence.) She flashes unnecessarily esoteric terms in a style reinforcing my interpretation of Felski's earlier observation in terms of fashion, rather than innovation. Still Felski's candor is nice, ironically as it manifests.
Overall, the main effort in the book is to articulate a certain mode of reading. I think Felski does this pretty well, although the work is not very novel. Felski doesn't suppose it is, except that it could be a new mode of work for many many academics. Felski's enthusiasm for literature is one of the best things about this book: it manifests consistently but unobtrusively. More than her methodical argumentation, her enthusiasm carries her point forward. And this isn't to say Felski is superficial or a weak thinker, by the way. This books does some useful things pretty well, though it does underwhelm in some respects, and it does not effect a breakthrough.
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3 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Great Insight on Why Writing is an amalgam of all iterary ideologies and those without., November 17, 2008
This review is from: Uses of Literature (Blackwell Manifestos) (Paperback)
Rita Felski's book is a bridge between the two schools of thought on the importance of literature. In short, she explains the intent of the reader. One school which strictly foists literature on a pedestal of alternity and opposition to the seemingly lay-men attachment to literature for the sake of enjoyment (the 2nd school of thought). I have never read a book about literary criticsism that contained such lucidity and insight on the humaness that many object to saying has any influence in such a critical field. Honestly, I'm not even well versed (if at all) in this critical art.In fact I was just in my university library looking for a voice of inspiration for my own writing.
After reading the first page, I immediately checked out. Now, I am almost finished with it. This book focuses on four important ideas that explain why people read: recognition, enchantment, knowledge and shock. The inviting nature of these well reduced themes and the mastery of which Rita explains it makes this book worthwhile to anyone interested in what makes literature tick regardless of ideology.
Thank you Rita!
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