Critical Methodologies Dr Mena Mitrano Tuesdays 5 00

Critical Methodologies Dr. Mena Mitrano Tuesdays | 5: 00 p. m. -8: 00 p. m. Aula 204 Office Hours: Tuesdays 4 p. m. - 5 p. m. , stanza 341 E-mail: mmitrano@luc. edu; filomena. mitrano@uniroma 1. it

Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, “Surface Reading: An Introduction. ” The Way We Read Now. Special Issue. Representations 108 (fall 2009): 1 -21.

Michel Foucault, “What is Critique? ” (lecture at the Sorbonne on 27 May 1978, English trans. 1996)

The “critical attitude” “. . . a certain manner of thinking, of speaking, likewise of acting, and a certain relation to what exists, to what one knows, to what one does, as well as a relation to society, to culture, to others. . . “

“There is something in critique that is related to virtue. And in a certain way, what I wanted to speak to you about was the critical attitude as virtue in general. ”

The “critical attitude” = a counterpoint: “at once partner and adversary of the arts of governing, as a way of suspecting them, of challenging them, of limiting them, of finding their right measure, of transforming them, of seeking to escape these arts of governing or, in any case, to displace them” (Foucault, “What is Critique? ”)

critique : “the art of not being governed so much” (Foucault, “What is Critique? ”)

Dieter Freundlieb, “Foucault and the Study of Literature, ” Poetics Today Vol. 16, No. 2 (Summer, 1995), pp. 301 -344. “The teaching of literature would no longer be considered the transmission of culturally important, perhaps even timelessly valid, truths contained in canonical texts and brought to light by a methodologically controlled process of interpretation; instead, it could be seen as an ethico -political training and a disciplinary formation of subjects under the guise of a search for truth in literature. Literary criticism, particularly within a pedagogical context, could be regarded. . . as part of an apparatus of ethical surveillance and normalization, including selfsurveillance and self-fashioning” (330).

Judith Butler “What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue” (2001)

criticism “fault-finding” Raymond WILLIAMS responses to cultural works “which [do] not assume the habit (or right or duty) of judgment” (iqtd. in Butler ). Theodor W. ADORNO “danger. . . of judging intellectual phenomena in a subsumptive, uninformed and administrative manner and assimilating them into the prevailing constellations of power which the intellect ought to expose” (qtd. in Butler).

“Critique seeks the truth content of a work of art; commentary its material content. The relation between the two is determined by that basic law of literature according to which the more significant the work, the more inconspicuously and intimately its truth content is bound up with its material content. ” Walter Benjamin, "Goethe's Elective Affinities" (1924 -5)

Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (2015)

“We are no longer afforded a panoramic vision of the social order: to do [criticism] is not to soar like an eagle, gazing down critically or dispassionately at the distant multitudes below, but to trudge along like an ANT, marvelling at the intricate ecologies and diverse microorganism that lie hidden among the thick blades of grass. ” (Limits of Critique 157 -8)

“. . . guarding, protecting, conserving, caretaking and looking after the wounded and vulnerable artifacts of history. " Rita Felski, “Introduction, “ Re-composing the Humanities -- with Bruno Latour, New Literary History 47. 2 -3 (Spring & Summer 2016)