A Letter from the Trenches of the Method Wars

How to Interpret a Text, Part 3

This is Part 3 of a series that offers a guided tour of selected bits of literary theory. The series asks what various critics thought about the question: Is there a right way or a wrong way to interpret a literary text? You can read part 1 and part 2 if you’d like to, but each post can be read separately.

---

Intro

The Method Wars were, for my money, the most consequential debate in literary theory to be conducted in the Age of Academic Twitter (when lots of academics bickered on Twitter, from around 2012-2022). The Method Wars were, generally, about the right way to interpret literary texts, and the two sides were what I’ll call the Criticals and the Postcriticals.¹

The Method Wars were pretty dangerous, as literary theory dust-ups go, which is to say that they were not dangerous at all. Egos were singed, colleagues were subtweeted, a few grad students got cyberbullied, and that’s about it. The “war” is now over in that people have sort of stopped talking about Critique and Postcritique, and Academic Twitter evaporated after Elon took the wheel. The Method Wars had no clear victor. But they’re important to understand because they open up interesting and consequential questions that are fundamentally about how we ought to treat literature.

a combatant in the Method Wars fires on an unsuspecting foe

The arguments in the Method Wars basically boiled down to: is “good reading” about critically looking at literature and explaining how it justifies, reinforces, or resists systemic oppression (the Critical position)? Or is that way of looking at literature basically played out, meaning that critics should focus on lighter things, like how literature is fun and beautiful and helps people heal and connect (the Postcritical position)? Or is good reading a mixture of the two (the position from which most academics actually approach literature, especially when they’re teaching)?

If you’ve read the first two posts in this series, you’ll remember that in the 1960s, a critical mass of literary critics started engaging in what the French philosopher Paul Ricœur called the “hermeneutics of suspicion.” You remember that the central innovation of the hermeneutics of suspicion was the idea that literary texts like novels and poems can, and should be, read “against the grain”—with the idea that every literary text contains hidden meanings that must be uncovered by special reading practices. And you will remember that these hidden meanings are often political in nature and are almost always evaluated on political grounds. For example, a Marxist critic will often see that novels are not just entertainment but are capitalist propaganda; a feminist critic will often see literary texts as subtly communicating harmful (or beneficial) attitudes about women; and so on. In either case, for a “suspicious reader,” literary texts have hidden political meanings, and those meanings are often quite sinister: literature, for the suspicious reader, often teaches us to see the world in unjust or unfair ways.

The widespread adoption of the hermeneutics of suspicion brought about a kind of Cambrian explosion in academic literary criticism from the 1970s onward. New critical approaches with technical-sounding names seemed to emerge with every decade: the new historicism, postcolonial criticism, deconstruction, queer theory, ecocriticism. Politically speaking, these approaches tended to be, frankly, left-wing, arguing for the value of “revolutionary” art that resisted capitalism, systemic racism, the patriarchy, and so on, insisting instead on various kinds of “liberation”—from oppressive political systems, discrimination, restrictive social mores, et cetera. Especially in the 1980s and 1990s, literary interpretation went theory-crazy, with different schools of critics happily applying their favored theories to new literary texts and often making remarkable and interesting discoveries. These new discoveries increasingly focused not just on politics but on specific political issues, most prominently race, class, and gender. By the 1990s, however, these new ways of interpreting texts, inspired by the hermeneutics of suspicion, began to feel a little bit old—at least, to some people.

Reparative Reading

It is now the year 2003, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick publishes a book chapter, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” For Sedgwick, the hermeneutics of suspicion were no longer liberating; they had become obligatory. The job of a literary critic had become calling attention to the ways that literary texts either further or resist various forms of ideology. This made suspicious readings repetitive and predictable.

Worse than that, though, looking at literature only for the harms it could do started to feel not just suspicious but paranoid—the literary critic was now obliged to find hidden conspiracies, hidden ways in which texts enabled subterranean systems of social domination. In other words, because the world seems so unfair, so filled with oppression and evil, doing anything other than finding these awful hidden meanings in a work of literature seemed blinkered or unserious. Any serious theorist or critic who looks closely at a novel will see representations and reinforcements of the oppression and evil that they already know fills the world.

This paranoid sensibility, as Sedgwick calls it, isn’t based on nothing. Sometimes, she writes, paranoia is correct—there is a conspiracy, there is oppression. But that doesn’t mean that every single reading of every literary text needs to identify conspiracy or oppression. “To be other than paranoid,” Sedgwick writes, “does not, in itself, entail a denial of the reality or gravity of enmity or oppression.”

To avoid looking like overoptimistic airheads who were blithely unaware of the domination and suffering that characterize the world, literary critics reflexively rushed to be paranoid, Sedgwick argued. But this rush to be paranoid—this uncritical assumption that it was always the best way to look at a text—had a few problems. It can make readers feel hopeless; it can be a self-fulfilling prophecy (if you look for bad things in a text, you’re likely to find them); it can be reductive (reducing literature to nothing more than expressions of ideology); it prevents people from thinking about fun and pleasure, which are ways that literature offer some solace to suffering people; and, finally, it depends on a misguided faith that, if only evidence of oppression were to be exposed, the world would improve. (Someone might prove that a novel uses racist stereotypes, for example, but simply exposing this fact, Sedgwick would suggest, may not actually help any struggle against racism.)

Sedgwick argues that paranoid reading is important and useful, but it just isn’t enough to give readers a full understanding of what literature is and does. She argued for a renewed focus on what she called “reparative reading”—reading both for pleasure and for a kind of solace. Reparative reading practices sidestep some of the shortcomings of paranoid reading—they allow us to be surprised by a poem; allow us to focus on pleasure and fun; and ultimately can transform literature into a source of comfort, nourishment, and sustenance rather than merely one more compromised thing in an already corrupt world. Reparative reading practices teach us “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture—even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them.” Joy, pleasure, comfort—these things are not necessarily less intellectual than critique, unmasking, or ideological analysis, and they have their own benefits.

There are three things about Sedgwick’s essay that I’d highlight. One is that Sedgwick very intentionally never says that paranoid readings should never be done. She simply says that they can’t be the end-all or be-all of literary interpretation. She’s not making the argument that paranoid readings are wrong—just that they don’t offer a complete account of what literature does. Second, she does not challenge the left-aligned political philosophies that appeared so frequently in suspicious reading; Sedgwick’s arguments for reparative readings were not critiques of left academia from a conservative perspective. Finally, in this chapter, Sedgwick doesn’t explain how to read reparatively. I finished the essay wondering: how does someone read reparatively rather than in a paranoid manner? What do you actually do differently? What different questions do you ask about a text?

Rita Felski and the Postcritics

One place we might look to answer these questions would be Rita Felski’s 2008 book Uses of Literature. In her book, Felski often echoes Sedgwick. Paranoid reading, Felski argued, has become dogmatic, depressing, and pointless, and the critical theories descended from the “hermeneutics of suspicion” have no way of explaining why anyone should bother to read literature in the first place. “At this point,” she writes, responding to Judith Fetterley’s concept, “we are all resisting readers”—perhaps it is time for something new. Her book asks: to what other uses can we put literature?

Felski argues that academic readers, like everyday readers, read for all kinds of interesting reasons, not just to perform political critique. But the dominance of the hermeneutics of suspicion prevents academics from talking about these reasons for reading. She lists four reasons to read: reading for enchantment, recognition, knowledge, and shock. Each of these things focuses on what readers get out of texts—on why people read in the first place. And to learn more about each of them, we need to focus on what Felski calls the “phenomenology” of reading—in other words, we need to focus on what it feels like to experience reading a text, on what the text gives to us, to get a full understanding of what that text means.

When you read a book and read something that resonates with your own experience, Felski says, you might want to take that moment of recognition seriously. To analyze these moments would be to gain a deeper understanding of how literature can help us know ourselves more clearly. What is it we see when we see ourselves in a book? Can we gain a clearer understanding of other people by reading literature, and if so, how is that understanding produced and shaped by the art we consume? To investigate these questions, we might look at moments where we intensely identify with (or when we feel estranged from) a text and ask what’s happening.

Similarly, we might analyze works that “enchant” us—that captivate us and effortlessly hold our attention. The “experience of enchantment, of total absorption in a text, of intense and enigmatic pleasure” has, Felski argues, gone largely ignored in academic literary criticism. But it’s a powerful and important sensation that art can give us, and it deserves to be taken seriously. And so on—each of the uses of literature that Felski defines, she argues, is both worth thinking about and has not been thought about because of a preoccupation with paranoid reading. Whether this is an accurate way to sum up the state of literary criticism, however, is an object of some dispute.

Like Sedgwick, Felski is not saying that there is a right way or a wrong way to read literature, and, like Sedgwick, she does not criticize suspicious reading for being too left-wing. She’s mostly saying something like (my words) “there are many parts of the experience of reading literature that theorists and critics have ignored because they’ve focused solely on suspicious reading practices. It’s time we take these parts of the experience of reading seriously.”

In fact, Felski has no time for the question of whether there’s a right or a wrong way to read literature. “I hold fast,” she writes, “to the view that any account of why people read must operate on several different fronts, that we should relinquish, once and for all, the pursuit of a master concept, a key to all the mythologies.” Literature is such a multifaceted thing that we can never insist that “literature is for this” or “literature is for that.” Sometimes, we read for enchantment, and sometimes, we read to critique; both are legitimate, and both belong in literary studies.

The Method Wars, then, were not really about whether suspicious readings are incorrect, exactly. They are about whether suspicious reading is emotionally satisfying, politically useful, and complete as an explanation of what literature is and how it affects us.

…So why were there wars over this? After all, didn’t Sedgwick and Felski both insist, repeatedly, that suspicious reading can be thoughtful and productive, even if it has its excesses? Aren’t they simply pushing to expand literary studies? Who could argue against this?

But there’s a fieriness under the surface of both books, even as they insist that scholars should focus on good feelings. It’s fair to say, I think, that both Sedgwick and Felski actively dislike suspicious reading practices—for Sedgwick, suspicious reading can be cruel, while for Felski it is more frequently criticized as arrogant. Other postcritical writers, like Lisa Ruddick, go a bit harder: Ruddick identifies in some suspicious reading practices an “intellectual sadism” that seems opposed to anything “human, alive, and whole” in suspicious reading practices. Although all of these authors insist that suspicious reading has produced intellectually legitimate, fascinating, and fun work, there is also a sense that, by engaging in suspicious reading, they are doing something wrong—somehow violating or mistreating literature. Felski’s follow-up to Uses of Literature, her 2015 The Limits of Critique, more strenuously criticizes the hermeneutics of suspicion as they have manifested in academic literary criticism. In that book, Felski repeats many of the key claims of Uses of Literature. She evaluates the hermeneutics of suspicion as they’re actually practiced, in an almost sociological way, and the assessment is far from flattering. Echoing Sedgwick and Bruno Latour (whose essay “Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” I don’t have the space to address here), Felski argues that suspicious reading, far from being more “critical” and philosophical than reparative reading, is actually filled with often unjustified, arrogant assumptions and errors in reasoning.

Critique Responds to the Critique Critique

I’ve been recapping the “Postcritical” position—that is, the ideas of those who believe that suspicious reading practices are essentially played out and need to be supplemented and supported with other ways of reading. And I’ve suggested that, for these thinkers, suspicious reading seems wrong—not “incorrect,” but “morally suspect.” But how will suspicious readers respond?

Rather predictably for a set of readers who are accustomed to finding covert political meanings in texts, some of these readers thought that the Postcriticals were, in so many words, conservative—mostly, that they were covertly defending capitalism (or “neoliberalism”). One version of this argument, voiced by Jeffrey R. Di Leo (in an article called “What is Critique without Pessimism?”), is that by abandoning suspicious reading, postcritical theorists basically give up on the idea that education should be liberatory and progressive, that teaching and research can change the world. “Postcritique,” he writes, “is blind irrational striving albeit for the will to preserve neoliberalism.…rather than educate students in what is needed for them to be a critical citizenry that espouses democratic values, it reverses the educational process by focusing on their own personal likes and dislikes.” The goal of a literary education, for Di Leo, is to form students into democratic citizens, and the most important tool for a citizen to have is the ability to read suspiciously—to see past the surface and to find out what’s really going on. By focusing on things like pleasure and love, the postcritical readers deny the importance of critique.

box of books

Bruce Robbins seems to concur, writing that “critical distance”—the idea that literary critics should stand back and analyze cultural objects critically rather than thinking about enjoyment and pleasure—has a distinguished history that deserves respect, and that Felski’s mode of literary interpretation would be closer to “fandom,” which has the taint of commercialism and corporate-capitalist values. Robbins also suggests that postcritique preaches too much reverence for literature and too much unthinking acceptance of suspect ideas. Reading the world suspiciously, Robbins argues, can help us avoid genuinely harmful things (like, say, violent religious fundamentalism, or systemic oppression), which are very real and which result in real suffering. To criticize suspicious reading is to encourage students to be credulous and gullible.

At stake in this Method War, for these writers, is not just the question of how one should interpret a text to understand what it means, but what it means to be truly educated; how politics should enter the classroom; and the nature of art and society.

If all of this is beginning to sound, well, a bit over-the-top to you, you’re not alone. David Kurnick, another skeptic of Felski, argued that Felski and see English professors as cartoonish villains who seem to hate literature, who are obsessed with a bleak politics that has no room for beauty or fun. Felski, Kurnick writes, turn a debate into a melodrama, a battle between good and evil. Kurnick does not focus on the counter-melodrama—the way that the Postcriticals are painted as corporate stooges and neoliberal apologists, whose opponents, the Criticals, defend the ideals of democracy and freedom from fascism and oppression—but he rightly suggests, I think, that this tendency to melodrama has a lot to do with the fact that much of the Method Wars were fought over Twitter, a platform now well known for turning any debate—even one about something as seemingly dry as literary interpretation—into a Manichean battle between good and bad.

Conclusion

So far in this series, I’ve tried to explain the views of other people with clarity and liveliness and to provide some commentary as we go. There are tons of other approaches that I haven’t talked about, like distance reading (or in fact any of the theoretical schools I glossed over in the intro of this piece), and philosophical movements, like metamodernism, that will influence the future of this discussion. But for the next entry in this series, I think I’ll try to be explicit about what I believe: how I approach reading and interpreting literary texts, and why I think it’s justified.

Until then, you have my gratitude for reading, and I hope you learned something new!

1. This division has been called simplistic. Then again, I’m trying to simplify here.