Subject: The Review: We re Off to the Method Wars
If you were paying attention to academic Twitter last week, especially those precincts occupied by scholars of literature, you might have noticed a several-day-long flare-up over questions of interpretation and critique. (Search method wars and you ll see what I mean.) Although occasioned by recent arguments around the work of Rita Felski most immediately, a defense of her postcritique in
The Point and a critique of it in the
Los Angeles Review of Books this debate deserves to be seen in a wider view, encompassing not only Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick s 1997 essay Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading but also a tradition of essays on literary criticism s relationship to philology, including especially Edward Said s The Return to Philology (in