Reading like a professional: Accounting for it

I think that traditional criticism attributes significance to texts through rationalising them. These scientific methods of approaching a text have been used as a way of explaining it, defining it, and therefore controlling it. I think this is what Felski refers to as being ‘suspicious’ of a text, and Edmundson sees as treating the text as an enemy. Through approaching the text on these terms, the critic is able to contain it and conquer it, making it a topic on which we can have some kind of knowledge or certainty.

However, these approaches to texts seem to deny the affective responses the texts usually initiate. It is these responses that usually give these texts their value to us. As students of literature, we have engaged in Edmundson’s process of this ‘second socialisation’ into the world of reading in a way that has had significant personal impacts. Reading has the potential to create affective reactions strong enough to alter our lives, impacting the decisions we make (for example, to study literature at university), the structure of our imaginations and general way of seeing the world. It is these affective responses that initially draw us to literature and give it its importance, so to exclude these responses from criticism is to deny our reason for criticising them in the first place.

While engaging in a quest for knowledge about the text, the scientific approach diminishes the importance of this knowledge. I agree with Felski’s point that ‘one of the distinguishing marks of works of art is their ability to inspire intense responses’. These intense responses are what gives art its value, what sets it apart from other objects. To deny these intense responses, and art’s potency as ‘the quintessential mood-altering substance’ is to deny its importance to us. It is the affect that gives art its power, so this power should be valued and put to use.

Traditionally, emotion and affect has been seen as irrational, existing in opposition to intellectual pursuit. However, perhaps this affect can be reconfigured as a resource from which more information about the text can be gathered. There must be a reason why we enjoy some texts and not others, there must be reasons why we can find a plot devastating or uplifting, truthful or false. We do not need to reject ‘readings’ altogether, or avoid scientific-style approaches, but we can use these affective responses as an extra piece of information to help us interpret texts.

Felski’s idea of ‘reflective reading’ seeks to find this middle ground between critical and uncritical reading. Through engaging in this sort of criticism, the analytical process is no longer performative and alien to our personal experiences of texts, but representative of them. In Felski’s words, this process enables us to determine ‘why texts matter to us’. This seems to fulfil a functional and important role of the critic in society: to account for our reactions to texts through various critical approaches. Whether or not we perform ‘readings’, whether we are suspicious of or friendly toward the text, whether interpretations are rational or affective, the important thing is to keep the criticism relevant to the text’s readers.

It is therefore important to follow Edmundson’s advice and ‘befriend’ the text, approaching it ‘on its own terms’. To try to impose some foreign, preconceived idea onto the text is to strip the text of any actual significance it might have had, instead foregrounding the significance of the ‘reading’ given to it. We should not need to be told to ‘befriend’ the text, because we are all here because we are its friends. We need to acknowledge and exploit this friendship, using our critical capacity to reinforce and promote its value to us.

The criticism does not need to be definitive or certain. A text is not a problem that we can figure out. Through engaging both the affect and the intellect, the ‘reflective’ approach seeks to rationalise the irrational responses to it. Perhaps we can never know we understand a text, but we can know how we feel about it.



Felski, R., 2009. "After Suspicion" from Profession 28-35.

Edmundson, M., 2009. "Against Readings" from Profession 56-85.