About

Rita Felski is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor in the Department of Political & Social Thought at the University of Virginia. Her academic role involves engaging with political and social thought, contributing to the university's intellectual community. The information provided does not include specific details about her research focus, background, or key contributions, but her title indicates a distinguished position within her field.

Research topics

• Psychology
• Art
• Epistemology
• Aesthetics
• Philosophy

Selected publications

• Zwischen Erfahrung und Begriff. In der Kontaktzone von Literaturwissenschaft und Kritischer Theorie

  WestEnd · 2026-01-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Love, etc. essays on contemporary literature and culture

  2024-01-01 · 1 citations

  book1st authorCorresponding

  Long treated with skepticism in literary and cultural studies, love - as a subject of serious scholarly inquiry - is now attracting intense interest and renewed attention. Love, Etc. centers on two key themes: representations of love in literature and culture and love as a relationship to literature and culture

  Publisher

• The <i>English Studies</i> Interview: Rita Felski

  English Studies · 2024-06-26

  articleSenior author

  Item does not contain fulltext

  PublisherDOI

• Biblical Interpretation Reading List

  Biblical Interpretation · 2023-09-04

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Rita Felski's argument in Hooked: Art and Attachment seems basic: namely, humans engage with art because we are attached to it.Drawing loosely on Bruno Latour's actor-network-theory (she labels her approach "ANT-ish"), Felski highlights three kinds of aesthetic experience -attunement, identification, and attachment -in a multifaceted exploration of why and how art (including literary texts) works.Hooked builds on Felski's widely-read 2015 monograph, The Limits of Critique.Together, these works have made her one of the most prominent proponents of what literary and cultural critics are now calling "postcriticism."In brief, this movement objects to the constraints of conventional academic discourse and defends the value (and the values) of "lay" readers who engage with art not to explain or expose, dissect or analyze it, but simply to experience and enjoy it.Nevertheless, biblical scholars who are for myriad reasons wary of the critical theories and methods that challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries, or who long to make biblical studies great again, will find no salvation here.Felski is an equal-opportunity iconoclast; she is as eagle-eyed and probing when interrogating forms of faith and fealty as when picking apart hegemonic hermeneutics of suspicion.Felski pushes professional critics to recognize that attachment is a fundamental "condition of any conceivable form of intellectual life" (122).We are simply taught not to acknowledge this: "Scholars are adept at theorizing, historicizing, and politicizing the investments of others -while often remaining coy or evasive about their own" (3).Felski has hooked her own critics in both positive and negative ways.While some praise Hooked as "erudite and compelling" or a "marvelous achievement," others experience her rhetoric as a personal affront (one reviewer describes the book as "an inventory of abuse" directed at other critics).Yet this mixed reception illustrates Felski's primary point: we engage with art (including critical scholarship) in affective, often unpredictable and even opposing ways."Commentary," Felski writes, "is connection" (122).This is precisely what makes Hooked relevant for the increasingly fractured field of biblical studies.Felski's invitation to accept and foreground our own attachments might help us to forge affinities and communicate across the rifts

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies” Revisited

  REAL · 2023-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Unknotted, Derailed, Realigned

  MLN · 2022-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding

  Unknotted, Derailed, Realigned Rita Felski (bio) First Reactions How to respond to Influx & Efflux? To find a way toward a form that fits its form? To mimic its patterns of affinity and sympathy, its courting of contagion? Jane Bennett not only writes but draws; flowers, amoebas, stars, and tendrils—evoking the album covers of 1960s psychedelic bands—spiral across the book’s cover, like vegetation from another planet. Similar shapes drift across the book’s pages, enigmatic echoes of, or complements to, the author’s words. The idea for a book on Whitman, Bennett writes, was prompted by years of doodling and the peculiar experience of the self that it brings to the fore: an “I” that is carried along, yet also creating, that is acted upon yet acting. The first obstacle: I feel (mistakenly, no doubt) that I can’t draw. And I’m unpracticed in writing as Bennett writes: bringing strange locutions and startling metaphors into play; rotating ordinary words— influence, impression—in the curve of my hand to make them shimmer in the light. This is what Bennett calls a poetics of writing up, a way of bringing sentences to life. Not just by making words reverberate, but also by showing how words are attuned to the world, how writing bears the traces of life. “Such writing would show, for example, how the throat and chest feeling of breathing and the texture of wind on your face still vibrate inside the word ‘inspiration’ or how hearing the phrase ‘on the one hand . . . on the other hand’ induces a subtle rocking to-and-fro of your body” (xxii). My own bodily state: animated yet paralyzed. The animation stems from a sense of intellectual excitement that I’d call, after Hartmut [End Page 1022] Rosa, resonance; being charged up by the words I am reading. The paralysis arises from a sense of toomuchness, of feeling overcome and overwhelmed. Resulting—narcissistically—in a sense of smallness: how can I possibly measure up? Yet Influx & Efflux nudges me toward a less defensive posture and a less fortified sense of self. How do Bennett’s words impress themselves upon mind and flesh, inspiring me to express them in my own fashion? How might I incorporate and interweave them with other idioms, forging links to “ideas and techniques from other writers, times, and places” (xv)? Position and Disposition The usual format of the review: an introduction of the writer; a summary of the book’s main theses and lines of arguments; a noting of what is new or significant, followed by a tally of what’s been overlooked or undertheorized. The weight and substance of the review often falls on the last of these: we expect the performance of “a critique.” Influx & Efflux renders this genre impossible: it precludes it. One chapter works its way toward another way of assessing and evaluating, citing Whitman: “He judges not as the judge judges, but as the sun falling round a helpless thing.” How can the sun’s falling—radiant, indiscriminate—be seen as a form of judgment? It would seem to involve a suspension—not a downright refusal to judge, but a “loafing in the interval.” A stretching or dilation of time; a hesitating or hovering. “Poetry buys time,” writes Bennett, “for anexact, inarticulate percepts and influences to weigh in” (50). How to irradiate a form of writing that is poetry, political theory, and criticism blended into one? That floats between genres? That is a provocation to the common-or-garden prose of most political theory and literary commentary? Influx & Efflux begins by noting criticisms of Whitman’s writing: its overtones of whiteness, colonialism, anthropocentrism, how it reveals “an American conceit of cultural superiority and entitled consumption” (xiv). Yet this is not where Bennett chooses to linger. She not only preaches but practices generosity, seeking to add and multiply rather than to subtract or diminish. Our intellectual conversations would become richer, says Yves Citton, if we were less eager to criticize those who do not share our views and more inclined to follow Spinoza’s recommendation: “in each particular thing one encounters, let us try and take what is good and fruitful in it...

  PublisherDOI

• Sociological writing as resonant writing

  The Sociological Review · 2022-07-01 · 9 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article focuses on two examples of sociological writing that have attracted wide public interest: Didier Eribon’s best-selling memoir about his working-class origins, Returning to Reims , and Hartmut Rosa’s door-stopper work of social theory, Resonance , featured on the cover of the German news magazine Stern. These two very different works – one indebted to Bourdieu and Foucault, the other located in the tradition of the Frankfurt School – share certain qualities. First, a formal feature I’ll call scale-shifting : a leavening of theoretical claims with vivid examples and resonant details. And second, a commitment to doing justice to the phenomenological depth of ordinary persons’ self-understanding. Both writers, in other words, approach the world as deserving of a poet’s attentive and appreciative eye as well as a theorist’s critical gaze.

  PublisherDOI

• Urzeczenie. O sztuce i przywiązaniu

  2022-05-25 · 8 citations

  bookOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Urzeczenie – najnowsza książka krytyczna wybitnej amerykańskiej literaturoznawczym Rity Felski – to rozprawa poświęcona teorii, interpretacji i akademickim uwarunkowaniom sztuki. Badaczka dyskutuje w niej ze zobiektywizowanymi, bezosobowymi dyskursami analitycznymi i wykazuje ich niewystarczalność w obliczu afektywnych uwikłań odbioru tekstów kultury.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Gender, love and recognition in <i>I Love Dick</i> and <i>The Other Woman</i>

  European Journal of Women s Studies · 2021-03-27 · 3 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  How might the idea of recognition offer a fresh slant on contemporary women’s writing? In this essay, we bring theories of recognition into dialogue with two literary works: Chris Kraus’s widely reviewed memoir I Love Dick and The Other Woman by the well-regarded Swedish novelist Therese Bohman. Our analysis focuses on recognition within the texts as well as its relevance to relations between texts and readers. We seek to clarify how attitudes to heterosexual love, feminism and same-sex identification are entangled and the broader implications of such entanglements. We are interested in how the protagonists engage the world as readers and the role of literature in shaping their identifications and attachments. Yet, a comparative analysis can also bring to light how a feminist habitus is predicated on class and education, suggesting that these two texts may invite rather different experiences of recognition.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Latour i literaturoznawstwo

  Teksty Drugie · 2021-01-01

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Felski examines how Bruno Latour's actor-network theory can influence our understanding of literature, especially the relationship between readers and the literary text.Latour guides us towards a causal concept of literature, one that includes an open field for multiple interactions or relationships -also on the emotional level -between the reader and the literary work.These interactions go both ways: from the work to the reader and vice versa.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Susan Fraiman

  Columbia University

  37 shared

• Robert Horwitz

  University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  36 shared

• Robert Stam

  36 shared

• Larry A. Gross

  36 shared

• Neetu Khanna

  The Asiatic Society of Mumbai

  36 shared

• Kate Fortmueller

  36 shared

• Liz Floyd

  New York University

  36 shared

• Lisa Cartwright

  University of California, San Diego

  36 shared