Felski 2011

Felski, Rita. "Context Stinks!" NLH 42:4 (Autumn 2011), 573-591. Web.

• 574 [problems with current historicist practices:] Deconstructive thinkers have vigorously assailed any notion of...an overcontextualization that wreaks violence on the distinctiveness of the literary object. [those args don't work for two main reasons:] First, they sometimes rely on a division between "exceptional texts" that exceed their historical moment and "conventional" or "stereotypical" texts that remain determined by it.... And second, the repudiation of context can result in a rarefied focus on poetic language, form, and textuality far removed from the messy, mundane, empirical details of how and why we read.
• [Hermeneutics of suspicion] While suspicion can manifest itself in multiple ways, in the current intellectual climate it often pivots on a fealty to the clarifying power of historical context. What the literary text does not see, in this line of thought, are the larger circumstances that shape and sustain it and that are drawn into the light by the corrective force of the critic's own vigilant gaze.
  • as Hensley 2016 puts it so neatly, "they have ideology, we have theory"
• INTERVENTION: ...I want to articulate and defend two related propositions: 1) that history is not a box -- that conventional modes of historicizing and contextualizing prove deficient in accounting for the transtemporal movement and affective resonance of particular texts -- and 2) that in doing better justice to this transtemporal impact, we might usefully think of texts as "nonhuman actors"[.]