WEEK 1 Blog Post
Timothy Walker

I’ll focus on the Warner and Sedgwick pieces here since they’re the two readings from this week that resonated most deeply with me, with what I’ve been thinking about both professionally and personally as I begin to embark on my graduate studies. Their respective calls to be critical about critical reading and paranoid about paranoid reading by foregrounding more affective experiences in order to illuminate often neglected and disparaged textual encounters articulates, for me, a notion that has encircled, but never fully entered into my previous graduate work. Perhaps a lack of wherewithal (or courage?) has prevented me from orienting my own graduate reading (and writing) practices towards the affective aspects of the literature I’ve been working on. Nonetheless, the impulse has always been there. Warner writes, “Uncritical reading is the unconscious of the profession; whatever worlds are organized around frameworks of reading other than critical protocols remain, for the most part, terra incognita” (33). Both Warner’s uncritical reader, who reads for pleasure, who self-identifies with characters, laughs, cries, and falls in love with books (13) and Sedgwick’s reparative (depressive) reader, who reads for aesthetics, amelioration, and edification (144), attempt to rescue affective reading practices from the essential cynicism and paranoia that pervade academic research and study by asking us (and academia at large) to be mindful of how our own assumptions about reading inform, structure, and narrow how we formulate arguments and limit our ways of knowing (or what we can know). Both authors seem to invite affective modes of reading (the estranged sibling of critical outlook) back into the fold, not in an attempt to abolish critical reading, but to enliven and renew its possibilities, to redeem them, in a sense.

            These readings got me thinking about what “redemptive scholarship” might look like, how it might be enacted, sustained, and integrated into our current critical climate. How might the timbre of a traditionally critical arguments benefit (or suffer) from a reparative bent? What possibilities might emerge by embracing, rather than dismissing affective readings? Sedgwick seems to think reparative positions may cultivate a sense of hope among scholars and readers (146). And I tend to agree. That hope feels like such a strange concept or idea to enter into a scholarly argument perhaps reveals that much of contemporary scholarship has a bleak sense of futurity (is hopeless too harsh a pronouncement?). That is to say, it seems primarily preoccupied with decentering, deconstructing, demoralizing, and disavowing (in essence, a destructive posturing?). There are always exceptions, we know. And the critical reading can be redemptive without an explicitly reparative angle, I think, but the point remains, what Warner and Sedgwick are both getting at, that critical and paranoid readings are specifically constructed modes that developed as means for legitimizing and systematizing the field of literary studies. They do not represent, however, the only worthy (or most productive!) ways of reading, no matter how naturalized they have become in English departments far and wide.  For me, one of the most important aspects of the work we do as scholars in the Humanities revolves around how our research contributes to collective concepts of futurity. Scholarship, to a large degree, has a wonderful capacity to imagine the future via the past and thereby enact change in the present.  Hoping seems to me to be an integral part (affect) of this imagining that has the potential to bring about positive change. What do y’all think? I’m interested to know how you might envision your own work operating as ‘redemptive scholarship’? What forms does it take, and what conclusions is it moving towards?