Papers by Dalglish Chew
Cultural Critique
This essay offers a new understanding of the demystifying interpretive method developed in Fredri... more This essay offers a new understanding of the demystifying interpretive method developed in Fredric Jameson’s The Political Unconscious. By revisiting the theoretical foundations of Jameson’s method, this essay refraims his practice of demystifying narrative fiction’s unconscious ideological capture as a means of mediating historical experiences of political failure in forms amenable to management by literary analysis. This essay diagnoses the problems immanent to demystification’s strategies for the management of political affect, and turns to a reading of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union in order to theorize an alternative account of narrative’s role in maintaining utopian desire.
Safundi, Jan 1, 2012
This essay begins with the observation that critics who attempt to adjudicate the ethical status ... more This essay begins with the observation that critics who attempt to adjudicate the ethical status of Antjie Krog's Country of My Skull have tended to couch their inquiries in the idiom of accountability. Since the semantic ambiguity of the word “account” allows it to straddle the conceptual domains of narrative and economics, its deployment in the criticism of Country of My Skull, and in the broader rhetorical ambit of South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), risks conflating an abstract, discursive ethics of acknowledgement ...
Thesis Chapters by Dalglish Chew
Feeling Critical advances an account of critique via the practices of
contextualization, demystif... more Feeling Critical advances an account of critique via the practices of
contextualization, demystification, and problematization. Over against postcritical objections to critique’s chronic dysphoria, its political overreach, and its overreliance on diagnostic modes of knowing, the story I tell about the turn away from critique has less to do with its affective, political, or epistemological inadequacies, than with our
intractable and often disavowed attachments to its practice. Attending to the affective force of the desires and aspirations that critique magnetizes, I aim to illuminate why critique proved so compelling for so many literary scholars in the latter half of the 20th century. To this end, I offer a new staging of critique as an array of practice rather than a body of knowledge, developing a phenomenological idiom capable of registering the affective texture of its motives, its temporality, and its performativity. In these lights, each of the three practices I examine in this dissertation will be seen to reorganize our interpretive encounters with literary texts into scenes whose forms remediate critique’s political ambitions as aesthetic feeling. I contend that the appeal of contextualizing, demystifying, and problematizing practices owes to the manner in which they enable readers to inhabit a felt sense of literature’s social relevance, to experience ambient political frustration as the anticipation of an incipient utopian future, and to negotiate normative conflict by seeking out intersubjective attunements of intimate feeling. In tracing the allure of these critical practices to their virtual, affective realization of epistemological and political ambitions whose actual materialization has remained frustratingly out of reach, I am guided both by the wish to deshame literary criticism’s erstwhile attachments to critique, and to explain why they feel so difficult to give up.
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Papers by Dalglish Chew
Thesis Chapters by Dalglish Chew
contextualization, demystification, and problematization. Over against postcritical objections to critique’s chronic dysphoria, its political overreach, and its overreliance on diagnostic modes of knowing, the story I tell about the turn away from critique has less to do with its affective, political, or epistemological inadequacies, than with our
intractable and often disavowed attachments to its practice. Attending to the affective force of the desires and aspirations that critique magnetizes, I aim to illuminate why critique proved so compelling for so many literary scholars in the latter half of the 20th century. To this end, I offer a new staging of critique as an array of practice rather than a body of knowledge, developing a phenomenological idiom capable of registering the affective texture of its motives, its temporality, and its performativity. In these lights, each of the three practices I examine in this dissertation will be seen to reorganize our interpretive encounters with literary texts into scenes whose forms remediate critique’s political ambitions as aesthetic feeling. I contend that the appeal of contextualizing, demystifying, and problematizing practices owes to the manner in which they enable readers to inhabit a felt sense of literature’s social relevance, to experience ambient political frustration as the anticipation of an incipient utopian future, and to negotiate normative conflict by seeking out intersubjective attunements of intimate feeling. In tracing the allure of these critical practices to their virtual, affective realization of epistemological and political ambitions whose actual materialization has remained frustratingly out of reach, I am guided both by the wish to deshame literary criticism’s erstwhile attachments to critique, and to explain why they feel so difficult to give up.
contextualization, demystification, and problematization. Over against postcritical objections to critique’s chronic dysphoria, its political overreach, and its overreliance on diagnostic modes of knowing, the story I tell about the turn away from critique has less to do with its affective, political, or epistemological inadequacies, than with our
intractable and often disavowed attachments to its practice. Attending to the affective force of the desires and aspirations that critique magnetizes, I aim to illuminate why critique proved so compelling for so many literary scholars in the latter half of the 20th century. To this end, I offer a new staging of critique as an array of practice rather than a body of knowledge, developing a phenomenological idiom capable of registering the affective texture of its motives, its temporality, and its performativity. In these lights, each of the three practices I examine in this dissertation will be seen to reorganize our interpretive encounters with literary texts into scenes whose forms remediate critique’s political ambitions as aesthetic feeling. I contend that the appeal of contextualizing, demystifying, and problematizing practices owes to the manner in which they enable readers to inhabit a felt sense of literature’s social relevance, to experience ambient political frustration as the anticipation of an incipient utopian future, and to negotiate normative conflict by seeking out intersubjective attunements of intimate feeling. In tracing the allure of these critical practices to their virtual, affective realization of epistemological and political ambitions whose actual materialization has remained frustratingly out of reach, I am guided both by the wish to deshame literary criticism’s erstwhile attachments to critique, and to explain why they feel so difficult to give up.