Date of Graduation
5-2025
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy in English (PhD)
Degree Level
Graduate
Department
English
Advisor/Mentor
Dempsey, Sean A.
Committee Member
Marren, Susan, M.
Second Committee Member
Cochran, Robert B.
Keywords
American Transcendentalism; literary postcritique; rewilding; self-cultivation; the ethics of care
Abstract
Literary postcritique is an emergent theoretical approach to literature that has elicited skepticism among many in academia because of its central claim that their unchecked overreliance on suspicious and symptomatic reading styles is diminishing the pedagogical potential of our reading together. To restore this potential, Rita Felski, a champion of literary postcritique, suggests adopting an aesthetic reading style, a mid-level interpretation that neither indulges in the formalists’ habits of close scrutiny nor in the cultural critics’ wider lens of political and social contexts. In The Limits of Critique and Hooked, Felski argues that an aesthetic reading style can develop in students vital relational understandings and re-sensitize them to shared affective experiences in their classrooms’ discursive communities. For this project, I suggest that Felski’s twenty-first-century post-critical option echoes the reformative work of a certain stripe of nineteenth-century Romantic thinkers: the American Transcendentalists. This project’s goal is to emphasize the democratic value of Felski’s work by translating the approach of literary postcritique into terms of American Transcendentalism. Its comparison of Felski’s theoretical approach and Henry David Thoreau’s ethical practices reveals that both provide readers with opportunities to reorient themselves within diverse social networks, improve their caring skills of attention, understanding, and responsiveness, and rescale viable, sustainable social reform to effect change through small, everyday interactions. These similarities serve to repackage literary postcritique and aesthetic reading styles as worthy of their skeptics’ reconsideration. The project concludes with an invitation to reimagine curriculum, instruction, and assessment in ways that align with Felski and Thoreau’s sincerest ambition: to repair our sociality.
Citation
Aldrich, T. (2025). Literary Postcritique and American Transcendentalism: Helping Students Practice Community-Building by Rewilding Literature in the Classroom. Graduate Theses and Dissertations Retrieved from https://scholarworks.uark.edu/etd/5768
Included in
American Studies Commons, English Language and Literature Commons, Language and Literacy Education Commons
