Situating Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories in the context of late Victorian information culture shows how Holmes's professionalism worries the line between information and knowledge, surveillance institutions and liberal society. Because of his information savvy, Holmes has often been considered a figure of surveillance. A closer look at the Holmes narratives, however, reveals that he occupies a more ambiguous place—while his surveillance techniques seem to align him with bureaucratic institutions, he asserts his independence from state institutions and acts as a liberal agent concerned with information sharing and the moral well-being of society. Holmes's cognitive process strikes a balance between data and narrative, allowing him to maintain a critical distance essential to his professionalism and liberalism.

Virginia Woolf's “A Sketch of the Past” (1939–40) develops her most radical ontological and pedagogical insights, which are inseparably connected by her concept “moments of being”—redefined in this essay as pedagogical accidents. This redefinition opens readers to an unexplored dimension of Woolf's late thought: namely, the reorientation of learning and teaching around the creative function of accidents, the unhinged temporality of “sudden violent shock[s]” that repeat their difference across one's lifespan, and the prioritization of feeling. The nonlinear, nonrealist, and nonsequential temporality of these events serves Woolf as a model not only for the memoir but for the double task of learning how to write her life otherwise and of teaching her potential readers the shapes and intensities of their own selves and lives. My reading of Woolf's memoir as a work of “sensuous pedagogy” attempts to account for the importance of feeling to this task.

J. Saunders Redding's To Make a Poet Black (1939) changed the way African American poetry would be read and valued. In an effort to articulate an African American modernism, Redding rewrote the recent history of the New Negro Renaissance, validating and skewing its literary production. The standards and values that Redding used helped to advance the reputations of Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Jean Toomer but also led to discrimination against femininity and its associated poetic forms. By incorporating the gendered matrix of the New Criticism into African American literary studies, he helped to create a new formal consensus, which cut across the black and the white academies and united critics on the left and the right of the ideological spectrum, in opposition to women's poetry.

Near the end of their lives, the poets Jorge Luis Borges and Seamus Heaney both translated the Old English poem Deor. Medieval Germanic literature was an object of deep ambivalence for these poets, and their identification with Deor, the poem's eponymous scop, charges their translations with a sense of preemptive self-mourning. Analyzing the structure of the poem, particularly its refrain, “That passed over, this can too,” reveals a chronological framework in which the reader's temporality forms a legible outer limit enclosing the poem as a whole. The poem's acceptance of its own finitude resonates with the work Borges and Jacques Derrida produced late in their careers, as they tried to understand the afterlife and independence of their own creations. Just as the poet Deor was outlasted by the poem that ostensibly bears his name, the authorial name survives and mourns the mortal author.

The famed French explorer and writer Jane Dieulafoy became a celebrity in the late nineteenth century for the discoveries that she and her husband, Marcel, made on their excursions in Persia. Dieulafoy wore pants during this time and upon resettling in Paris acquired a permit from the Parisian police to wear men's clothing, even as she was embraced by the socially conservative literary and political elite. Recognizing Dieulafoy through the modern notion of transgender allows us to make sense of that seeming contradiction. Two of her long-overlooked novels, Volontaire (1892) and Frère Pélage (1894), can be read as early transgender narratives. Through their gender-crossing protagonists, these texts provide an intellectual framework for understanding how Dieulafoy reconciled her gender expression with the religious and social structures that she held dear.

Jeanette Winterson's beautiful memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Is a biography of a reader, a book about reading—reading for your life. In addition to the Bible, there are six books in the Plymouth Brethren Winterson household, and they are all nonfiction. Jeanette's mother, Mrs. Winterson, bans the reading of fiction, so young Jeanette reads in secret, in the outside lavatory or under covers at night, carefully depositing each read book under her mattress until it floats so dangerously high that it threatens to reveal the habit considered so vicious by her mother but that is sustaining Jeanette. Mrs. Winterson reads the Bible; young Jeanette has a memory of Jane Eyre read aloud in her mother's good reading voice, but Mrs. Winterson doctors it (with the skill of a clever reader, an astute stylist) so that Jane marries St. John Rivers and goes off to the mission with him. T. S. Eliot makes her cry in Accrington Public Library because his lines “This is one moment / But know that another / Shall pierce you with a sudden painful joy” (from Murder in the Cathedral; qtd. in Winterson 39) give her hope that she will survive the moment she is in, and so does Gertrude Stein saying to Alice B. Toklas: “Right or wrong, this is the road and we are on it” (from The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas; qtd. in Winterson 130). Jeanette Winterson claims that she “puts herself inside books for safe-keeping” and that “a tough life needs a tough language” (36, 40). The people around her have that tough language. She hears lines that she later locates in Shakespeare, a writer she regards as “not part of the alphabet, any more than black is a colour” (115). When she is homeless and living in her Mini, supporting herself at the local sixth-form college by working at the weekend market and the local library, she reads “English Literature A-Z,” in the order in which it is shelved at the Accrington Public Library (115–30). Books are home when she is homeless (61); they are doses of medicine (42), saving people from isolation and the suffering that comes from feeling that nothing about their life is recognizable to others or intelligible to themselves, from being castaways from the tribe of human.

Literary criticism thrives on the distinction between first and second reading, on what is often parsed as absorptive reading versus critical reading, belletristic versus analytic reading. It sets itself against the idea that a irst reading of a text might be the one in which we have “seen [it] well”-on the assumption that critical insight is belated (Emerson 476). “As scholars, we read lengthy texts [such as novels] sequentially; then, in order to write, we inevitably reread recursively,” which has the efect, as the critic Michaela Bronstein goes on to observe, of producing conlicted conceptions of the novel as either “a static object (a form) or an experience in time” (77). One goal of literary criticism would appear to be to keep readers from lingering in that temporal and immersive irst reading in order to arrive at an assessment of the total work. First reading and critique are viewed as largely anathema; second thoughts inspire us to relinquish irst impressions, in a process of questioning and revision infused with a spirit of skepticism and doubt. here is an air of supersession- something vanguardist-about critique, but as Bronstein also points out, “the purpose of rereading need not be to revise the irst reading from an analytic distance. . . . Close reading [can use] the recursive process of analysis to approach, rather than to erase, sequential reading” (78). I take Bronstein's projection of a literary criticism that accounts for rather than dismisses the absorptive aspects of irst reading as an accurate description of Rita Felski's project in The Limits of Critique, a manifesto that calls on literature scholars to recommit to “care or concern for [aesthetic] phenomena” (107). Felski makes the case for a pragmatist phenomenology and calls her method for its achievement “postcritique,” a mode of reading that declines to unmask, demystify, interrogate, subvert, or expose the literary text (the habit of generations of recent critics). Postcritique means to expand the uses of literature beyond that of marking an absence or an insufficiency, returning readers to the values that drew them to the literary work of art in the first place (“aesthetic pleasure, increased selfunderstanding, moral relection, perceptual reinvigoration, ecstatic self- loss, emotional consolation, or heightened sensation” [188]).

What are the “limits of critique” in the age of trump? At a time when nationalist and proto-fascist movements are on the rise in many parts of the world? When hate-filled words and actions against the foreign, the racial or religious other, the gendered, and the differently abled are empowered to come out of the shadows and into the public realm, poisoning the atmosphere, spreading fear and despair? When corruption and greed threaten not only the foundations of democracy but also the planet on which we depend? Don't we need critique more than ever—critique of lies, of discourses and their histories, of policies and the power structures they reflect? The answer is both yes and no. Or rather, we do need critique, but we also need so much more than critique. Critique as an end in itself is not enough.

It is no criticism to note that Rita Felski's provocative, Frank, and spirited book The Limits of Critique is itself a work of critique, and a rhetorically powerful and persuasive one at that. While the hermeneutics of suspicion comes under considerable analytic pressure in the book, Felski does not hesitate to read for hidden meanings, tease out internal contradictions, or cast a skeptical eye on skepticism. Rather, she effectively engages in critique, without apology or embarrassment.

In The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski Uses Paul Ricouer's phrase “hermeneutics of suspicion” to frame and reappraise “a diverse range of practices that are often grouped under the rubric of critique: symptomatic reading, ideology critique, Foucauldian historicism, various techniques of scanning texts for signs of transgression or resistance” (2–3). Throughout the book, she argues that literary criticism has overvalued this approach, in part because of its many affordances and pleasures. Without rejecting critique altogether, Felski concludes that “it is one way of reading and thinking among others: finite, limited, and fallible” (192).

In her scholarship and her editorship of the journal New Literary History, Rita Felski has played a central role in recent debates about reading methods in literary studies. Literary critics engaged in endless discussions about how to read may strike an odd note, since reading is the one thing everyone assumes we know how to do. But in the face of the defunding of the humanities, critics have been rethinking the epistemological and ethical grounds of the field and proposing new and often unfamiliar approaches. In her latest book, The Limits of Critique, Felski addresses this “legitimation crisis” by turning her attention to critique, that systematic and skeptical form of inquiry that, she argues, dominates the contemporary practice of literary criticism (5). Critique, associated since Immanuel Kant with the questioning of religious and other forms of dogma, has in her view become a new dogma, an obligatory “style of thinking” in the profession (2). Focusing on critique as “mood and method” (1), Felski follows Paul Ricoeur in considering the attitude of suspicion—detached, wary, vigilant—as the guarantee of scholarly rigor and the last refuge of oppositional thought. Felski has little patience with such high-flown claims. Her focus is on the limits of critique: she sees it as one approach among others, reminding her readers that suspicion is a professional habitus with established links to law, expertise, and bureaucracy. She does not wish to bury critique; rather, she wishes to “redescribe” it, to “offer a fresh slant on a familiar practice in the hope of getting a clearer sense of how and why critics read” (2). If the effect of this reframing is to deflate critique, Felski's ultimate goal in The Limits of Critique is to widen “the affective range of criticism”: “Why are we so hyperarticulate about our adversaries and so excruciatingly tongue-tied about our loves?” (13), she asks, and sets out to imagine a more generous criticism.

Faultfinding is the fault that Rita Felski's The Limits of Critique attributes to literary criticism. Faultfinding is also, of course, what Felski's book spends most of its time doing. Had it not abandoned itself so completely to faultfinding, its central insight might have led it to do more interesting things. (The fact that these more interesting things are already being done by much socially engaged criticism is one obvious weakness of her argument, which puffs itself up by expanding its range of targets so as to take in nearly the whole profession and then, sensing a challenge, steps back in mock horror so as to suggest, “No, of course, I didn't mean that!”) As an example of these alternative, nonfaultfinding versions of critique, the book might have tried to explore the reasons the humanities are as susceptible as they are to the holier-than-thou self-righteousness that Felski both accuses and, however reluctantly, also personifies.

Google Ngram Viewer reports that usage of the word interrogation has been climbing steadily since 1942. liberals will of course argue, not without force, that the George W. Bush administration's embrace of “enhanced interrogation” (i.e., torture) drove the recent steady rise. To that sound point one might, however, also advance a less palatable observation: that representatives of the academy were in the interrogation room, doing the interrogating, long before the Bush administration got into the act.

I want to thank Wai Chee Dimock for initiating this forum and my agile interlocutors for responding to my work. In the final chapter of The Limits of Critique, I talk about reading as an act of cocreation and composition—a practice of thinking and feeling with, rather than against, a text. Such a vision of what it means to read is amply confirmed in these generous and generative essays.

Sarah Beckwith is almost preternaturally attuned to what I am trying to do in The Limits of Critique, to the extent of conveying my ideas better than I do myself. She glosses postcritical, for example, as meaning that “we come after critique and through it rather than that we have dispensed with it, though that meaning will surely be ascribed to her.” Nailed on both counts. I appreciate her attentiveness to how I write: to mood and disposition as being fundamentally a matter of form as well as content. I am not sure whether the style of The Limits of Critique is my voice—it is a way of writing I adopted for a specific purpose that may or may not appear again—but it seemed crucial, in tackling a book about critique's limits, to aim for a tone that was playful rather than censorious—or at least playfully censorious.

This cluster of essays stems from the spring reception workshop on autoexoticism, which was organized by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Programme (OCCT) and the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) and took place on 19 March 2015 at the University of Oxford. Speakers at the workshop, also the contributors to this special feature, had been discussing the question of exoticism for the past few months. The topic of autoexoticism emerged through our discussions, and we felt the need to explore it because we were dissatisfied with the status quo of criticism on exoticism and intercultural practices. These essays are therefore both the result of our attempt to rethink exoticism and its discourses by articulating the autoexotic and an invitation to further explore and problematize the topic.

In nineteenth-century france, the so-called province, denoting everything outside Paris, was considered a foreign land by Parisian writers, who often constructed it as an exotic space. When we deal with this kind of provincial exoticism, however, considering this perspective alone risks painting an incomplete picture of the French literary field. Through the example of Samuel-Henri Berthoud, an author from the north of France, my intention here is to shed light on autoexoticist practices by indigenous provincial writers and to explore how they actively reclaimed, fostered, and enhanced exotic constructions about their provinces. Indeed, a wealth of evidence supports my argument that their acceptance of hegemonic constructions from the dominant culture was not passive but rather an active and creative reappropriation. This essay also challenges the idea of a stable hegemonic cultural center around which the marginal authors and literary works gravitate. Before tackling these issues, let us take a step back and briefly survey the particular value of provincial France at the beginning of the nineteenth century.