The Alice F. Holmes Summer Institute Presents

This talk will address the relations between recent reassessments of critique in literary studies and current debates in the field of education. Drawing on the work of Hartmut Rosa, Rita Felski argues for the relevance of “resonance” as an educational concept. Resonance is not an emotion but a relation: not a positive feeling but an often ambivalent experience of aliveness, excitement, and connectivity. As a sociological as well as phenomenological concept, it encourages us to acknowledge the institutional factors that shape the treatment of education as either resonance or resource. Felski will draw out affinities between Hartmut Rosa’s suggestive concept of resonance and two novels of academic life that capture the impersonal intimacies of scholarship.

Rita Felski is the John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia and the former editor of New Literary History. A prolific author, she has written Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (1989), The Gender of Modernity (1995), Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (2000), Literature After Feminism (2003), Uses of Literature (2008), The Limits of Critique (2015), and Hooked (2020). Professor Felski is the editor of Rethinking Tragedy (2008) and co-editor of Comparison: Theories, Approaches, Uses (2013), Critique and Postcritique (2017), and Latour and the Humanities (2020). From July 18 - 29, Professor Felski is teaching the 2022 Alice F. Holmes Summer Institute in the Department of English, University of Kansas, on the topic "Criticism and Attachment.”

Rita Felski: "On Resonance"