Selective Affinities
Literature and New Critical Theory
Format:Hardback
Publisher:The University of Chicago Press
Publishing:9th Nov '26
£92.00
This title is due to be published on 9th November, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
Rita Felski’s new work brings literary studies into conversation with more affirmative and democratic forms of critical theory.
Literary critics associate the phrase “Frankfurt School” with early twentieth-century thinkers like Adorno or Benjamin, but contemporary German critical theory remains largely unknown. In this new book, Rita Felski draws on the work of a group of important philosophers and social theorists to offer fresh readings of literary texts by Robert Walser, Didier Eribon, Zadie Smith, Magda Szabo, John Williams, and Dionne Brand.
Through five key concepts derived from her reading of German theory—disclosure, recognition, self-realization, resonance, and lifeworld—Selective Affinities asks how these literary texts articulate the relationship between intellectuals and others. Contrary to critical theories that discount everyday experience, new German thought reveals the ethical, existential, and political richness of such experience. Through this framework, Felski shows that literature, theory, and experience are not opposed but mutually constitutive.
“Selective Affinities is a valuable contribution to literary studies, written with Felski’s characteristic verve. I expect that, like Felski’s other recent books, it will be read eagerly by readers from every rank of the academy and across literary fields. The book lucidly lays out the central concepts of a cluster of thinkers associated with the New Frankfurt School with whom most literary scholars may be largely unfamiliar, but whose ideas—as Felski demonstrates, in absorbing, perceptive readings of a wide range of twentieth and twenty-first-century literary works—can not only be fruitfully brought to bear on literary studies but also reconfigure how we understand the relationship between literature and life, between the realms of the aesthetic and the everyday.”
-- Sarah Tindal Kareem, University of California, Los AngISBN: 9780226849607
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: 454g
256 pages