Abstract
With a special nested structure, Rita Felski follows and finalizes Rem Koolhaas and Bruno Latour's manifesto of “Context Stinks!” The three theorists of different disciplines such as architecture, sociology and literature take context as a conservative proposition. In response to the contextualist paradigm that is threatened by self-limitation, self-exclusion and generalization, Koolhaas creates space for innovation through the strategy of “bigness”, while Latour questions the theory of social entities, introducing non-human actors into a new coordinate system. Based on them, Felski tries to remold the future of literature within the framework of actor-network theory, in order to forestall text from degrading into historical materials. She strives to dismantle the temporal structure of contextualism, revealing the emotional overtones of hermeneutics of suspicion and advocating a postcritical phenomenology of reading. However, there are some compatibility problems between actor-network theory and literary criticism, and Felski's midlevel approach is also at odds with the inherent requirement of absolutization in their anti-context manifesto. The reader-oriented reading theory is an important supplement to the contextual criticism, but not necessarily in a hyper-historical way.
Keywords
anti-context, Rita Felski, Bruno Latour, Rem Koolhaas, post-critique
First Page
185
Last Page
195
Recommended Citation
Su, Lijun. 2025. "Rita Felski's Critique of Contextualism: Taking Rem Koolhaas and Bruno Latour as a Clue." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 44, (6): pp.185-195. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol44/iss6/19
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