Quotes from Rita Felski

Education is not just about acquiring knowledge and skills but about being initiated into a certain sensibility.

every reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to the reader to enable him to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have perceived himself. And the recognition by the reader in his own self of what the book says is the proof of its veracity.

it encourages its readers to engage in similar acts of self-scrutiny.

The difference between a hermeneutics of restoration and a hermeneutics of suspicion, we might say, lies in the difference between unveiling and unmasking. Here

We are fundamentally social creatures whose survival and well-being depend on our interactions with particular, embodied, others.

Even if we are all products of the cultural blender, each mixture of influences, vocabularies, memories, orientations, and temperament possesses a distinct and unmistakable flavor. We make ourselves out of the models we encounter; we give ourselves a form through the different ways we inhabit other forms. And we bring these differences to the event of reading, even as we are reoriented— sometimes subtly, sometimes significantly— by the sum of what we read.

self and society are always interfused; there is no clear place where one ends and the other begins. Subjectivity is always caught up with intersubjectivity, personal experience awash with social and political meanings.

Literary theory, especially, cast its lot with a spirit of ceaseless skepticism and incessant interrogation; modeling itself on Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust, it was "der Geist, der stets verneint"—the spirit that always negates.