Poetics Today 32:2 (Summer 2011) doi 10.1215/03335372-1261208
© 2011 by Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics
Suspicious Minds
Rita Felski
University of Virginia, Eng­lish
Abstract The hermeneutics of suspicion is a term coined by Paul Ricoeur to describe
the practice of reading texts against the grain to expose their repressed or hidden
meanings. This essay examines the distinctive features of such a hermeneutics as
they have shaped literary theory and criticism in recent decades. Suspicious reading,
it proposes, is not only an intellectual exercise in demystification, but also a critical
style and scholarly sensibility that offers specific pleasures. These pleasures include
the aesthetic and ethical satisfactions of fashioning detective-­fiction-­style plots.
The literary critic, like the detective, interprets clues, establishes causal connections,
and identifies a guilty party: namely, the literary work accused of whitewashing
or concealing social oppression. Deconstructionist critics like Shoshana Felman
seek to expose the dangers of such a suspicious hermeneutics but remain thoroughly
entangled in the very method they seek to repudiate. The goal of the essay, then, is
not to critique and be suspicious of suspicion. Rather, it seeks to take the hermeneutics
of suspicion seriously and to understand why it has proved so attractive to contemporary
scholars. At the same time, it also suggests that the present-­day ubiquity
and predictability of this critical method makes its claims to intellectual novelty or
political boldness ever harder to sustain.
Recent discussions of affect (Radway 1997; Thrailkill 2007) have emphasized
literary criticism’s distrust of emotion, but there is little acknowledgment
of criticism’s own affective registers. How are method and mood,
argument and attitude intertwined? The typical Introduction to Criticism
and Theory course in the United States or United Kingdom classifies its
content according to intellectual tenets or political convictions (deconDownloaded
from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
216 Poetics Today 32:2
struction, queer theory, psychoanalysis, postcolonial studies). Yet styles of
academic reading are affective as well as cognitive, inviting us to adopt attitudes
of trust, impatience, reverence, or wariness toward the texts we read.
Academic criticism contains its own structures of pre-­evaluation (Smith
1995), encouraging readers to adopt a certain disposition and to approach
texts in a specific frame of mind. In present-­day literary studies, this frame
of mind is frequently one of wariness, vigilance, and distrust. Drawing on
Suzanne Keen’s invitation to think of genre as an “affect-­producing template,”
I apply this idea to contemporary academic genres of suspicious
reading. What are the distinctive formal devices and rhetorical strategies
of a hermeneutic of suspicion? And how do these features help establish
an affect-­laden as well as analytic relation to texts? Suspicious reading, I
argue, is not just an intellectual exercise in demystification but also a distinctive
style and sensibility with its own specific pleasures.1
	 The hermeneutics of suspicion is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur, who
famously identified Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud as the founders of a
“school of suspicion,” the primary architects of a distinctively modern style
of interpretation that is driven by a desire to demystify, an adamant refusal
to take words at face value. In spite of their many differences, Ricoeur
(1970: 32) argues, these thinkers share a common commitment to reducing
“the illusions and lies of consciousness.” What drives such a hermeneutic
is the conviction that appearances are deceptive, that texts do not gracefully
relinquish their meanings, that manifest content shrouds darker,
more unpalatable truths. It is a mode of interpretation that adopts a distrustful
attitude toward texts in order to draw out meanings or implications
that are not intended and that remain inaccessible to their authors
as well as to ordinary readers. In his argument, Ricoeur develops a key
distinction between a hermeneutics of trust, which is driven by a sense of
reverence and goes deeper into the text in search of revelation, and a hermeneutics
of suspicion, which adopts an adversarial sensibility to probe
for concealed, repressed, or disavowed meanings (ibid.: 9). The difference
between these approaches, we might say, is the difference between unveiling
and unmasking.
	 Ricoeur’s model of a suspicious hermeneutics offers a valuable reference
point for assessing the recent history of literary studies in the wake of
several waves of literary and cultural criticism that have encouraged styles
of vigilant and mistrustful reading. Here we can point to the influence
of structuralist and poststructuralist modes of thought, with their built-­in
1. This essay focuses on the suspicious dimensions of contemporary styles of criticism. It
does not address the related issue of how works of literature encourage suspicion in readers
via the use of techniques such as unreliable narrators.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
Felski • Suspicious Minds 217
wariness of commonsense or everyday meaning; the impact of an identity
politics of race, gender, and sexuality that encouraged readings of canonical
texts against the grain in order to expose their hidden biases; the influence
of Marxism via the models of symptomatic reading developed by
Macherey (1975), Jameson (1981), and others, and, finally, the taken-­for-­
granted nature of Freudian schemata, which made it easy for scholars to
transfer such schemata to the study of literature and culture via analogies
such as the political unconscious. The hermeneutics of suspicion, in other
words, is a term applicable to a diverse range of critical frameworks. While
psychoanalytical feminism, New Historicism, and postcolonial criticism,
to name just a few current approaches, are characterized by obvious differences
in focus and method, they share the conviction that the most rigorous
reading is one that is performed against the grain, that the primary
rationale for reading a text is to critique it by underscoring what it does
not know and cannot understand.The influence of such approaches, moreover,
reaches well beyond the confines of literature departments; when
anthropologists unmask the covert imperialist convictions of their predecessors,
when sociologists read the texts of Weber, Marx, or Durkheim
against the grain, when legal scholars challenge the purported neutrality
of the law to lay bare its hidden agendas, they all subscribe to a style of
interpretation driven by a spirit of disenchantment.
	 To be sure, not all literary theory manifests an adversarial and distrustful
attitude to the literary work. Indeed, quite a few voices—often those
associated with deconstruction or with recent Lévinas-­inspired work on
the ethics of reading—extol the alterity of literary texts, testifying to their
radical singularity and enigmatic strangeness. And yet suspicion is not so
much dissipated in such arguments as it is displaced. We do not need to be
suspicious of the text, in other words, because it is already doing the work
of suspicion for us, because it is engaged in the negative work of subverting
the self-­evident, challenging the commonplace, relentlessly questioning
idées fixes and idées recus. The literary text thus matches and exceeds the
critic’s own vigilance, performing a metacommentary on the traps of interpretation,
a knowing anticipation and exposure of all possible hermeneutic
blunders. Critic and work are bound together in an alliance of heightened
mistrust vis-­à-­vis commonsensical forms of language and thought (Felski
2009).
	 While the term hermeneutics of suspicion with its obligatory footnote to
Ricoeur, is often invoked in current literary debates, the features of such a
hermeneutics have, until recently, received attention mainly from scholars
working in religious studies, intellectual history, legal theory, and related
fields (Stewart 1989; Thiele 1991; Bermann 2001; Josselson 2004; Farmer
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
218 Poetics Today 32:2
2007). In the current climate of retrospection, however, as critics reflect on
the intellectual legacy of recent decades and reassess methods of reading
that have come to seem stale and unsurprising, the hermeneutics of suspicion
is shifting from a mode of analysis to an object of analysis within
literary studies. A style of interpretation that once seemed entirely self-­
evident and self-­explanatory now finds itself squirming under the spotlight
(Sedgwick 1997; Latour 2004; Strowick 2005; Best and Marcus 2009; Felski
2009; Love 2010). Why do so many scholars feel impelled to unmask
and demystify the works that they read? What sustains their certainty that
a text is withholding some vital information, that they must authorize their
commentary by highlighting what is concealed, repressed, unsaid?
	 Such convictions owe much, as I have noted, to contemporary styles of
intellectual politics that, following the reception of Althusser, Lacan, Derrida,
Foucault and others, have largely relinquished affirmative or utopian
projects of world-­building in favor of the rhetoric of subversion, estrangement,
and critique. The U.S. reception of French theory, François Cusset
(2008: 83) observes, helped to encourage a “suspicion without limits”
in which scholars increasingly edged away from any espousal of positive
values or norms, preferring to present themselves as “champions of subversion.”
The pervasiveness of this mindset also testifies to the increasing
pressures of professionalization and the scramble to shore up academic
authority: the hermeneutics of suspicion, after all, assigns a unique depth
of understanding to the trained reader or theorist, equipped to see through
the illusions in which others are immersed. According to John Farrell
(2006: 4), this radical mistrust of apparent or commonsense meaning characteristic
of post-­1960s literary criticism has engendered a mode of interpretation
and argument that is quintessentially paranoid in tone.
	 What leads the reader to pause, however, is the extent to which Farrell’s
own account replicates, even intensifies, the very method of interpretation
that it is eager to repudiate. As Sedgwick (1997) shows in her virtuoso
meditation on this issue, paranoia reveals an uncanny ability to reproduce
itself indefinitely by latching onto a variety of hosts—to accuse others of
paranoia is itself a paranoid move. The doubting of doubt underscores
the critic’s entrapment within a suspicious sensibility and the mentality of
critique, as she finds herself caught in an infinite regress of skeptical questioning.
As will become evident in the course of this essay, it is hard to see
how any objections to suspicion, my own included, can entirely escape the
snarls of this contradiction. Nevertheless, “paranoia,” in my view, proves
an especially unhelpful concept in grappling with the significance of a suspicious
hermeneutic; even if critics insist that they are using the term in a
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
Felski • Suspicious Minds 219
metaphorical rather than a strictly diagnostic sense, its effect is to pathologize
the entire process of critical interpretation.
	 It is also noteworthy, in this context, that while the hermeneutics of
suspicion is by no means a pejorative term—Ricoeur’s own stance, for
example, is entirely respectful, even admiring—the phrase is rarely
claimed by its practitioners. The reason, no doubt, is that scholars tend to
bristle at any perceived personalization of their academic work, assuming
that any reference to motive or disposition will diminish their scholarship
by undermining its intellectual credibility. To acknowledge the affective
dimensions of argument, however, is not necessarily to invalidate its intellectual
or analytical components, but merely to acknowledge the obvious:
modes of critical thought are also forms of orientation toward the world,
shaped by sensibility, attitude, and affective style. Yet the role of such factors
in the shaping of contemporary scholarship is rarely acknowledged.
	 My goal, then, is to redescribe rather than simply refute the hermeneutics
of suspicion, to examine it from various angles, to treat it not just as
an error to be rectified but as a style of thought more multiform and mysterious
than it first appears. Such an approach strives to be generous as
well as censorious, phenomenological as well as historical, seeking to do
justice to the allures of a critical sensibility as well as tracing its limits. It
conceives of the hermeneutics of suspicion as not just a cognitive exercise
but an orientation infused with a mélange of affective and characterological
components. In short, suspiciousness constitutes a distinct sensibility
or disposition whose parameters exceed the specifics of its intellectual content.
It serves as a defining feature of an exemplary persona often invoked
in contemporary theory: the critic who strives to avoid or suspend normative
commitments in favor of an ethos of restless questioning and self-­
questioning (Anderson 2006; Hunter 2007).
	 While this model of the literary critic is a recently established one, I
dissent from Ricoeur’s larger account of suspicious reading as a uniquely
modern intellectual phenomenon that originates with Descartes. In an
extended argument that reaches beyond the bounds of this essay (Felski,
forthcoming), I question this view by tracing a history of suspicious
interpretation back to the medieval heresy trial. Heresy presented a hermeneutic
problem of the first order and the transcripts of religious inquisitions
reveal an acute awareness on the part of inquisitors that truth is
not self-­evident, that language conceals, distorts, and contains traps for
the unwary, that words should be treated cautiously and with suspicion
(Peters 1988; Arnold 2001). In this context, it is also necessary to supplement
Ricoeur’s presentation of the hermeneutics of suspicion as an interDownloaded
from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
220 Poetics Today 32:2
nal development within the history of ideas, as the brainchild of a few
exceptional thinkers. In reality, suspicious reading has a larger, more variegated
and more mundane history. As Elizabeth Strowick (2005) remarks,
suspicion becomes a widely diffused interpretative method in the nineteenth
century and early twentieth century, manifested in various forms of
knowledge that are organized around the mistrust of surface appearance
and the reading of clues, such as criminology, psychoanalysis, and literature.
While Ricoeur’s (1970: 33) account of the hermeneutics of suspicion
stresses its heroic, oppositional, nay-­saying qualities (“these three masters
of suspicion are . . . assuredly, three great ‘destroyers’”), attending to this
larger cultural history underscores that suspicious reading is part of the
world rather than opposed to the world, not just the inspired invention of a
few theorists and philosophers but an interpretative practice embedded in
a variety of institutional structures, tacit conventions, and local norms.
	 We can think of suspicion, in this context, as a curiously non-­emotional
emotion, a quasi-invisible affective state that overlaps with, and builds
upon, the stance of detachment that became synonymous with professional
culture. The rise of the professions was to promote the sense of a tight fit
between technical competence and affective neutrality, with the expertise
of doctors or lawyers requiring a dispassionate performance of allotted
tasks, a refusal to be distracted by motives, moods, or judgments deemed
irrelevant to the task at hand. Detachment served as a vital confirmation of
the ability to rise above personal or political allegiances, to devote oneself
wholeheartedly to perfecting the procedures and practices that define particular
types of expert knowledge. A similar sangfroid pervaded much of
New Criticism, with its strictures against affective fallacies that threatened
to pull literary studies back into the impressionistic judgments and gut
reactions of lay reading (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954). A Kantian tradition
that stressed the disinterested nature of aesthetic response found common
cause with a newly professionalized literary field that equated intellectual
rigor with dispassionate scholarship.
	 To be sure, scholarly detachment overlaps with, but is not synonymous
with, suspicious interpretation, which, in assuming the worst about its
object, conjures up a negatively weighted rather than purely impartial attitude.
In what remains one of the most suggestive essays on the phenomenology
of suspicion, Alexander Shand (1922–23) argues that it involves a
sense of vigilant preparedness for attack, rooted in biological mandates to
watch for possible predators, its intensity rising as we feel ourselves or our
loved ones to be under attack. This view of the aggressiveness of suspicion
as a response to perceived threat has been frequently echoed in past
decades: the literary scholar’s adversarial stance is justified as a necessary
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
Felski • Suspicious Minds 221
defense against the ideological designs of the literary work, which require a
self-­refashioning as a resisting reader (Fetterley 1978). According to Shand,
while the consequences of suspicion for the individual are often beneficial,
its implications for communal life can be catastrophic. An elusive emotion
that combines elements of fear, anger, and curiosity, suspicion constitutes
an asocial form of affect that sows the seeds of division and conflict. Writing
in 1916, Shand expounds on the effects of suspicion as an emotion that
destroys what he calls “harmonious co-­operation between classes,” inspiring
restless and revolutionary tendencies across Europe, generating dissatisfaction
and mistrust, and serving as a powerful catalyst for political
upheaval.
	 While stressing suspicion’s links to political dissent, Shand fails to consider
its equally salient role in sustaining social order and its intimate connection
to structures of modern surveillance. The detective serves as the
prototype of a science of suspicion that developed in the nineteenth century,
functioning as an expert reader uniquely able to decipher hidden
strata of criminal activity or intent, to translate clues back to causes (Pyrhonen
1999; Moretti 2005). Older models of religious inquisition, with
their built-­in mistrust of surface meanings, melded with new forms of scientific
method based on the patient deciphering of details. During the
nineteenth century, medical and legal professionals collaborated in developing
a science of criminology based on interpretation, classification, and
forensic evidence, resulting in a culture of experts able to discern secrets
invisible to the ordinary human eye, to turn the suspect body into a readable
text (Thomas 2000: 24). The interrogation of suspects assumed a key
role in police work, requiring finely tuned skills in reading involuntary gestures
or fleeting changes in facial expression. What distinguished such acts
of suspicious reading from a broader culture of professional detachment
was a mindset of mistrust combined with a morally inflected presumption
of guilt, a conviction that surface appearances were not only misleading,
but deliberately deceptive.
	 Thanks to this proximity to scientific method, the emotional aspects of
suspicious interpretation were muffled; such interpretation was now, after
all, an institutionally mandated attitude, rather the expression of a buried
psychological impulse or an abnormally mistrustful mind. Indeed, the professional
suspicion of the detective or the literary critic may be of low-­
grade intensity, one of a very different order, say, to the feelings of anguish
or uncertainty likely to be triggered by fear of a lover’s betrayal (see, for
example, the lyrics of Elvis Presley’s 1969 classic “Suspicious Minds”: “So,
if an old friend I know/Drops by to say hello/ Would I still see suspicion
in your eyes?”). And yet, as a regularly rehearsed attitude, it cannot help
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
222 Poetics Today 32:2
seeping into the minds of its practitioners. Suspicious reading inscribes
itself in the psyche as a particular mode of thought and feeling, a mind-­
set equipped with distinct qualities: distance rather than closeness; guardedness
rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority
rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure
rather than tact. It constitutes an orientation in the phenomenological
sense; a matrix of feelings, attitudes, and beliefs that expresses itself in a
particular manner of turning toward its object, of leaning toward or recoiling
away from a text, of engaging in close—yet also critical and therefore
distanced—reading. Like any repeated practice, it eases into the state of
second nature; no longer an alien or obtrusive activity, but an internalized,
habitual, and self-­evident aspect of one’s identity as a reader.
	 This critical ethos manifests itself, among other things, in an interest
in plotting. In the process of reading texts against the grain to discover
their hidden meanings, critics fashion causal connections, imagine personae
engaging in purposeful activity, assign responsibility, and often
attribute guilt. In this sense, suspicious interpretation is an exercise not
just in meaning-­making, but in moral-­making. To be sure, the narratives
that literary critics construct are constrained by the status of their writing
as interpretation and commentary; when they are “interrogating” works of
literature, they are not at liberty to invent stories at will but must refer back
to these works from time to time and anchor their claims in textual evidence
if they are to inspire confidence in and consent from other readers.
The role of these source texts is to offer a plentitude of traces, clues, or
symptoms; the job of the suspicious critic is to interpret these clues by
situating them within larger structures of social or linguistic determination
(a procedure that is refined, but, as we will see, by no means abolished
in deconstructive readings). Suspicious criticism, in this sense, asks
the same questions as the whodunit; both partake of what Ginzburg (1989)
calls a conjectural paradigm, poring over signs, moving from an effect
to the reconstruction of a cause, from observation to interpretation, from
establishing what has been done to the identification of a doer—whether a
guilty individual, as in the case of the whodunit, or a culpable text or social
structure, as in the case of criticism.
	 Doers, that is to say, need not be persons, and a suspicious hermeneutic
often professes a lack of interest in the category of authorship as a means
of explaining the ideological workings of texts. We see this lack of interest,
for example, in the type of suspicious interpretation known as symptomatic
reading, an influential blend of Freudian, semiotic, and political (often
Marxist) theory developed by Macherey (1975), Jameson (1981), and others.
Here psychoanalytical categories such as repression and the unconscious
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
Felski • Suspicious Minds 223
are applied to the relationship between a literary text and a larger social
world; the text is held to be symptomatic of social conditions that it seeks
to repress but to which it nevertheless unwittingly testifies. Like the hysterical
patient, the text is not fully in control of its own discourse; it reveals,
to the expert eye, semiotic contradictions that are at odds with its ostensible
meaning and that can be traced back to hidden, subtextual dominations
and exclusions. The role of the critic, then, is to read the text against
the grain in order to draw out what it refuses to own up to. Any truth to
be gained must be wrested rather than gleaned from the page, derived
not from what the text says, but in spite of what it says. Appearance is no
longer a gateway to a deeper reality, but a tactic for screening that reality
from view.
	 In her influential Critical Practice (1980), for example, Catherine Belsey
reassigns agency from the writer to the text, which is described as akin to a
Lacanian subject, forever split between its conscious intentions and a textual
unconscious that is not, she insists, that of the writer. In descriptions
such as the following, we see literary works being endowed with will and
purposefulness: “The realist text is a determinate representation, an intelligible
structure which claims to convey intelligible relationships between
its elements. In its attempt to create a coherent and internally consistent
fictive world, the text, in spite of itself, exposes incoherences, omissions,
absences and transgressions” (ibid.: 107). On the one hand, Belsey charges
the nineteenth-­century realist text with acts of fraudulence; like the dream
censor, it seeks to conceal disruptive desires, to efface contradiction by
“masquerading as coherence and plenitude” (ibid.: 104). Realism “offers
itself as transparent”; reading the realist work is a reassuring and conservative
experience because this work seeks to efface its own textuality, its
existence as discourse (ibid.: 51). Here we see the critic imputing qualities
of agency and purpose to the text, treating it as a quasi-­person equipped
with an intent to deceive.
	 On the other hand, this deception is doomed to fail, because the ideology
of the text invariably turns out, against the text’s ostensible wishes, to
be “inconsistent, limited, contradictory” (ibid.: 104).Thus, for example, we
discover that Jules Verne’s The Secret Island contains an “unpredicted and
contradictory element disrupting the colonialist ideology which informs
the conscious project of the work” (ibid.: 108). In a similar manner, Belsey
argues that even though “the project of the Sherlock Holmes stories is to
dispel magic and mystery, to make everything explicit, accountable, subject
to scientific analysis” (ibid.: 111), these stories cannot help but “display
the limits of their own project”; they are “compelled to manifest the inadequacy
of a bourgeois scientificity which, working within the constraints of
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
224 Poetics Today 32:2
ideology, is thus unable to challenge it” (ibid.: 116). The chasm between
intention and effects, between surface and depth meanings, between what
the text says and what it cannot admit or face up to, means that the ideologies
of Conan Doyle’s work—its overt commitment to an ideal of rationalist
detection and deciphering of clues—are persistently unraveled by its
internal fissures, inconsistencies, and contradictions.
	 The narrative of suspicious reading thus assumes not just a political but
also a moral cast in identifying acts of subterfuge for which texts are held
accountable. The critic fashions a sequence of cause and effect that correlates
textual clues with underlying systems of political inequality or oppression
(colonialism, in the case of Verne; bourgeois ideology and patriarchy,
in the case of Conan Doyle); disavowed social forces speak indirectly via
clues and traces, symptomatic evasions and determinate absences. It is a
central claim of Critical Practice that realist texts do not represent the world
but can only testify to their own inevitable failure to represent, as flawed
artifacts and agents of ideology. In Belsey’s words, the truth contained
in Sherlock Holmes is not any truth about social relations but “the truth
about ideology, the truth which ideology represses, its own existence as
ideology itself” (ibid.: 117). In this regard, the text’s culpability, its power to
conceal or corrupt is acknowledged yet also qualified; the individual work
does not act alone, as it were, but is subject to political or discursive forces
working behind the scenes—a domain of ideology, in the case of Belsey.
The scenario conjured up by the critic’s plotting and naming of guilty
parties is thus closer to the world of hard-­boiled crime fiction or film noir
than the classic whodunit; behind the single miscreant—the mystifying
intent of the individual work of fiction—are arraigned a host of murkier,
more menacing structural forces that leave a spreading stain on the social
body.
	 In Belsey’s text, as in a number of other influential examples of criticism—D.
A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police (1989) comes to mind—we see
the proliferation and self-­replication of suspicious interpretation, as academic
readers mimic, whether knowingly or unwittingly, the same policing
techniques that are portrayed in the texts they are criticizing. The critic,
like the detective, refuses to take surface meanings at face value; the text,
like the criminal suspect, must be scrutinized, interrogated, and made to
yield its hidden secrets. Interpretation pivots on a skeptical and adversarial
relationship to its object; the text, in George Levine’s (1994: 3) memorable
phrase, is treated “as a kind of enemy to be arrested.” While ordinary
readers, just like the hapless Watson, are easily deceived by the evidence
of their eyes, the professional reader, whether critic or detective, presses
below distracting surfaces to the deeper meanings of signs. Such a reader
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
Felski • Suspicious Minds 225
is the one who knows, whose expert knowledge allows him to penetrate
obfuscations and see through false rationalizations. In its adherence to a
depth hermeneutic, a skeptical sensibility, and a specialized vocabulary
that subsumes and recategorizes its object, contemporary criticism thus
reveals its debt to prior scenes of suspicious interpretation.
	 Drawing parallels between suspicious reading and detective fiction
underscores their mutual reliance on the double plot. The classic detective
novel, as we know, depends on such a double plot, telling the story
of a crime via the story of its investigation; in Todorov’s (1977: 46) words,
the former is absent but real, the latter present but insignificant. In the
opening pages of the novel, the reader is confronted with the enigma of an
unsolved crime, and the subsequent unfolding of the text is geared toward
recreating the sequence of actions surrounding this original transgression.
The story of the investigation thus frames, yet also depends on, a prior
sequence of events that must be reconstructed and articulated; when the
two plots finally converge in the detective’s explanation of the crime and
naming of the criminal, the work of the text is complete. The hermeneutics
of suspicion employed in literary studies hinges on a similar double
structure. The critic shares the detective’s desire to track down and bring
to light obscured patterns of causality—in this context, the social forces
that underpin and motivate the symptomatic tensions and contradictions
of the literary text. Through this process of investigation, the critic
solves an intellectual puzzle, enlightens the reader, and enacts a movement
from obfuscation to understanding. In both criticism and crime fiction,
the interpretation and piecing together of clues creates knowledge in the
present via the reconstruction of the past.
	 There are, to be sure, key differences between these two forms of exegesis.
The detective novel, in its classic form, withholds crucial information
from the reader, refusing access to the detective’s mental processes, and
delaying the revelation of the criminal’s identity until the closing pages.
Critical commentary, by contrast, often reveals its cards at the start by
pointing its finger at an established, de-­personalized, agent such as bourgeois
humanism or patriarchal ideology. Because the figure who deciphers
clues and the figure who writes are the same, the reader is often privy to
the critic’s reasoning and deduction as it takes place. In this sense, the key
question posed by the typical scholarly exercise in suspicious reading is less
whodunit than how it was done. The interest of the reader is sustained, not
by the anticipated unveiling of an unexpected villain, but by the ingenuity
and inventiveness of the critic’s interpretations, the artfulness with which
she weaves surprising yet plausible connections between text and world.
	 These parallels between literary criticism and detection have been seized
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
226 Poetics Today 32:2
on by deconstructive critics to impugn the very project of interpretation,
as in Shoshana Felman’s (1982) virtuoso reading of prior readings of The
Turn of the Screw. Taking as her point of departure the well-­known Freudian
analysis of James’s story by Edmund Wilson, Felman identifies this
analysis as an exemplary staging of the pitfalls of a hermeneutics of suspicion.
In explaining the text’s ghosts as projections of the governess’s own
desires, she proposes, Wilson engages in a triumphalist exercise of diagnosis
and demystification. Whereas earlier critics had taken these supernatural
dimensions at face value, slotting the text into the genre of the ghost
story, Wilson recasts the meaning of the story in one stroke, transforming
The Turn of the Screw into an allegory of female neurosis and sexual repression.
What we see in this gambit, Felman argues, is the attempt of psychoanalysis
to gain mastery over literature by translating it into the authoritative
categories of its own hermeneutic code. The psychoanalytical critic,
like the detective, is intent on solving a mystery, nailing down answers,
explaining away ambiguity through the interpretation of clues.
	 Felman demonstrates, over and over again, how this attempt to gain
hermeneutic mastery over the text is likely to fail, how literature can dupe
the traditional Freudian critic who prides himself on not being duped. “The
Turn of the Screw,” she writes, “constitutes a trap for psychoanalytical interpretation
to the extent that it constructs a trap, precisely, for suspicion”
(ibid.: 189). That is to say, the sophisticated reader who reads against the
grain of the text, who spurns its surface blandishments in order to ferret
out occluded meanings, is outflanked by James’s novella, which offers a
prescient commentary on the dangers of such acts of decoding. Its own
protagonist, after all, is the quintessential suspicious reader; the governess
seeks frantically to make sense of the enigmatic events happening around
her, unleashing a frenzy of interpretation that ends catastrophically with
the death of Miles, one of her charges. For Felman, this death serves as
an allegory of the destructive consequences of a suspicious hermeneutic.
Children, it seems, can be killed by the very act of understanding, annihilated
by an overriding urge to know. Wilson’s interpretation of the governess’s
behavior as a symptom of repressed female sexuality unknowingly
replicates the very desire for certainty that is persistently questioned and
undermined in the text he is reading. Suspicious reading turns out to be a
destructive, even deadly, enterprise. Countering this hermeneutic hubris,
Felman allies herself with a Lacanian recasting of psychoanalysis in terms
of desire rather than truth. Sexuality, in other words, is not a secret to be
discovered, a mystery to be solved; rather—like literature itself—it exposes
the folly of any such pursuit of certainty, underscoring “the division and divisiveness
of meaning; it is meaning as division, meaning as conflict” (ibid.: 112).
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
Felski • Suspicious Minds 227
	 What we see in Felman’s analysis, however, is not the elimination of a
suspicious hermeneutic, but its relocation. It is no longer the story of the
crime that attracts the accusations of the critic, but the story of the investigation;
it is not the text that is guilty, but the critic’s exegesis of the text.
In Felman’s words, “it is nothing other than the very process of detection which
constitutes the crime” (ibid.: 176). In her reading of The Turn of the Screw, she
assumes the role of defense rather than prosecution, bending over backward
to do justice to the vertiginous richness and many-­layered ambiguities
of James’s story. She shows again and again that The Turn of the Screw
is a conundrum that cannot be solved, a marvelous artifact of writing that
exceeds rational analysis and conceptual mastery, a labyrinthian hall of
mirrors in which readers can only lose their bearings.
	 Yet Felman does not accord the same benevolence to criticism, whose
hidden motives are elucidated and laid bare with assurance. Psychoanalytical
criticism is charged with seeking to “‘explain’ and master literature,”
censured for “killing in literature that which makes it literature” (ibid.:
193). In pressing the text to confess its secrets, she suggests, Edmund Wilson
commits an act of egregious violence. “Would it not be possible to
maintain,” writes Felman, “that Wilson, in pressing the text to confess, in
forcing it to ‘surrender’ its proper name, its explicit literal meaning, himself
in fact commits a murder . . . by suppressing within language the very
silence which supports and underlies it, the silence out of which the text precisely
speaks?” (ibid.). The causal structures and ethical categories that
are undone in the deconstructive reading of literature reassert themselves
ever more forcefully in the deconstructive exposé of criticism as a willful
annihilation of the otherness of the text. Indeed, Felman’s essay, beyond
its dazzling rhetoric and its many-­layered techniques of self-­questioning,
remains fixated on the fundamental questions of detective fiction: whodunit,
and who is guilty? (Pyrhonen 1999). It engages in a frenzy of hermeneutic
activity, plumbing the depths of the scholarly commentary on
James’s novel in order to bring to light a hidden drama of conflict, exclusion,
and misrecognition. Freudian analysis, Felman leads us to believe, is
not merely insufficient but intrusive, imperious, even murderous; in its fantasy
of mastery, its resolute blindness to the textuality of the text, it engages
in a full-­scale reduction and destruction of the literary work. Even as suspicion
of literature is abjured, it resurfaces in the guise of what we can call
metasuspicion in Felman’s stringent reckoning with the very project of critical
interpretation.
	 As we see here, the hermeneutics of suspicion seems exceptionally
resilient and impervious to direct attack, infiltrating the words of its most
implacable opponents, sprouting new heads as quickly as we lop them off.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
228 Poetics Today 32:2
As I noted earlier, Ricoeur distinguishes between a hermeneutics of suspicion
and a hermeneutics of trust, between a reading which tears off masks
and one which seeks to restore and recollect meaning. Perhaps, in this light
we can gain a better handle on suspicious interpretation by treating it with
a degree of generosity, bestowing upon it a measure of the sympathy it
withholds from others. Phenomenology, Ricoeur (1970: 28) observes, is a
method well suited to such a restorative reading, expressing itself in a care
for phenomena as they present themselves to consciousness.To engage in a
phenomenological description is not to expose a subterfuge or puncture an
illusion but to explicate the irreducible, meaning-­bearing, and value-­laden
elements of our everyday practices.
	 Viewed in this light, the hermeneutics of suspicion is not just political
but also aesthetic: it offers not only a kind of knowledge but also a form of
pleasure. Critical reading is not, as is often assumed, a purely abstemious
or ascetic practice, a gesture of insurrection voided of positive content or
value (see, for example, Stephen Ross’s [2009: 10] definition of critique as
a “fundamentally negative energy, a process of incessant disruption and
challenge”). Rather, it offers its own substantive pleasures: the satisfaction
of detecting figures and designs below the text’s surface, fashioning
new plots out of old, joining together the disparate and seemingly unconnected,
acts of forging, patterning, and linking. It constitutes an art rather
than a science, an inventive piecing together of signs to create new constellations
of meaning; a patient untangling and reweaving of textual threads.
Its conjectures owe much to inventiveness, leaps of faith, and inspired
hunches; suspicious reading, at its best, is not an arid analytical exercise,
but an inspired blend of intuition and imagination. Conjecture, remarks
Ginzburg (1989), is not so far from divination, and the deciphering of clues
blurs the line between reason and irrationality. When Edmund Wilson suggests
that a story about ghosts is really an allegory of thwarted female
eroticism, when D. A. Miller insists that heartwarming stories of Victorian
domestic life are intent on disciplining and punishing their readers, it is the
bravura of such claims that helps ensure their impact. The effect is that of
a Gestalt switch, a sudden flash of illumination or jolt in perspective that
allows previously unsuspected layers of meaning to come into view.
	 In rereading and rewriting the literary text, critics enact a temporary triumph
over the sovereignty of authors, take on the role of poachers making
raids on property they do not own (Barthes 1977; de Certeau 2002). Without
unduly romanticizing the renegade or insurrectionary nature of such
appropriations, we can acknowledge the powerful satisfactions that they
offer. Refusing obligations of reverence and fidelity, critics assert their
right to fashion something new out of the words on the page, to reframe
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
Felski • Suspicious Minds 229
them in the light of their own concerns and commitments. Such rewriting
is never entirely free of hubris in its claim to know the text better than
it knows itself; but it also offers the possibility of a creative remaking that
allows unexpected insights and fresh perspectives to unfold. Suspicious
interpretation enables a new purchase on old texts, an especially appealing
strategy for feminists, postcolonial critics, queer theorists, and other latecomers
to the academy, whose relationship to the literary tradition is often
fraught and ambivalent.
	 Yet the appeal of such a hermeneutics extends beyond the political
urgencies that are commonly cited as its sole rationale. It is not just a political
or professional mandate but also an avocation, an irresistible occupation,
an all-­absorbing game between text and reader that tests one’s wits
and challenges one’s interpretative skills. Like the detective novel, such
a practice of reading embodies the pleasures of ratiocination, exercising
mental agility and inventiveness. Many critics have had the experience of
puzzling over a recalcitrant piece of writing, testing and discarding various
hypotheses and interpretative models, only to suddenly experience a
flash of insight that makes previously invisible connections fall into place.
Suspicious reading, in other words, is a language game in quite a literal
sense of “game.” As such, it combines rules and expectations with the possibility
of unexpected moves and inventive calculations, enabling a form
of carefully controlled play. The critic competes against an imagined textual
opponent, engages in determinate and precise calculations of strategy,
adopts a specific role that comes equipped with certain requirements. This
game-­like quality of interpretation does not necessarily void or negate
other dimensions of reading, but it often proves especially prominent in
an academic context, where scholars are rewarded for ingenious forms of
puzzle-­making and puzzle-­solving. Elisabeth Bruss expounds on the features
of such an approach:
In a gaming situation, communication must be viewed as a tactic, an attempt to
constrain another player’s expectations. One must then respond to it tactically,
with guarded skepticism, treating narrative devices or the total range of reference
in a work as evidence of an opponent/collaborator’s resources. . . . One
becomes engrossed in a literary game without “believing” in it. Its excitement
does not depend on empathy or illusion but on the challenge of strategic dilemmas:
when to trust, what to trust, whether to trust at all, and how to proceed
with reading in the light of such risk and uncertainty. (Bruss 1977: 162)
	 Postmodern works of metafiction often advertise and revel in these
game-­like features of interpretation (see, for example, Marie-­Laure Ryan’s
[2003] discussion of The French Lieutenant’s Woman), but all texts can be
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
230 Poetics Today 32:2
read along similar lines, treated as imaginary opponents to be maneuvered
against and bested rather than as voices to be trusted. The payoff of such
an approach includes the pleasure of deploying skills and plotting strategy,
devising intellectual moves that conform to the basic principles of academic
reading while offering new ways of outwitting or outflanking a literary
object. Discussing the element of play in scholarly interpretation, Calinescu
(1993: 138–56) describes the critic engaging in a series of moves that
fuse convention and innovation, striving to become an ever more sophisticated
and skillful player, to outfox not only the text but also other critics.
	 Game theory, however, is flawed by its tendency to conceive of players
as purely rational actors. In a recent analysis of trends in Victorian criticism,
Anna Maria Jones (2007) offers an alternative view by arguing that a
hermeneutics of suspicion is simultaneously a hermeneutics of sensation.
The critic’s sifting of textual clues and ferreting out of hidden truths offers
pleasures that are not only intellectual but also emotional; a mode of interpretation
generates a gripping storyline in which the experience of suspense
is followed by the ultimate pleasures of revelation and explanation.
Here criticism borrows not only from detective fiction but also from the
Victorian sensation novel, a genre devoted to exposing the hidden mysteries
of the mundane that inspired visceral responses and intense attachments
in its readers. Foucauldian criticism, like the nineteenth-­century
texts it analyzes, is built around the revelation of shocking secrets, the pursuit
of guilty parties, and the detection of hidden crimes. In each case, the
most obvious answer is never the right one and the counterintuitive explanation
is the one most highly rewarded. Uncovering the hidden import
of seemingly inconsequential clues drives the pleasure of both fiction and
criticism (Jones 2007).
	 There is, to be sure, an undeniable kernel of antagonism in suspicious
interpretation, as critics arm themselves against imagined opponents to
whom they impute malicious or hostile intent. Scholarly prose can easily
take on a triumphalist cast, as readers take pride in casting off their
former naïveté, congratulate themselves on their perspicacity, feel sharper,
shrewder, more knowing, less vulnerable. Suspicious reading, Sedgwick
(1997) remarks, pivots on a sense of righteous self-­vindication, a trust in
the inherent merits of critical exposure. And yet the adversarial structure
of such reading also contains a tacit tribute to its object, an admission that
it contains more than meets the eye. There is little intellectual satisfaction
to be found, after all, in simply rehearsing the prejudices of an obviously
prejudiced text. Critics often prefer to pit their wits against a worthy opponent,
to dig out cunningly concealed rather than self-­evident truths, to
engage in a strenuous battle of wills from which they hope to emerge triDownloaded
from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
Felski • Suspicious Minds 231
umphant. A skillful suspicious reading is, in this sense, also a close reading,
requiring an intimate familiarity with its object. Indeed, the words that
are being dissected may be the words that once seduced and entranced
the same reader. This reader must inhabit the text, come to know it thoroughly,
explore its every nook and cranny, in order to draw out its hidden
secrets. Suspicion, in other words, may not be so very far removed from
love.
	 In this context, the overheated accusations that are heaped upon suspicious
reading by Felman and other critics—that it does untold violence to
literature, destroys its otherness, exercises an egregious and imperious will
to power—should be taken with a grain of salt. Not even the most ruthless
or reductive analysis can destroy a text that survives unscathed, thanks to
its condition of infinite reproducibility, to be read anew by other readers.
What drives such charges, to be sure, is the concern that critical reading
has an adverse effect on our appreciation of literary texts, blinding us to
beauty and complex design, consigning challenging and unsettling works
to the dustbin of history. Yet here, too, a suspicious hermeneutic does not
automatically remove a text from circulation but may also endow it with
fresh vitality by hooking up to new agendas, debates, and audiences. Animus,
after all, can inspire a fervid and concentrated attention, an exceptionally
diligent focus on the object that is being critiqued. Edward Said’s
(1994) reading of Mansfield Park as an allegory of imperialism, for example,
made the work of Jane Austen newly intriguing to a community of postcolonial
critics who might otherwise have paid her writing scant heed
(Park and Rajan 2000).
	 The danger that shadows suspicious interpretation is less its potential
brutality than the threat of banality. For several decades it has served as
the default option, business as usual, the taken-­for-­granted methodological
norm in literary studies. Its gestures of demystification and exposure are
no longer oppositional, but obligatory, their claims to intellectual novelty
or political boldness ever harder to countenance. For younger scholars,
especially, the critical paradigm is the major paradigm in which they have
been trained; even as it continues to present itself as a challenge to the
intellectual mainstream, it is the mainstream (Billig 2000). Unchecked
by counterforces, locked into a complacent and self-­confirming circle of
argumentation, a hermeneutics of suspicion dissipates its problem-­solving
powers and loses much of its allure. It no longer tells us what we do not
know; it singularly fails to surprise.
	 Suspicious reading is also, I have argued, a style of interpretation that
has paid little attention to its own style and sensibility, imagining itself
as a purely intellectual exercise in demystification and negative thinking.
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
232 Poetics Today 32:2
Once suspicious interpretation is acknowledged to be not only analytical
but affective, not just a critique of narrative but also a type of narrative—
once we realize, in short, that it has much in common with the literary
texts it seeks to diagnose and expose—its status as a vehicle for radical critique
is necessarily diminished.To some critics, such a downsizing of oppositional
thought will seem like a loss. Yet this diminution may turn out to
be a liberation, authorizing us to look anew at other styles of criticism, to
explore other modes of interpretation and argument that are less tightly
bound to exposure, demystification, and the lure of the negative (Berman
2001). How else might we venture to read, if we were not ordained to read
suspiciously?
References
Anderson, Amanda
	 2006 The Way We Argue Now (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).
Arnold, John H.
	 2001 Inquisition and Power: Catharism and the Confessing Subject in Medieval Languedoc (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press).
Barthes, Roland
	 1977 “The Death of the Author,” in Image, Music, Text, translated by Stephen Heath,
142–48 (New York: Hill and Wang).
Belsey, Catherine
	 1980 Critical Practice (London: Methuen).
Berman, Paul Schiff
	 2001 “Telling a Less Suspicious Story: Notes toward a Non-­Skeptical Approach to Legal/
Cultural Analysis,” University of Connecticut School of Law Articles and Working
Papers, Paper 11.
Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus, eds.
	 2009 “The Way We Read Now.” Special issue, Representations 108.
Billig, Michael
	 2000 “Toward a Critique of the Critical,” Discourse and Society 11(3): 291–92.
Bruss, Elisabeth
	 1977 “The Game of Literature and Some Literary Games,” New Literary History 9: 153–72.
Calinescu, Matei
	 1993 Rereading (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Cusset, François
	 2008 French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life
of the United States, translated by Jeff Fort with Josephine Berganza and Marlon Jones
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
de Certeau, Michel
	 2002 “Reading as Poaching,” in The Practice of Everyday Life, 165–76 (Los Angeles: University
of California Press).
Farmer, Lindsay
	 2007 “Arthur and Oscar (and Sherlock): The Reconstructive Trial and the ‘Hermeneutics
of Suspicion,’” International Commentary on Evidence vol. 5, 1, article 4.
Farrell, John
	 2006 Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press).
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
Felski • Suspicious Minds 233
Felman, Shoshana
	 1982 “Turning the Screw of Interpretation,” in Literature and Psychoanalysis: The Question of
Reading: Otherwise, edited by Shoshana Felman, 94–207 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press).
Felski, Rita
	 2009 “After Suspicion,” Profession 8: 28–35. Forthcoming. “The Demon of Interpretation.”
Fetterley, Judith
	 1978 The Resisting Reader: A Feminist Approach to American Fiction (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press).
Ginzburg, Carlo
	 1989 “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method,
translated by John and Anne C. Tedeschi, 96–125 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press).
Hunter, Ian
	 2007 “The Time of Theory,” Postcolonial Studies 10(1): 5–22.
Jameson, Fredric
	 1981 The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press).
Jones, Anna Marie
	 2007 Problem Novels: Victorian Fiction Theorizes the Sensational Self (Columbus: Ohio State
University Press).
Josselson, Ruthellen
	 2004 “The Hermeneutics of Faith and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Narrrative Inquiry
14(1): 1–28.
Latour, Bruno
	 2004 “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,”
Critical Inquiry 30(2): 225–48.
Levine, George
	 1994 “Introduction: Reclaiming the Aesthetic,” in Aesthetics and Ideology, edited by George
Levine, 1–30 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press).
Love, Heather
	 2010 “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn,” New Literary History
41(2): 371–92.
Macherey, Pierre
	 1975 A Theory of Literary Production (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).
Miller, D. A.
	 1989 The Novel and the Police (Los Angeles: University of California Press).
Moretti, Franco
	 2005 “Clues,” in Signs Taken for Wonders: On the Sociology of Literary Forms, 130–56 (London:
Verso).
Park,You-­me, and Rajeswari Sunder Rajan
	 2000 The Postcolonial Jane Austen (London: Routledge).
Peters, Edward
	 1988 Inquisition (New York: Free Press).
Pyrhonen, Heta
	 1999 Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the Detective Story (Toronto: University
of Toronto Press).
Radway, Janice
	 1997 A Feeling for Books: The Book-­of-­the-­Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-­Class Desire
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press).
Ricoeur, Paul
	 1970 Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press).
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest
234 Poetics Today 32:2
Ross, Stephen
	 2009 “Introduction: The Missing Link,” in Modernism and Theory, edited by Stephen Ross
(New York: Routledge).
Ryan, Marie-­Laure
	 2003 Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
Said, Edward
	 1994 Culture and Imperialism (London: Vintage).
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky
	 1997 “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading: or, You’re so Paranoid, You Probably
Think This Introduction Is about You,” in Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction, edited
by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, 1–37 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press).
Shand, Alexander F.
	 1922–23 “Suspicion,” British Journal of Psychology 13: 195–214.
Smith, Barbara Herrnstein
	 1995 Critical Terms for Literary Study (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press).
Stewart, David.
	 1989 “The Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” Journal of Literature and Theology 4(3): 296–307.
Strowick, Elisabeth
	 2005 “Comparative Epistemology of Suspicion: Psychoanalysis, Literature, and the
Human Sciences,” Science in Context 18(4): 649–69.
Thiele, Leslie Paul
	 1991 “Reading Nietzsche and Foucault: A Hermeneutics of Suspicion?” American Political
Science Review 85(2): 581–92.
Thomas, Ronald R.
	 2000 Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press).
Thrailkill, Jane F.
	 2007 Affecting Fictions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
Todorov, Tzetvan
	 1977 The Poetics of Prose, translated by Richard Howard (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press).
Wimsatt, William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley
	 1954 “The Affective Fallacy,” inTheVerbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, byWilliam K.
Wimsatt, 21–39 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky).
Downloaded from http://read.dukeupress.edu/poetics-today/article-pdf/32/2/215/459020/PT322_01Felski_Fpp.pdf
by guest