Biblical Interpretation Reading List

Rita Felski, Hooked: Art and Attachment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. Rita Felski’s argument in Hooked: Art and Attachment seems basic: namely, humans engage with art because we are attached to it. Drawing loosely on Bruno Latour’s actor-network-theory (she labels her approach “ANT-ish”), Felski highlights three kinds of aesthetic experience – attunement, identification, and attachment – in a multifaceted exploration of why and how art (including literary texts) works. Hooked builds on Felski’s widely-read 2015 monograph, The Limits of Critique. Together, these works have made her one of the most prominent proponents of what literary and cultural critics are now calling “postcriticism.” In brief, this movement objects to the constraints of conventional academic discourse and defends the value (and the values) of “lay” readers who engage with art not to explain or expose, dissect or analyze it, but simply to experience and enjoy it. Nevertheless, biblical scholars who are for myriad reasons wary of the critical theories and methods that challenge traditional disciplinary boundaries, or who long to make biblical studies great again, will find no salvation here. Felski is an equal-opportunity iconoclast; she is as eagle-eyed and probing when interrogating forms of faith and fealty as when picking apart hegemonic hermeneutics of suspicion. Felski pushes professional critics to recognize that attachment is a fundamental “condition of any conceivable form of intellectual life” (122). We are simply taught not to acknowledge this: “Scholars are adept at theorizing, historicizing, and politicizing the investments of others – while often remaining coy or evasive about their own” (3). Felski has hooked her own critics in both positive and negative ways. While some praise Hooked as “erudite and compelling” or a “marvelous achievement,” others experience her rhetoric as a personal affront (one reviewer describes the book as “an inventory of abuse” directed at other critics). Yet this mixed reception illustrates Felski’s primary point: we engage with art (including critical scholarship) in affective, often unpredictable and even opposing ways. “Commentary,” Felski writes, “is connection” (122). This is precisely what makes Hooked relevant for the increasingly fractured field of biblical studies. Felski’s invitation to accept and foreground our own attachments might help us to forge affinities and communicate across the rifts Biblical Interpretation (2023) 1–5