Proliferations of Omniscience

Outside of queer theory, in literary studies more generally, Rita Felski's book Limits of Critique revises the hermeneutics of suspicion to theorize what she calls "postcritical reading": "What afflicts literary studies is not interpretation as such but the kudzu-like proliferation of a hypercritical style of analysis that has crowded out alternative forms of life" (9).Contrary to Felski's claims, readers must continue to elaborate networks of power and other socio-political and historical implications of the literary text, but I suggest that we must also see literary narrative as a proliferation of identifications and desires that are as provisional as the sense of omniscience that they incite.A. C. Facundo is an independent scholar, who received a doctorate in English from York University in Toronto (2013) and continued as a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council postdoctoral fellow at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.