Summary Of Rita Felski's The Limits Of Critique

This chapter deals with the essence of information, how one acquires it, what one does with it, and how one makes decisions based on the information at hand. This fact is so basic and important, yet one can take this for granted. Wrong judgments and decisions occur when one needs to make a decision

If a person wishes to be up to date on what is going on the world around them, in all facets and walks of life, then they must spend a considerable portion of time merely skimming the water of each pool of knowledge, never having the time to truly sink their feet in. This correlates directly back to the massively increased availability of information and writings, whose shoulders Birkerts puts the blame of our loss upon. Nicholas Carr cites a study done on the “behavior of visitors to two popular research sites” which gives its users an even larger degree of online texts.

This chapter is very important from my point of view, since it talks about the importance of information in all ways of life and particularly how information means power. The asymmetries of information are a widespread problem even nowadays and we find it the most in the low class society obviously because of the lack of education.

This analysis have shown me how important is to be faithful to your own principles, even when the world takes you to unknown. The knowledge of the society in which each one has to life is what shows that opposed positions that seem irreconcilable are part of a whole and as Collin’s suggests, each individual has to decide what is right or what is wrong in the society and then take a position and try to change what is wrong. (Hentrhone,

　　In the essay “Reading and Thought”, Dwight MacDonlad talked about the kind of poor reading people are attached to in modern society. MacDonald believed reading materials such as Times and New York Times are too overwhelming for the readers. Readers tend to skim through the reading materials because most of the reading do not have any connections with their daily lives. Moreover, MacDoanld claimed that the readings people do these days are not thoughtful. The readings are rather irrelevant toward the readers. It is because the journalists to produce dull pieces of readings which are meant to be skimmed through without having too much thoughts involved. As the journalists do not have much consideration of the materials they produced. To the journalists the readings they produce are just a series of news that should be read driftly and left behind with no thoughful idea needed to be informed. These effects caused modern society to have a poor reading habits because people do not reflect and give time to think about the readings they did. Readers casually accept the readings even though they do not have provide any resourceful information for the readers.

We as humans tend to have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. We look for knowledge about everybody and everything that surrounds us from our day-to-day life. Sadly though, we must accept that in the grand scheme of life we (as a society) tend to put pleasure above our quest for knowledge. The pursuit of knowledge tends to take time and energy, two things we call invaluable, and it also shows us things that might depress us. Contrastingly, ignorance takes no time and energy. Also, (as the common saying goes) ignorance is bliss. It keeps ugly truths away from us. But that is no reason to forsake knowledge for ignorance. In the early 1900’s, two books were published that would eventually be referred to the pinnacle of classical literature.

(Welty 92). The author chose this point of view to help the audience gain a foothold into

There is a universal truth that is largely accepted, socially as well as scientifically, when it comes to the observation of human beings: they are adaptable, and thus, are always evolving. Every day, people are conditioned and molded by their surroundings because they are influenced, as well as prodded, by the idea of acceptance in a society, which in return, transcends into a conceptual idea of conformity. However, there are occasionally unique individuals who refuse to adapt entirely, and instead project unorthodox ideas that differ from the status-quo of societal beliefs. Consequently, this manner of individualism causes them to be looked upon differently in the realm of where they reside. In many works of literature, a free-thinking individual

This article is another piece of written truth as to how one’s social upbringing reflects their views and opinions.

The ability to critically review a book is an essential skill that every academician should possess. Academicians should have the capacity to identify the central theme of an author in a book. They should also understand the way the author has presented the theme in the book. Without these capabilities, reading books are only waste of time because it is not beneficial reading a book if one does not understand it.

The modern world today could not be more different than 200000 years ago when the first homo sapien first appeared on Earth. Over these 200000 years period, many things have changed the face of the Earth forever. The Neolithic Revolution 12000 years ago changed the way human lived from foragers to agriculturalist that forged the Earth into their images. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century allowed knowledges to spread all over the world. The rise of the internet in the 1990s united the world under a network of informations for all to access. Another drop in mankind's endless ocean of ideas is the concept of literature. The concept of expressing one's beliefs via a “body of artistic writings of a country or period that are

Humans have a natural tendency to criticize what they read, hear, or see. This tendency has allowed humans to grow intellectually as well as physically. A famous psychologist Ivan Pavlov once said, “Don't become a mere recorder of facts, but try to penetrate the mystery of their origin" (Pavlov). This quotation expresses the desire of truth that humans seek. The desire to penetrate the mystery of ones origin is the driving force behind literary criticism. Furthermore, critics use different techniques to unveil the mystery behind different stories. Specifically, psychological criticism can be used to unveil these mysteries. Psychological criticism can be defined in many different ways. However, the reason something is referred to as being psychological

Throughout each of these documents, the seeking of truth, the pursuit of knowledge, and the formation of eloquence are paramount. In his letter to Thomas Caloria, Petrarch condemns a critic for being “less interested in victory than in a fight”, claiming that such men never produce any form of substantial work. He maintains that deep discussion is useful, but the end goal is to attain truth rather than simply argue. “'In the excess of debate the truth is lost'”. Scholarly writing, he suggests, is a more open battleground, and better suited to the discovery of truth, which is the central focus of seeking knowledge.

Theories generally propose explanations whose status is still hypothetical and subject to experimentation that can exist in any area of interest; nonetheless, as one narrows theories down to a single specific field, like that of Literature, definitions adjust with them. Literary theory relies on human response to literature, followed by forming opinions and examining the text. Primarily, literary theory allows criticism creation of principles by which a literary text can be examined, and a number of diverse perspectives on a literary text and its conception may form. Moreover, concentrated methods of reading

Fish’s Reader Response Criticism is composed of two interdependent ideas: first, that the meaning of texts is shaped by the reading experience itself, and second, that these meanings cannot be judged to be correct or incorrect, but merely belonging to one “interpretive community” or another. The first idea may be identified as the executive aspect of Reader Response Criticism because it analyzes the act of reading, while the second idea is the epistemological aspect of the theory because it circumscribes the knowledge we can acquire about a text to the merely relative. Studied independently, each aspect of Reader Response Theory offers by itself strong arguments countervailing the formalist stance of the New Critics. But as we will see,