Persuasion and critical-theoretical thought

My contribution takes on the notion of persuasion from the vantage point of the more theoretical developments of literary criticism, from poststructuralism to the present. I take my cue from the current debate on “postcritique” (Rita Felski 2015; R. Felski and Elizabeth Anker 2017), a label that comprises a heterogeneous set of trends all of which nevertheless share the common task of re-evaluating the hermeneutics of suspicion, seeking alternatives to it. Discussion highlights the widespread need for more ethical ways of reading after poststructuralism (Eve K. Sedgwick 1997, 2002; Amanda Anderson 2006); the fact that this ethical turn seems to require new styles of argumentation (Pardis Dabashi 2020) offers here the opportunity to look back at a central tenet of classical argumentation, persuasion, to reflect on its role in the transformation of Anglophone literary criticism. The contribution is articulated in three sections – “Publicness,” “Paranoia and Persuasion,” and “The solitude of the critic” – whose overall aim is to illustrate the progressive withdrawal of persuasion from the oratorical public setting theorized by Aristotle, which presupposes a uniform collectivity, to a much more shadowy subjective dimension of tensions and conflicts. T The first section builds on a reading of Austen’s novel Persuasion (1818), which marks a rupture with the traditional notion of persuasion steeped in the constraints of oratorical interaction and inaugurates the “privatization of literary expression” with the rise of an absorbed cultural observer capable of distancing herself from her immediate environment and scrutinize its works both from the margins and from the outside. This part connects Austen’s withdrawal from a uniform publicness with the twentieth-century emergence of the notion of discourse with a reading of Foucault’s “Discourse on Language,” the inaugural lecture livered at the Collège de France in 1970. The reading of Foucault expands on the progressive withdrawal from a problematic publicness inherited from the rhetorical tradition and transfers the withdrawal to the figure of the literary theorist. In section 2, “ Paranoia and Persuasion,” the work of theorist Eve K. Sedgwick exemplifies those practitioners who sought relief from persuasion as it was actualized by the exigencies of pluralism in the second half of the twentieth century (for example with the notion of communion between an implied author and an implied reader) and further break away from the rhetorical bond between author and reader, insisting that finding oneself outside the discursive community is a real possibility. But the work of Sedgwick also points to an impasse: on the one hand, rhetorical persuasion has waned in modern criticism, on the other hand, the latter’s theoretical transformation seems to have internalized persuasion. Hinged on the link power-knowledge, the poststructuralist posture of the knowledge seeker depends on an always already persuaded audience who is uniformly convinced that our symbolic, cultural productions are entangled in relations of power. While this contribution tracks the disentanglement of criticism from the classical oratorical tradition, the poststructuralist impasse invites a re-examination of persuasion in the ways we read and argue in the academic public sphere.