PRECARITY AND LITERARY PERFORMANCE: A POSTCRITICAL PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The art of textual practice has historically thrived on the remarkable diversity and dexterity of an ever-evolving repertoire of methods and theoretical frameworks devised to assess the novelty, merit, and impact of any given literary work. However, with the rise of literary studies as a formalised discipline, the emphasis fell heavily on critical practices that upheld intellectual stances of strict objectivity, pronounced scepticism, and dispassionate detachment, chiefly aimed at unearthing cryptic allusions, hidden agendas, or ideological machinations lurking beneath the texts. Proponents of a new school of thought called Postcritique, led by Rita Felski, argue that while these critical modes are undeniably valuable and remain pertinent, the dominance of one mode of inquiry can eclipse some of the most vital aspects that make a literary encounter truly exceptional: its unique singularity and otherness, its delightful spontaneity and vivacity, and above all, its extraordinary capacity to entangle us affectively. Postcritique thus calls for a rebalancing of the critical spectrum, proposing a critical renaissance that embraces both scepticism and faith and that examines, with theoretical rigour and socio-political awareness, how readers and critics attune to and resonate with literary narratives. Following the postcritical call for new critical vocabularies and new metaphorical frameworks to deepen our understanding of the symbiotic relationship between readerly attunement and critical affect, this thesis proposes two interrelated concepts: how the literary event can be construed as a performance, and the notion of a hermeneutics of precarity. By exploring the philosophical implications of these two converging concepts and analysing three distinct narratives of precarity in contemporary fiction, this thesis argues that precarity, a term associated with vulnerability, instability, and uncertainty, can be a versatile postcritical idiom and an effective ontological foundation for a more restorative approach to literary interpretation. It enables us to elucidate, through a deeper understanding of our shared precariousness, the idiosyncrasies of our literary engagements and the formative power of literary performances to illuminate the universals that reside within the particular, revealing the grand affective dynamics of growth, change, and even flourishing within the human condition.