Each year, the Department of English invites a distinguished scholar to deliver The Robert J. Kane Lecture. This year’s Kane Lecture will be delivered by Professor Rita Felski, John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia, former Niels Bohr Professor at the University of Southern Denmark, and former editor of New Literary History. Her most recent books include Uses of Literature (2008), The Limits of Critique (2015), Hooked: Art and Attachment (2020), and Love, Etc.: Essays on Contemporary Literature and Culture (ed. with Camilla Schwartz, 2024). Selective Affinities: Literature and New Critical Theory will be published by The University of Chicago Press in late 2026.
Her new book draws on the work of a group of important philosophers and social theorists to offer fresh readings of literary texts. Through five key concepts derived from her reading of German theory—disclosure, recognition, self-realization, lifeworld, and resonance—Felski asks how these literary texts articulate the relationship between intellectuals and others. Contrary to critical theories that discount everyday experience, new German thought reveals the ethical, existential, and political richness of such experience. Through this framework, Felski shows that literature, theory, and experience are not opposed but mutually constitutive. Prof. Felski’s Kane lecture will discuss new German thought as a resource for rethinking the relations between theory, literature, and everyday life. “Defining what I mean by ‘experience concepts,’ I clarify their relevance for analyzing the insides and outsides of texts,” Prof. Felski explains. Literary examples will be taken from the work of Robert Walser, Didier Eribon, Dionne Brand, and Magda Szabo.
