My review essay on Rita Felski’s Limits of Critique and Lee Konstantinou’s Cool Characters is up at Amerikastudien:

“All criticism, even Felski’s proposed “affective hermeneutics,” must be “suspicious” in the sense that the critic must suspect that the way a work achieves its effects is opaque until elucidated. Or, to import Konstantinou’s keyword, criticism cannot be “post-ironic” because it depends on the presumption that there is some gap between meaning happening and its explanation—between the “what” and the “how” of aesthetic experience. Konstantinou makes a related point about not literary but political experience.” More (HTML) (PDF)