Abstract
Since the advent of Structuralism in the 1960s, particularly in the modern Anglophone and Francophone world, scholars such as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Rita Felski have pointed to the historical limits of “critique” and have called for a revision of the epistemological framework that supports the very idea of critique. Such proponents of “postcritique” condemn the tradition of skepticism that has been the norm in the art of criticism. They call, rather, for a shift to a form of critique that does not distance itself from the text but rather actively immerses itself in it. At the same time, immersion in the text runs the risk of reducing the work of criticism to the level of impressions. This paper first presents a conceptual inventory of attempts to transcend the limitations of traditional modes of film criticism, then offers an epistemological model that facilitates new forms of criticism. Such a model would allow for the viewer’s engagement by challenging the excessive power of recognition that leads them to consider texts that are actually discrete in nature as coherent representations.
