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What does it mean to be convinced by an interpretation of a work of art? In what, precisely, does such a conviction consist, and how does it differ, if at all, from other forms of conviction, such as moral, political, or—most polemically—religious? This talk explores the vexed relationship between criticism and what has historically been considered its antithesis: divine revelation, particularly in the Islamic context. The doctrine of secular criticism has dominated the discipline of literary studies since the late nineteenth century. It insists that the act of critical interpretation testifies to the separation of religion and state and that this is what makes criticism not just socially and politically valuable, but also the marker of its intellectual modernity. But what if the experiential intensities of revelation were never expunged from aesthetic interpretation, but simply disavowed? That possibility is thrown into relief when we examine disagreement in the realm of aesthetic interpretation. When two equally expert critical interlocutors simply see the evidence differently—when they arrive at an impasse—is when the closeness of interpretative conviction to revelation starts to become startlingly apparent.
Dabashi reads a contemporary debate within literary studies concerning the nature of fictional character through the lens of two intellectual histories that seem an unlikely pairing: on the one hand, Kant’s and Hume’s theories of disagreement and training in aesthetic judgment, and on the other, Ibn Rushd’s and Al-Ghazali’s disagreement concerning the route to divine revelation. By mapping a famously fierce religious debate onto the very Enlightenment theories of interpretive dispute that went on to form the basis of the secular criticism thesis, Dabashi illuminates the limits of reason-based evidentiary systems within modern criticism. She shows how despite its normative claims to rationality, modern criticism nevertheless relies on what Aristotle calls indemonstrable first principles (primary truths Ibn Rushd would refer to as awwaliyāt) from which all ensuing conclusions are drawn, principles that cannot be argued for but must be taken on faith. Ultimately, the paper engages medieval Islamic intellectual history and Enlightenment philosophy to make a case for the value of dispute in contemporary cultures of argument in the endangered discipline of literary studies.
Pardis Dabashi is Assistant Professor of English at Bryn Mawr College, where she is also Affiliated Faculty in the Middle Eastern, Central Asian, and North African Studies Program, the Comparative Literature Program, and the Film Studies Program. Her scholarship examines the intersection of form, politics, and affect in narrative film and literary modernism, as well as the history, epistemology, and experience of aesthetic criticism. She teaches classes on twentieth-century literature, film, and theory. Dabashi is especially interested in how aesthetic and rhetorical form index or trouble stances of political and epistemic certainty, which she explores by examining structures of feeling such as conviction, ambivalence, and doubt. Her work has appeared in PMLA, Modernism/modernity, Textual Practice, MFS: Modern Fiction Studies, Feminist Media Histories, Early Popular Visual Culture, Public Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and elsewhere. She is co-editor of The New William Faulkner Studies (Cambridge UP, 2022), and she is co-editor of the Visualities forum on Modernism/modernity Print+. Her first book, Losing the Plot: Film and Feeling in the Modern Novel (University of Chicago Press, 2023,) studies plot and ambivalence in the classical Hollywood cinema and the Euro-American modernist novel. It received the 2024 Modernist Studies Association First Book Prize. She is currently working on two new book projects, one, tentatively titled Reading and Revelation: Islam and the Experience of Criticism, that studies the history and consequences of the exclusion of Islam from the methodological landscape of EuroAmerican criticism and theory, the other on affects of humiliation and mourning in Iranian New Wave Cinema and Persian modernist literature of the 1960s and 70s.