Shamefaced Concepts

Abstract

This text represents an attempt to analyze the main premises of Rita Felski’s theoretical project presented in her book Uses of Literature, translated into Polish as Literatura w użyciu (Literature in Use). The American scholar’s reflections, focused on problems of reception aesthetic and constituting a polemic with the concept, crucial to contemporary literary theory, of the hermeneutics of suspicion and with critical theory, are here interpreted using the four concepts relied on by Felski in the book: recognition enchantment, knowledge and shock. They constitute various forms of readerly engagement with the text and various forms of use, of applications of literature in practices of everyday, non-specialist reading. This article identifies Felski’s attempt to disrupt the elitism of literary studies and their exclusionary stance toward non-professional readers as one of the most important elements in her project as put forth in the book.