"the twenty-first-century critic in a bind..."

29 June 2022:  Really struck by this passage about reading Uncle Tom's Cabin: "The novel puts the twenty-first-century critic in a bind: read it the way professional literary critics have been trained to read and make yourself unable to understand why it exerted the power it did, or read it as it wants to be read and lose your credibility as a critic" (Halpern 636). Halpern's whole piece is really smart and interesting. It's also relatively informal in its tone (with personal anecdotes and jokes!), which makes it refreshing and seems kind of meta--she's a person writing about responding to a text as a person, so it makes sense to appeal to readers this way. 

Work Cited

Halpern, Faye. “Beyond Contempt: Ways to Read Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” PMLA, vol. 133, no. 3, May 2018, pp. 633–39. EBSCOhost.