Reading with(out) Suspicion: Atwood, Sedgwick and Critical Practice

This article reads Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace (1996) alongside Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s formulation of paranoid and reparative readings. Focusing on the dynamic between time and affect in Sedgwick, something that is strikingly missing in contemporary debates about critique and post-critique, I examine the affective, temporal and political registers of paranoid and reparative styles of reading and demonstrate how Sedgwick’s work exceeds the post-critique approaches it informs. I then move to a discussion about the reading positions offered by Alias Grace including suspicious reading and empathetic engagement. Positioning Alias Grace as a parallel text to Sedgwick’s, I argue that revisiting Atwood’s novel in the context of the post-critique movement not only helps to restore the politics informing Sedgwick’s theory but also contributes to the ongoing discussion about the politics of reading.