Imperfect Seclusion: Critiquing Networks and Networking Critique

Abstract This article is an apologia for an interdisciplinary, networked approach to critique that leverages the difference between disciplines, and of different critics within disciplines, in order to open up a text’s critical difference, that is (following Roland Barthes and Barbara Johnson), the way that it differs from itself rather than the way that it differs from other texts. In this case, a non-Indigenous Australian scholar of ‘French Studies’ and an Indigenous Australian scholar of ‘English Studies’ showcase a reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, which reveals how that text’s refusal to coincide with its own meaning also causes our own different interpretations to coincide with each other. Importantly, too, by celebrating disciplinary differences, the kind of networked critique that we propose avoids the one-upmanship of internecine scholarly engagements that Rita Felski calls ‘suspicious reading.’