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Ways of Reading
- Minnesota Review
- Duke University Press
- Issue 89, 2017 (New Series)
- pp. 83-102
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
In the wake of the linguistic turn, scholars have turned to affect and to aesthetics to account for textual experiences that exceed critical frameworks of representation and critique. Bringing formalist analysis and affect theory to bear on one another, recent works of literary, art, and film criticism by C. Namwali Serpell, renée c. hoogland, and Eugenie Brinkema develop methodologies for exploring how the arts move us — how they impress themselves upon our bodies and create effects in the world. Adding to the current conversation about postcritical reading, surface reading, distant reading, and other methodological developments, these works offer methods for illuminating the relationship between form and feeling: neo-phenomenology, retelling, and close reading. By analyzing the relationship between affect and aesthetics across genres of art, this essay argues, we can expand the category of reading to better understand the temporal, spatial, and sensory encounter between text and audience.
Abstract:
“Ways of Reading” presents an interview with Sharon Marcus in which she discusses the influential and controversial concept of “surface reading.” The interview covers the genealogy of the concept, its difference from symptomatic reading, its relation to description, and other issues in contemporary method in literary criticism. It also addresses some of the debate about the concept and offers one revision. Additionally, the interview also surveys Marcus’s influential work in comparative literature, notably on the spaces in fiction in French and English literature in her book Apartment Stories and the homosocial relations among women in Victorian literature in her book Between Women. Last, it discusses coediting the new journal Public Books.
