Is There a Beast in This Class?: The Pragmatics and Ethics of Dialogic Reading

This essay takes a teaching experience—a collective close reading of “The Beast in the Jungle”—as a starting point to investigate the pragmatic effect produced by three features of the text: its pervasive use of catachresis, the prominence of speculation (both in the financial and in the conceptual sense) in its economy, and its creation of an analytic setting both for its characters and for its readers. Through the evasive, speculative quality of its central object, the story—itself the scene of an obstinately sought but ultimately frustrated dialogue—fosters an intense, ethically charged intersubjective engagement in dialogic reading.