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Abstract
Calling for surface reading practices that will not distort literary texts, Best and Marcus argue for descriptive and distant modes of surface reading, and assume a single, static, and objective model of the text. Besides risking the de-politicization and de-historicization of texts, advocates for purely descriptive criticism threaten the liveliness of pedagogical engagement. Devaluing critical work that is both popular and reproducible by students, Latour moves humanities critics far away from practices in the hard sciences that depend upon predictable and transmissible methodologies. Barad’s quantum mechanics-based theory of intra-action shows how texts are not independent objects, but phenomena that incorporate personal, institutional, historical, and other material entanglements. Participants in the 2012 Exemplaria symposium illuminate Barad’s claim, showing texts to be shaped by various disciplinary, historical, codicological, and affective forces. Much as physicists use various instruments in describing phenomena, literary analysts should see political and historical theories and commitments as just as vital and legitimate critical tools as aesthetic theories.
Notes
1 On the mutual conditioning of individuals and environments in the process of “intra-action,” and for comparison of the philosophical assumptions of Werner Heisenberg’s and Niels Bohr’s versions of quantum mechanics, see Barad 97–131.
2 Sontag seeks to insulate artistic form from modes of interpretation that insist on translating works into a separable content (5–7). Shklovsky focuses critical attention on the artful strangeness of literary form, working against scholarly habits of identifying the actual objects and symbols intended by artists (11–12).
3 On the historical background to, the current state of, and the relevant problems related to the textual criticism of Chaucer, see Scala 481–96.
4 Such critique of an uncritical assumption of a stable and unitary literary text can be found within the Best and Marcus special volume: Leah Price insists that we should not dwell on texts as written artifacts, for most of the lives of books are spent inhabiting a “larger spectrum of social practices” (120).
5 For a survey of key proponents of reader-response theory, which denies the notion of a self-sufficient text and sees literature as emerging only as a transaction between a particular text and a particular reader, see Jane P. Tompkins’s essay collection, Reader-Response Criticism. For a valuable example of cognitive modes of approaching the reader’s performance of a text, see Crane’s contribution to the Best and Marcus volume (76–97).
6 For a survey of the New Philology’s institutional self-reflections regarding the rise of various vernacular literary disciplines, see Bloch and Nichols (especially 1–22). On the political, cultural and personal dimensions of meaning that shape all texts subject to analysis by scholars of Middle English, see Matthews (especially xiii–xxxv).
7 Dinshaw has expanded on her symposium reflections on amateurism in How Soon Is Now? (see especially 73–104).
8 See also Fradenburg’s discussion of the “abject[ion] of “enjoyment” (242) in her reflections on the humanities in Sacrifice Your Love (239–52).
9 The standard apparatus of medieval scribes included a knife, which was used both for sharpening pens and for cutting into the parchment, in order to remove markings before they became too deeply stained into the writing surface (see de Hamel 37–38).
10 In “Surface and Depth, Local and Global: The Politics of Critical Attention in the 21st Century,” Heng advocated just such a flexible understanding of reading practice, urging critics to be prepared to alter the scale of critical attention, ranging from local to global, whenever it becomes necessary while pursuing their particular projects. Mark Chinca also advocated for flexibility in altering one’s scales of theoretical abstraction, arguing for the necessity of various metalanguage in his symposium presentation, “Naming and Negation.”
11 For analysis of the propensity for theoretical critics to underappreciate the equally vital labor of textual critics, see McGann.
12 For a thoroughgoing survey of the textual complexity of editing Piers Plowman, see Brewer.
13 In describing symptomatic reading as having self-consciously rendered literary criticism “as a strenuous and heroic endeavor,” Best and Marcus also attribute more worldly motives to Jamesonian critics: they argue that such a heroic style of criticism may seem “fully deserving of remuneration” (5–6).
14 In her symposium presentation, “Reading Pastimes, or the Way We Read Then,” Karma Lochrie also argued vigorously for the importance of desire both in scholarship and pedagogy, with desire dictating both how evidence emerges and how engagingly teachers can present historical difference to students.
15 Bourdieu understands symbolic capital as any material or ideational “property” that has been structured by an individual’s inculcation by a social order (“Rethinking the State” 8–9).
16 Bourdieu’s argument that “rites of passage” enable social elites to reinforce their privilege by highlighting boundaries that they themselves transgress (Language 117–18) enabled me to read animal transformation narratives as figuring aristocratic claims to preeminence over the natural world (Schiff 419).