Surface reading: An introduction

Representations

Volumn 108, Issue , 2009, Pages 1-21

  Best, Stephen ^a   Marcus, Sharon ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 70350355248     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.2009.108.1.1     Document Type: Editorial

References (45)

1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, 1981), 61
2. We note that there remain things that government powers go to extraordinary lengths to keep hidden, to keep as state secrets, "extraordinary rendition" being one of them. A hermeneutics of suspicion in which understanding requires a subtle reading of the situation thus remains readily pertinent to the work of critique. See, for example, Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World (New York, 2009)
3. We take this notion of what is there for the taking from Anne-Lise François, Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, 2008), 10, who deploys it in a different historical context there than we do here
4. Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, 2006)
5. Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago, 2006)
6. Emily Apter, Elaine Freedgood, and Sharon Marcus, conference proposal, "The Way We Read Now: Symptomatic Reading and Its Aftermath," June 2007; similar language appeared in the description of the March 2006 ACLA conference seminar "Symptomatic Reading and Its Discontents," organized and chaired by Sharon Marcus and convened in collaboration with Elaine Freedgood, John Plotz, and Leah Price
7. As Ellen Rooney has put it, symptomatic reading produces "the absent question ... that the reading ... establishes as unthinkable within the text's own problematic" "Better Read Than Dead: Althusser and the Fetish of Ideology," Yale French Studies 88 (1995): 187
8. Umberto Eco, "Interpretation and History," in Interpretation and Overinterpretation, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge, 1992), 31
9. See Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianopolis, 1992)
10. and Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley, 1994)
11. On the interpretive homology between Marx's analysis of the commodity and Freud's analysis of dreams, see Slavoj Žižek, "How Did Marx Invent the Symptom?" Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York, 1995), 296-331
12. Carlo Ginzburg, "Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm," in Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1989), 99, 101
13. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage (New Haven, 1979), 7, 12, 8, 56
14. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London, 1997), 28
15. Mary Poovey argues that this account of reading as work originated with John Ruskin, who tended to cast meaning "not as self-evident because simply denoted by the author's words but as difficult and evasive." See her Genres of the Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain (Chicago, 2007), 312-13
16. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1991)
17. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York, 1992)
18. Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass use this locution (of looking at, rather than through) to discuss the importance of attending to errant textuality in "The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text," Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (Fall 1993): 255-83, 257
19. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York, 1999), 9
20. Samuel Otter, "An Aesthetics in All Things," Representations 104 (Fall 2008): 116-25, 119
21. Otter's description of the literary-critical enterprise as an unraveling paraphrases Catherine Gallagher's observations regarding the legacies of New Criticism. See her "The History of Literary Criticism," in American Academic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines, ed. Thomas Bender and Carl E. Schorske (Princeton, 1998), 151-72
22. The distinction between meaning and significance belongs properly to E. D. Hirsch, for whom the former describes what an author means by a chosen sign sequence, whereas the latter names a relationship between that meaning "and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything imaginable." E. D. Hirsch Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, 1967), 8
23. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929; reprint, London, 1973), 312, 11
24. Susan Sontag, "Against Interpretation," in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York, 1966), 6, 5, 14
25. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You," in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Perfomativity (Durham, 2003), 123-51
26. Timothy Bewes, "Reading with the Grain," unpublished manuscript, presented at 2006 ACLA seminar on symptomatic reading and later expanded; Jane Gallop, "The Ethics of Reading: Close Encounters," Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 16, no. 3 (2000): 7-18
27. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York, 1971), 34, 31
28. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (Berkeley, 1986), 324 n.15
29. Aaron Kunin, "Shakespeare's Preservation Fantasy," PMLA 124 (January 2009): 95
30. Clifford Siskin, "Textual Culture in the History of the Real," Textual Culture 2, no. 2 (Autumn 2007): 118-30
31. Marc Angenot, "Social Discourse Analysis: Outlines of a Research Project," Yale Journal of Criticism 17 (2004): 199-215, 200
32. See Marc Angenot, Ce que l'on dit des Juifs en 1889. Antisémitisme et discours social (Saint-Denis, 1989), 177, translation ours
33. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton, 2007), 75
34. Benjamin Kahan, "'The Viper's Traffic-Knot': Celibacy and Queerness in the 'Late' Marianne Moore," GLQ 14, no. 4 (2008): 510, 512
35. Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, 2009), 63
36. Stephen Best, "Rumor in the Archive," unpublished manuscript, presented at "The Way We Read Now: Symptomatic Reading and Its Aftermath," Columbia University and New York University, May 2008
37. Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago, 2008), xxiv, xxvi-xxvii
38. Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961-84, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. John Johnston (New York, 1989), 57-58
39. Marjorie Levinson, "What Is New Formalism?" PMLA 122, no. 2 (March 2007): 558-69, 560
40. Theodor Adorno, "Commitment," in Notes to Literature: Volume Two ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1992), 80
41. Theodor Adorno, "The Essay as Form," in Notes to Literature: Volume One, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1991), 11
42. Margaret Crane, "Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious," in this issue; citing Jameson, The Political Unconscious, 245
43. Christopher Nealon, "Un-Militant Thinking," unpublished manuscript, delivered at "The Way We Read Now: Symptomatic Reading and Its Aftermath," Columbia University and New York University, May 2008
44. Charles Altieri, "Cavell's Imperfect Perfectionism," in Ordinary Language Criticism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein ed. Kenneth Dauber and Walter Jost (Evanston, 2003), 216
45. Bruno Latour, "Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern," Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 227