Notesale: Turn your study into money

Document Preview

Extracts from the notes are below, to see the PDF you'll receive please use the links above

---

Surface Reading Theory
My ideas for essay:
Critics delve within texts, and spend hours analysing every word choice, implications of each
sentence and metaphor
...
 
This essay will argue that we should not focus on the depths of the text, but focus on the ‘surface’ the obvious implications and ideas that sit on the surface that are accessible to the average reader
...
 
Contexts where messages must be veiled - e
...
Wilde, Stoker - homosexuality was a crime so they
veiled homosexual themes
...
Jane Austen’s characters that voice opinions she disagrees with are satirised and mocked
...
To view the ‘meaning’
we do not need to explore latent meanings - it is on the surface
...
If the general audience
cannot see feminist themes on the surface without undergoing a process of interpretation, it is
arguably not conveying the feminist message the critic believes it is
...

They want to understand meaning
...

This will require interpretation
...
” p1
"One factor enabling exchanges between disciplines in the 1970s and 1980s was the acceptance
of psychoanalysis and Marxism as metalanguages
...
This “way” of interpreting went by
the name of “symptomatic reading
...
” p1
"“If everything were transparent, then no ideology would be possible, and no domination either,”
wrote Fredric Jameson in 1981, explaining why interpretation could never operate on the
assumption that “the text means just what it says
...
Where it had become common for literary scholars to equate their work with
political activism, the disasters and triumphs of the last decade have shown that liter- ary criticism

alone is not sufficient to effect change
...
” p2
"The “way” of our title should not be construed as a uni- tary mode or a pilgrimage to a single point,
but as a road branching in mul- tiple directions, like Jorge Luis Borges’s garden of forking paths
...
” p3

"The notion underlying all forms of symptomatic reading, that the most significant truths are not
immediately apprehensible and may be veiled or invisible, has a very long history
...
” p4




"The nineteenth-century roots of symptomatic reading lie with Marx’s interest in ideology and the
commodity and Freud’s in the unconscious and dreams
...
” p7

"Cheng sees a hermeneutics of suspicion as allied with a politics of identity, since what often
motivates the reading of the surface as a symptom of hid- den depths is the desire to restore and
make visible the authenticity veiled by spectacle
...
” p9

"Surface looms large in the vocabulary of our contributors, but rarely do they mean the literal
surface of texts: paper, binding, typography, the sounds of words read aloud
...
Following the lead of our contributors, we take
surface to mean what is evident, perceptible, appre- hensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor
hiding; what, in the geometri- cal sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore
covers no depth
...
15” p9

"Surface as the intricate verbal structure of literary language
...
17 This type of surface reading, as Otter shows, would move slowly, if
at all, from text to context, from parsing meaning to interpreting signifi- cance
...
Formalisms new and old argue against the traditional association of the surface
with what is too simple to merit notice
...
An early and influential statement of
this approach was Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” (1966), which argued that interpreters
do not disclose the text’s true meaning but alter it
...
show what it means
...
This focus assumes that texts can reveal
their own truths because texts mediate themselves; what we think theory brings to texts (form,
structure, meaning) is already present in them
...
The purpose of
criticism is thus a relatively modest one: to indicate what the text says about itself
...
”22 Similarly, Joel Fineman’s Shakespeare’s Per- jured Eye argued that the traditional
questions for criticism of the sonnets are already questions in the sonnets themselves; there is no
need for a critical metalanguage to explain the sonnets because, as Aaron Kunin has recently
observed, “the poems provide the most accurate description of their own operations
...
” p11
"Surface as literal meaning
...
”26” p12
"If criticism is not the excavation of hidden truths, what can it add to our experience of texts?
… These questions are especially urgent because many of our most powerful critical models see
criticism as a prac- tice of freedom by locating autonomy, self-reflexiveness, detachment, and
liberatory potential either in the artwork itself or in the valiant labor of the critic
...
In this sense, Jame- son is not only doing what E
...
Hirsch called usurping the place of the
author (5); he is also more daringly associating the power of the critic with that of the God of
biblical hermeneutics, who can transcend the blinkered point of view of humankind
...
” p15
"Surface reading, which strives to describe texts accurately, might easily be dismissed as politically
quietist, too willing to accept things as they are
...
” p16
"As Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Purloined Letter” continues to teach us, what lies in plain sight is
worthy of attention but often eludes observation—especially by deeply suspicious detectives who
look past the surface in order to root out what is underneath it
...
We
began this essay by asserting the distance we would like to take from the type of symptomatic
reading we inherited from psychoanalysis and Marxism, but in concluding we note that the work of
assembly and the desire for a more complete view of reality are also aims of both schools of
thought, which is one reason they remain cen- tral to the critics whose works we have assembled
here
...
” p19

ART 2: The Way We Read Now, Elizabeth Weed
"Tracing its interpretive history to the Gnostics and mainstream Christians, through Marx and
Freud, Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson, they define symptomatic reading thusly: “Broadly
speaking, this practice encompasses an interpretive method that argues that the most interesting
aspect of a text is what it represses, and that, as Fredric Jameson argued, interpretation should
therefore seek ‘a latent meaning behind a manifest one
...
D
...
” p227

ART 4: Close But Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the
Descriptive Turn, Love
"The rise of interpretive practices borrowed from Marxism and psychoanalysis, structuralism and
poststructuralism, and semiotics and deconstruction has displaced the individual and
consciousness from the center of inquiry, shifting attention to structures of language, desire, or
economic capital
...
” p372
"I want to focus on the significance of hermeneutic activity—the practice of close reading—in this
geneal- ogy
...
” p373
"The most pointed and salient of his interventions has been his forwarding of the method of distant
reading
...
” p374
"I want to suggest that the suspension of close reading is not the only way to get traction on
these institutional and ethical questions [scientific authority, generality, knowledge, legitimacy]
...
These fields have developed practices of close attention, but, because they rely on
description rather than interpretation, they do not engage the metaphysical and humanist concerns
of hermeneutics
...
” p375
" I argue that a descriptive rather than an interpretive account of Beloved draws attention to
qualities of the text that critics have tended to ignore, particularly its exteriorizing and objective
accounts of social life
...
A flat reading of Beloved suggests the possibility of an alternative ethics, one
grounded in documentation and description rather than empathy and witness
...
Maps provide another model for the activity of the sociologist, who should try to “keep
the social flat” (RS 165): “Although social scientists are proud of having added volume to flat
interactions, it turns out that they have gone too fast
...

they have withdrawn inquiry from the main phenomenon of social science: the very produc- tion of
place, size, and scale
...
” p378
"For Phelan, the perspective of the slave catcher is presented unambiguously as a negative
example for the reader
...
” p386
"What is often forgotten in these discussions, though, is the fact that, for Ricoeur, the “hermeneutic
field” is “internally at variance with itself
...
” Interpretation as recollection of
meaning returns us to the realm of sacred hermeneutics; according to Ricoeur, it is this faith in
“a revelation through the word” that “animates [his] research
...
Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud
“clear the horizon for a more authentic word, for a new reign of Truth, not only by means of a
‘destructive’ critique, but by the invention of an art of interpreting
...
It is this hermeneutics of
recognition and empathy—originally sacred and now grounded in an unacknowledged but powerful
humanism—that defines literary studies, even in an age of suspicion
...
4” p234
"Perloff even makes an instrumental case for such an approach: as she notes, the demand outside
the academy, as wit- nessed by the enthusiasm surrounding Samuel Beckett’s centennial, is for
reading literature, not theory, so by returning to our roots, we will not only satisfy ourselves but the
market, as well
...
”
p237

"the so-called passing of theory equally reflects wider fears about the role or place of critical
thinking within an increasingly corporatized university
...
” p239
"The coupling of the archive (a stand-in for the real) and the aesthetic (culture) alleviates Gallagher
and Greenblatt’s discomfort with key Marxist concepts—base and superstructure, class
consciousness, totality—and with any form of systematization whatsoever
...
”27 Only in this way, they claim, can the aesthetic qualities
of culture as text be appreciated
...
In both cases, a
hermeneutics of suspicion is replaced by a suspicion of hermeneutics, a disavowing of
interpretation itself, which is part and parcel of the so-called death of theory
...
(This point is specifically taken up by Jameson in “Making Time Appear” when he
notes that the act of interpretation, contrary to populist bias, in no way asserts the superiority of the
interpreter or reader over an assumed “plebeian readership,” in an aside noting that “in that sense,
we are all plebeians when we read
...
” But
“what the reader is not free to abandon is the interpretive process itself
...
Surface reading hopes to freeze time, to stay in the present in its appeal to the
commonsensical, to a thing’s face value
...
Given this, it is not clear why they might not also be symptoms of larger
structures; why stop at the horizon of a genre when surely genres, too, constitute particular modes
of historical thinking, simply at a different level of the social?” p247
"In this way, surface readers give up on reading as much as they give up on theory, its role
reduced to stat- ing the obvious, even as they continue to fetishize the text in their celebra- tion of
its surface
...
In the former reading, surfaces
seem to promise solidity, or an affirmative inertness that would render them unsusceptible to the
vagaries of self-reflective thought; in the latter, surfaces are what we have to be wary about
...
But again, neither will simply choosing
one or the other
...
”81” p249

"Reading is by ne- cessity overreading: intense rather than cool (as in “just reading”); political
rather than scientistic; highly interpretive rather than descriptive
...
” p254
"Remaining on the surface, in other words, is simply not an option, at least if reading is about
something other than the performance of reading
...
” p264
"The neoliberalization of the university has made talk of the death of the humanities a reality—and
one more and more directly felt on the ground, as it were
...
What then becomes indistinguishable is
reading and a fidelity to revolution
...
Why is it different to
what we’ve always done
•
Pay attention to what texts do say, not what they don't
Latour
•
•
•

Problem - instant revisionism
Humanities - distrust of objectivism 
Descriptive tool  donut’s assert critics superiority

•
Representations journal - Specil issue on description
•
Tools that don’t create heroic critic
•
Submissions from various fields, not just literary
◦
How you would describe clouds in atmospheric science - look different from where
you’re standing 
Matters of concern
•
Conditions under which facts are produced
Surface Reading: An Introduction
•
Crtical description
•
Don’t need metalangugae
•
what text says about itself
•
Critics role to identify and describe pattersn
◦
genre critisicm, discourse analysis
◦
taxonomist
▪
categorises text
•
Surface as literal
•
“just reading” - attending to surfaces of texts rather than reading symptomatically for
what they repress
•
Surface reading as apolitical - objection and enthusiasm
◦
M & B think - oppenness to all potentials of text - not instrumental means to an end
◦
Politics of surface reading emergence depending on text, rather than being applied
to text
Love
•
◦
•

Critic becomes privileged interpreter of text
this is what B & M say about sympotmatic
Love says instead of critic being privelegeed interpreter - Latour’s actor network

theory
◦
◦
◦
◦
◦
not deep
•
◦
◦
•
•

Literary critic documentarian
Literary criticism should be modest - reign in claims about what it can do
Modes of accounting for social life
Sociologists interested in lit
Lit is not a site of human feeling, account of feelings of everyday interactions - flat
Model this reading
Reading of Beloved
‘registering losses of history rather than repairing them'
What does it look like? How is it done? she tries to show this
Suspicious - readings that find the method they propose

Responses to surface reading:
•
Weed
•
Jeffrey J Williams, The New Modesty in Literary Criticism
•
Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique
•
If you believe how you say something matters, inseparable to what you’ve said,
literary studies matters
•
Offer a defence of criticism - doesn’t need to be defensive
•
Criticism can’t do that much
•
Demystifying nature of critique on criticism itself
◦
Critique critical methods
◦
Expose assumptions of our own methodologies 
•
Rita Felski

◦
◦
◦
◦
•
◦
◦
◦
◦
◦

critique not just a questioning of routine, putting into place new routines
Critique gives you habits of thought
Idea we should recognise those habits of thought
Not necessarily bad
Virginia Jackson
not explicitly in this debate
About what criticism is for?
What is normativity? What should we do with norms?
When are norms bad? 
Normativity in relation to genre

There is a message in the text - not entirely subjective? Countering postmodernism?
Genre’s not stable 

ART 6: Building a Better Description, Marcus, Love and
Best
"ACADEMICS DON’T NECESSARILY KNOW WHAT description is, but they know they don’t like
it
...
Studies that do not
engage causal or predictive questions, or do not do so successfully, are judged ‘merely’
descriptive
...
6” p2
"Humanists often keep their engagement with description tacit and articulate their explicit
discomfort with ‘‘mere description’’ by insisting (rightly) that description cannot be separated from
interpretation
...
7” p2
"In 2009, Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus published a special issue of Representations called
‘‘The Way We Read Now
...
’’9 In 2010, Heather Love published an essay called
‘‘Close but Not Deep’’ that proposed the observational social sciences as a model for descriptive
readings of literary texts
...
1” p2
"Anthropol- ogist Anna Tsing, in her work on ecology and nonhuman sociality, advocates what she
calls ‘‘critical description’’—‘‘critical, because it asks urgent ques- tions; and description, because it
extends and disciplines curiosity about life
...
16” p3
"Recently, scholars interested in complex systems— from global climate change to the literary
world system—have begun to experiment with what it might mean to describe, explain, and
analyze rather than to theorize or critique
...
” p4
"Views of description as impossible and ideological tend to cast it as a slick con artist, passing itself
off as objective in order to score illegitimate gains
...
” p5
"Bad describers observe, count, measure, copy, list, and catalog objects with either stultifying
exhaustiveness or selective incompleteness that is often ideologically moti- vated
...
They sever what they describe from larger
contexts or histories, seeking to pin things down and contain them rather than to capture their flux
...
” p6
"4
...
If we understand descrip- tion as enhanced attention, we can direct that
attention inward and out- ward, to how we describe as well as to what we describe
...
” p12
"6
...
One way to build a better description is to accept the
basic critique of objectivity as impossible and undesirable
...
But why not also
try out different ways of thinking about objectivity? Responsible scholarship is often understood as
respecting the distinction between a phe- nomenon and the critical methods used to understand it;
the task of the critic is to transform the phenomenon under consideration into a distinct category of
analysis, and to make it an occasion for transformative thought
...
This is indeed how they figure in much recent debate
...
4” p104
“[both/and] … a useful model for how we might understand the related opposition between
interpretation and description
...
It is,
rather, that they depend on and implicate each other in ways that render jettisoning either untenable
...
But the
inevitability of interpretation’s reliance on description has found few standard bearers
...
has broken down

---