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The Work of Reading pp 91–111Cite as

Palgrave Macmillan

Reading by Example: Disciplinary History for a Polemical Age

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Abstract

This essay argues that the self-consciously polemical tenor of recent conversations about critical method has hindered, rather than catalyzed, efforts to diversify our repertoire of approaches to literary form and aesthetics. In response to critical discourse around surface reading, postcritique, and the new formalism, Battersby suggests that those who seek to challenge the dominance of a given method need to refocus their efforts away from telling others that their preferred approaches have “run out of steam,” and towards giving readings which demonstrate, rather than merely assert, their novelty and value. The disciplinary history offered in the latter half of the essay illustrates that past movements that succeeded in transforming the field did so precisely through exemplary readings that illuminated literary texts in previously unprecedented ways.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to reprint material from my more wide-ranging essay on the same theme, “Reading Against Polemic: Disciplinary Histories, Critical Futures,” The Cambridge Quarterly 49, no. 2 (2020): 103–23.

  2. 2.

    I allude to Bruno Latour’s widely-read essay “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.”

  3. 3.

    In a fashion not dissimilar to Mir Ali Hosseini’s analysis of postcritical sensibility in his essay for this volume.

  4. 4.

    Felski, Limits of Critique, 13.

  5. 5.

    Felski, 1.

  6. 6.

    Felski, Uses of Literature, 1.

  7. 7.

    Robbins, “Not So Well Attached,” 371.

  8. 8.

    Friedman, “Both/And,” 345.

  9. 9.

    Felski, Limits of Critique, 12.

  10. 10.

    Felski, 151.

  11. 11.

    Felski, 172.

  12. 12.

    Best, “La Foi Postcritique,” 388.

  13. 13.

    Felski, “Response,” 389.

  14. 14.

    Felski, Uses of Literature, 132.

  15. 15.

    Felski, 76.

  16. 16.

    Fuss, “But What About Love?,” 355, n. 1.

  17. 17.

    Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading”; Cohen, “Narratology,” 51–75; Crane, “Spatial Imaginary,” 76–97; Price, “‘History of the Book,’” 120–38; Cheng, “Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility,” 98–119; Nealon, “Reading on the Left,” 22–50.

  18. 18.

    Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 16.

  19. 19.

    Cheng, “Skins, Tattoos, and Susceptibility,” 102.

  20. 20.

    Best and Marcus, “Surface Reading,” 16.

  21. 21.

    Simpson, “Interrogation Over,” 378–79; Stewart, Deed of Reading, 16.

  22. 22.

    Love, “Close but Not Deep,” 375.

  23. 23.

    Love, 385.

  24. 24.

    Love, 386.

  25. 25.

    Love, 385.

  26. 26.

    Lubbock, Craft of Fiction.

  27. 27.

    The modesty of the modifiers critics use to describe their approaches—“mere reading,” “just reading,” and “minimal interpretation”—is a telling indication that such practices are characterised more by the critical manoeuvres they refuse to perform than any novel strategies for the interpretation of texts (Mitchell, Mere Reading; Marcus, Between Women; Attridge and Staten, Craft of Poetry).

  28. 28.

    Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?,” 562. See also Otter, “Aesthetics in All Things,” 116–17.

  29. 29.

    Wolfson, “Introduction: Reading for Form,” 5.

  30. 30.

    Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” 562.

  31. 31.

    Theile, “New Formalism(s),” 6.

  32. 32.

    Theile, 8–11.

  33. 33.

    Theile, 10.

  34. 34.

    The very pervasiveness of this idiom in the academy today reflects the shift in cultural expectations of the function of universities that Simon Grimble describes elsewhere in this volume.

  35. 35.

    Menand and Rainey, “Introduction,” 10.

  36. 36.

    Menand and Rainey, 11–12.

  37. 37.

    Brooks and Warren, Understanding Poetry, ix. On the influence of New Critical textbooks, see Mark Jancovich, New Criticism, 87.

  38. 38.

    Brooks and Warren, ix.

  39. 39.

    Brooks, “New Criticism,” 593.

  40. 40.

    Brooks, Well-Wrought Urn.

  41. 41.

    De Man, Allegories of Reading, 9–13.

  42. 42.

    Levine, Forms, ix.

  43. 43.

    Bloom, Western Canon.

  44. 44.

    Sedgwick, Between Men, 30–33, 31.

  45. 45.

    Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet, 94–97.

  46. 46.

    Sedgwick, “Masturbating Girl,” 818–37; Fraiman, “Austen and Edward Said,” 807.

  47. 47.

    Said, Culture and Imperialism, 80–97.

  48. 48.

    Said, 95.

  49. 49.

    Said, 95.

  50. 50.

    Fraiman, “Austen and Edward Said,” 805.

  51. 51.

    See Love, “Close but Not Deep,” 372.

  52. 52.

    North, Literary Criticism, 86.

  53. 53.

    North, 87.

  54. 54.

    Gallagher and Greenblatt, Practicing New Historicism, 1.

  55. 55.

    Greenblatt, Learning to Curse, 6.

  56. 56.

    Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning, 246–52; Shakespearean Negotiations, 21–65.

  57. 57.

    In Attridge, Singularity of Literature and Work of Literature.

  58. 58.

    Attridge and Staten, Craft of Poetry, 13.

  59. 59.

    Attridge and Staten, 5.

  60. 60.

    Culler, Structuralist Poetics, xiv.

  61. 61.

    Woloch, One vs. the Many, 4.

  62. 62.

    Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 123–51.

  63. 63.

    North, Literary Criticism, 162, 168.

  64. 64.

    As Staten elucidates in Chapter 2 of this volume, aspects of Brooks’s own practice were in turn taken up by critics who did not share his convictions about the organic unity of literary texts.

  65. 65.

    North, Literary Criticism, 168.

  66. 66.

    Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 135–36.

  67. 67.

    Lynch, Loving Literature, 1.

  68. 68.

    Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 150.

  69. 69.

    Armstrong, “In Defense of Reading,” 89.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Bristol, Bristol, UK

    Doug Battersby

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  1. Doug Battersby
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Correspondence to Doug Battersby .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oxford, Oxford, UK

    Anirudh Sridhar

  2. University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Germany

    Mir Ali Hosseini

  3. University of York, York, UK

    Derek Attridge

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Battersby, D. (2021). Reading by Example: Disciplinary History for a Polemical Age. In: Sridhar, A., Hosseini, M.A., Attridge, D. (eds) The Work of Reading. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71139-9_5

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