Abstract
Why do we read literary texts closely? There are plenty of other things to do with literary texts, many of them more fun, some of them even interesting. But the interesting ones, though they may help us in our close reading, or may indeed challenge, limit, or secure its conditions of possibility, belong to other disciplines: psychology, linguistics, sociology of art, anthropology, area studies, history, religious studies, philosophy, neurobiology, and so on. Inasmuch as the literary object is peculiar enough to warrant its own discipline—and we cannot yet dismiss the claim that it does not—that discipline is close reading. Questions about the way we read “now” are always beside the point, for the reason that the way we read now is they way we have always read—provided we understand that the domain of this “always” is limited to the rather young “we” of literary studies as a discipline. What additional qualifiers attach to reading as a slogan do not add much: since there is nothing to read but the textual surface, “surface reading,” for example, is simply a synonym for reading.’ Such slogans are presumably ginned up to generate disagreement, which would be useful for everyone except that in order to count as a disagreement, there would have to be something to disagree about, and that something would be, for both avowed surface readers and any conceivable interlocutor in the discipline, how to account for the words on the page, in other words the meaning of a literary text.
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Notes
See Fredric Jameson, Fables of Aggression: Wyndham Lewis, or the Modernist as Fascist (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979).
See Wyndham Lewis, Hitler (London: Chatto and Windus, 1931), 83.
Page references are to G.W.F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970); paragraph numbers follow Miller’s English translation; Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford, 1977). Translations will often differ substantially from the English text.
Fredric Jameson, Representing Capital (London: Verso, 2011). See, e.g., p. 81: “What the figure of externalization and the return or taking back into self is for Hegel, the trope of separation and its various cognates and synonyms is for Marx.”
The reference is to Michael Fried, “Art and Objecthood,” in Art and Objecthood (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 148–72.
Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Horkheimer and Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Continuum, 1996), is cited in the text as DE. Translations will often differ substantially from the English text. Dialektik der Aufklärung: Philosophische Fragmente (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1969) is cited in the text as DA.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke, 1991), 4.
English text in Capital, 948–1084. Karl Marx, Das Kapital 1.1: Resultate des unmittelbaren Produktionsprozesses (Berlin: Karl Dietz, 2009) is cited in the text as R. The distinction occurs elsewhere in Capital, notably K 533/C 645.
Pierre Bourdieu, “Le marché des biens symboliques,” L’Anée sociologique 22 (1971), 52–53.
Clement Greenberg, “Modernist Painting,” in The Collected Essays and Criticism, vol. 4: Modernism with a Vengeance, 1957–1969 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 85–86.
Lisa Siraganian, Modernism’s Other Work: The Art Object’s Political Life (Oxford University Press, 2012).
See Nicholas Brown, “Postmodernism as Semiperipheral Symptom,” in Utopian Generations: The Political Horizon of Twentieth-Century Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton, 2005), 173–99.
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© 2013 Mathias Nilges and Emilio Sauri
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Brown, N. (2013). Close Reading and the Market. In: Nilges, M., Sauri, E. (eds) Literary Materialisms. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137339959_9
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