Special Issue of Representations features essays on Symptomatic Reading and its aftermath
October 26, 2009
Representations 108, The Way We Read Now, takes a close look at new ways of performing literary analysis in the twenty-first century. For decades, literary scholarship has been conducted under the sign of “symptomatic reading,” or the assumption that all texts bear latent, hidden meanings. The contributors to The Way We Read Now extend and rethink that influence by developing critiques of, variations on, and supplements to symptomatic reading by gesturing to a practice that Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, co-editors of the issue, call “surface reading.” Marcus and Best remind us “that as much as our objects of study may conceal the structures that give rise to them, they also wear them on their sleeves; that the moments that arrest us in texts need not be considered symptoms, whose true cause exists on another plane of reality, but can themselves indicate important and overlooked truths.”
Click here to download the press release.
Representations 108, The Way We Read Now, takes a close look at new ways of performing literary analysis in the twenty-first century. For decades, literary scholarship has been conducted under the sign of “symptomatic reading,” or the assumption that all texts bear latent, hidden meanings. The contributors to The Way We Read Now extend and rethink that influence by developing critiques of, variations on, and supplements to symptomatic reading by gesturing to a practice that Sharon Marcus and Stephen Best, co-editors of the issue, call “surface reading.” Marcus and Best remind us “that as much as our objects of study may conceal the structures that give rise to them, they also wear them on their sleeves; that the moments that arrest us in texts need not be considered symptoms, whose true cause exists on another plane of reality, but can themselves indicate important and overlooked truths.”
Click here to download the press release.