Post 2: Dissection of a surface reading

OK this looks really long, but it's not. As I took my notes, I realized that I was conducting my own, very specific type of reading that seems exceedingly surface/science based. In an attempt not only to figure out Symptomatic and Surface methods of reading, it only seems appropriate to put my own method under the microscope, so I uploaded my notes here to take a closer look. If I were you, I'd just scan over the notes portion to get an idea of what I'm outlining, and skip to the bottom :) 

While reading Marcus and Best's "Surface Reading," I highlighted, underlined, and wrote out notes that chopped up and simplified the text for easy consumption after the fact. (How Spinoza of me!) But creating categories, lists, and color coding help me do what exactly? Get to the bottom of something? Make out the surface? What kind of reading does mine resemble more? Well, let's see... 

Each time I thought I read something telling about Symptomatic Reading that might help me define it, I put added it to the list, along with notes on what I thought (in pink): 

Symptomatic reading:

• The result of psychoanalysis and Marxist ‘metalanguages’ in the 70’s and 80’s: sees meaning as hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter (reader).
• Reader is granted power by being necessary to interpret (locate, diagnose, extract?) a text’s unconscious (perhaps the reason why it was so popular for so long? God complex!)
• A text’s truest meaning lies in what it does not say
• Textual surfaces as superfluous, and and symptomatic reading is required to unmask hidden meanings.
• Texts possess meanings that are veiled, latent, all but absent if it were not for their irrepressible and recurring symptoms (think Playing in the Dark)
• Fredrick Jameson: If everything were transparent, then no ideology would be possible, and no domination either. Interpretation could never operate on the assumption that the text means just what it says.
• The most interesting aspect of a text is what it represses, and that (according to FJ) interpretation should therefore seek a latent meaning behind the manifest one.
• What a text means lies in what it does not say, which can then be used to rewrite the text in terms of a master code. What is a master code? Ideology? Apparatuses? Structures?
• By disclosing the absent cause that structures the text’s inclusion and exclusions, the critic restores to the surface the deep history that the text represses (FJ) - I like the idea of finding the structure of the inclusion and exclusion, but am not sure that this requires finding or exposing or expunging something that's being repressed, per se
• Not only what’s left out, but WHY and HOW
• Locate absences and asks what those absences mean, what forces create them, and how they signify the questions that motivate the text, but that the text itself cannot articulate. - Again, I like the idea that there can be something that drives the text that the text itself cannot name - it's mysterious and obvious all at once
• Creates opposites of present/absent, manifest/latent, surface/depth - but these don’t all make sense together (surface can be seen as superficial and even deceptive, manifest seems clear and genuine, etc.

From Playing in the Dark:

Africanism has become both a way of talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repressions, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability (7)

[The concerns of] Autonomy, authority, newness and difference, absolute power--not only become the major themes and presumptions of American literature, but that each one is made possible by, shaped by, activated by a complex awareness and employment of a constituted Africanism. It was this Africanism, deployed as rawness and savagery, that provided the staging ground and arena for the elaboration of the quintessential American identity.  (45)

Recall how Morrison so deftly locates the absences within the text - the gaping holes and glaring presences that are only half the equation, or speak symbolically to what is not being named. This gives Symptomatic Reading a better review for me; seeing symptoms and latent meaning and something to be exposed so often sounds slightly arrogant and dismissive, not to mention reductive and often somehow misogynist. Seeing how this is done in a positive way is a nice reminder.

I did the same thing with Surface Reading: 

Surface reading:

• Broadens the scope of critique to include interpretations that seek to understand the complexity of literary surfaces, surfaces that have been rendered invisible (or useless) by symptomatic reading
• Identifies the truth that a text bears witness to
• What is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts
• What is neither hidden nor hiding - Because who's hiding it?
• What is looked at, rather than what we try to see ourselves through - How self-centered symptomatic reading can be! But also, how helpful when the self that needs to be identified (rather, any subject) is one that is categorically or systematically obscured from texts
• Surface reading, which strives to describe texts accurately, might easily be dismissed as politically quietest, too willing to accept things as they are.
• Attentiveness to the artwork as its own freedom
• True openness to all the potentials made available by texts is also prerequisite to an attentiveness that does not reduce them to instrumental means to an end
• Way of studying culture that neither attack nor defends it
• Use science and technology to expand what critics can do
• Registers the way constraints as well as breaking free from them, structure existence (recognize this without judging)

Anytime there was a method of reading described, I took down who thought what and how: 

Key Players:Foucault: skeptical about the possibility of radical freedom and dubious that literature or its criticism can explain our oppression or provide the keys to our liberation
FREUD / Paul Ricoeur: Freud’s model of interpretation was suited for (symbolic language, or) language where ‘another’ meaning is both given and hidden in the immediate meaning. Symbolic function is to mean something other than what is said. So to interpret is to understand the/a double meaning. Freud’s understanding of double meaning is based on the demystification of illusion (super popular) - There are so many more types of double meaning!
MARX/Althusser: method of divulging the undivulged event in the text it reads, and in the same moment relates it to a different text, present as a necessary absence in the first. For Althusser, symptomatic reading makes the lacunae (missing or unfilled portion) perceptible. Symptomatic reading assumes that texts are shaped by questions they do not themselves pose and contain symptoms that help interpreters articulate those questions, which lie outside texts as their absent causes. Gestures back to a truth too complex to describe, as history cannot be read manifestly, as it is the inaudible and illegible notation of the effects of a structure of structures.
Jameson: symptomatic reader/critic must rewrite narrative in terms of master codes (?), disclosing status is ideology, as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. Text shaped by absence of history, and interpretation should seek a repressed, latent, mystified meaning behind a manifest one. Interpretation is unmasking; the critic restores to the surface the history that the text represses. How do they do this, exactly? The critic wrests meaning from a resisting text or inserts it into a lifeless one (god complex much?). Shows that a text’s silences, gaps, and imagery can be symptoms of something that are only apparently absent. So much talk of symptom in a way that suggests that the meaning is a disease to be eradicated, always-already negative and sickly
Mary Crane: As a cognitive reader, the unconscious consists simply of mental activities too rapid and too complex to be perceived. Sees conflicting images (of surface) pointing to underlying tensions in theory (she’s reading Jameson). And sees conflict between a reader who exposes disguised truths and a reader who produces those truths. Where Jameson would read contradictions as clues to veiled operations of history, Crane understands an author’s complex ‘spatial imaginary’ as an effect of how cognition works.
Margaret Cohen:   Canon is too restricted/too much is taken for granted. Symptomatic reading doesn’t work well on all genres. She suggests placing them in context with similar work is more enlightening; suggestion that placing a text in its discursive contexts can illuminate textual features that are obvious but which critics have overlooked. The horizon is a legible set of points one can use to navigate and understand a literary field. She uses archives to reconstruct a horizon that defines the position of texts and exists on the same plane as the text it explains. Situate texts within epistemological frames they share with other similar writing to find common themes.
Christopher Nealon:  The activist component of literature is value added by the critic. Some theorists believe that human action has priority over matter, while other believe that matter has priority over human action on it. (And it’s their job to figure out which comes first). Nealon asserts that literature and esp poetry enact the struggle between matter and human action rather than the victory of one over the other. The text is where the issues surface. Hermeneutics is not what critics do to the poem, poems contain their own hermeneutics. He asserts that you don’t need to add theory to the text or gather texts to prove a theory, it’s enough simply to register what the text is saying. This seems vague and frankly a bit reductive - but I may not be getting it
Leah Price: Price breaks completely with symptomatic methods by suggesting that we do not, and need not read books at all. It-narratives are what we need to trace histories and ideologies; by tracking how things are moved from place to place and for/by whom. Rather than teaching us simply to look at books in order to catalog material characteristics, it-narratives teach us a new way to think about classic opposition being the inert surface of things and the vibrant depth of persons. It-narratives endow books with consciousness in order to have them recount histories that divert us from their interiority toward their materiality, thus returning them to objecthood (but a vivid and significant kind). Excuse me? From her book review: Price anatomizes the meanings that were ascribed to the things people did with books other than reading them. This wide-ranging analysis is fascinating in its own right, but in making it, Price also throws down a gauntlet. Calling for more scholarly attention to "the wide range of nontextual . . . uses to which the book is put" (20), she aims to dislodge "the primacy of reading itself" (21) in current book history and literary criticism alike.
Anne Cheng: Replace suspicion and critical mastery with a susceptibility that could undo the dichotomy between subject and object. Cheng advocates for a mutual pedagogy of erotics in which the critic is inhabited by what he studies, and embraces the loss of critical certainty and the gain in intimacy that result. Sees hermeneutics of suspicion as allied with identity politics, since what motivates the reading of the surface as a symptom of hidden depths is the desire to restore and make visible the authenticity veiled by spectacle. Replace the symptom (which depends on the contrast between surface and depth) with a constellation of multiple surfaces understood as concealing nothing.

I tried to sort all the authors and their practices into the categories of Surface Reading:

Surface as materiality: Mary Crane, Leah PriceSurface as the intricate verbal structure of lit lang: Christopher Nealon, Anne ChengSurface as affective/ethical stance: Anne ChengSurface as practice of critical description: Christopher NealonSurface as patterns that exist within and across texts: Margaret CohenSurface as literal meaning: Christophen Nealon, Anne Cheng

As well as identify trends:

New Formalists: We do not need to criticize artwork, because it contains it's own critical and self-critical agency . The role of the critic is to restore the artwork to its original complexity. Reading is learned submission to the artwork, by which we come to share its freedom by embodying its powers. Materialists: The office of art is to resist through form, the course of the world. The art's claim to autonomy stems from its effort to detach itself from reality (which it cannot ever do), but also its also inseparable from a dream of freedom in which critics can participate: " As pure artifacts, works of art are instructions for the praxis they refrain from: the production of life lived as it ought to be." Mimetic relationship between literature and criticism. Symptomatics: critics who believe that the text is a mystification and that the critic must therefore distance himself from it by adopting a point of view at variance with its optic. Freedom comes from an agon with the ideological text. Critics don't produce the text, but produce any truth that can come from them Utopians striving for redemption... etc

And finally, take note of the closing points: 

1) To see more clearly does not require plumbing hidden depths2) producing accurate accounts of surfaces is not antithetical to critique. So... Surface reading might be the best way to move past the obstacles we've constructed around ideological demystification. The point was never to get away from the facts but closer to them. But we're not just looking for facts are we...

The essay rounds off by saying that the work of assembly and the desire for a more complete view of reality are shared by all whose practices are included in the survey. But to me, this comes off as a bit of a generalization. In my own reading (outdated or old fashioned as it may be) it's imperative that I embody BOTH surface and symptomatic reading to try and fully grasp a text. And to me, the most convincing of the surface reading practices presuppose a deeper ideological richness that they can then see playing out on the surface of the text.

Here's what I mean:

The process that I've laid out here is pretty cut and dry: surface reading through and through.  I read the text, divvy words or phrases into categories, make connections, and take it all for what it is. My efforts put the text into a format that my brain can comb through (consume?) more readily. I'm engaging what I've gathered from the surface and derive a lot of meaning from it. It's sort of the 'catch and release' of critical thought; take hold, observe, and then let it go. No need to mash it up, kill, or dissect it to reach any new peak of understanding or to better understand the latent symbolism, meaning, or truth. 

But this is only the first step of my reading, and the notes I can't help but leave myself are the holes in the levy, the breadcrumbs that suggest there are always-already trails leading 'down into' or 'under' or 'beyond' the surface. Looking deeper doesn't have to be a power-play, or a second-guessing of the surface. The text - consciously or unconsciously - has presented something to my brain that wants to keep exploring. Maybe this is out of habit, or out of paranoia (I don't want any truths or meanings or implications to sneak up on me), but you can't argue the fact that it's contributed to our experience of literature and our criticism of it in unfathomable ways. It seems unfinished not to pursue the ideological, latent, or undercover meanings that (whether or not they occur naturally in the text or if I place them there) I've identified. I understand the selfishness inherent in symptomatic reading; it's easy to become the savior or the sole beneficiary. But really, if we're just slaves to interpretation for clarity's sake, there seems to be very little political or social significance to be cultivated. 

After the initial surface reading, this text begs another read through. This time; with an eye to any symptoms that might have begun to peek out at me along the way. I only wish that the language of this process didn't necessarily connote an inherent sickness or malady that's causing all of those ideological interests - because there's richness, and excitement, and potential for positive change to be found as well. 

Blog 2 post

For the purposes of this blog I want to focus on Fredric Jameson’s work along with Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’ Article. I do not wish to focus on them in comparison but as a thought upon what I have learned of both types of reading, Symptomatic and surface through my other classes. Indeed, both are pretty fascinating in how they establish some interesting lines of thought in both subjects.

                With surface reading, I remember most an article we read on Billy Budd; it being a central text to understand different types of theory. The conclusion that the article led to that it was mainly a story behind the aspects of justice and whether or not it must be paid despite how honorable a character like Billy Budd Could be. The way the critic led to that conclusion was leading the reader through the many different interpretations “imposed” onto the story and leading that ultimately, if one were to just read the story for what it was it would lead to his conclusion. It made surface reading seem very easy to understand and in fact do. This type of reading actually seems to fit well with Best and Marcus conclusion that “we take surface to mean what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth. A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through” (9). To see the text as something evident seems to question the purpose as to why we need actual academic readers but it is also to see a text a something valid with itself, non-deceptive, and able to bring meaning without the necessity of a scholarly reader. To view texts as this is to shift the focus away from the reader but to the text itself. To be “apprehensible” or “perceptible” or “not hidden” also makes me wonder the things I may have missed as I constantly have symptomatically read texts. For example, a work I researched called The Holy Spirit of My Uncle’s Cojones could have easily been a fake memoir of a 1^st generation Salvadoran American growing up in the US and the experiences he had as he faced, sexual abuse, suicide, and racism. Instead I focused upon it as a national allegory connected to the trauma of the nation of El Salvador. If I allowed myself to look at it at a surface level Maybe I would have gained more insight on the text and its own truth.

Besides my own realizations upon surface reading Fredric Jameson is a very familiar name to me.  Not only due to my critical theory class but his name has been very apparent in my argentine cinema class in the Spanish Department. I feel that my reading of texts has always thought of the “collective” or how the text reflects the discourses of society. For this reason, when states that the political allegory “then, a sometimes repressed ur-narrative or master fantasy about the interaction of collective subjects, we have moved to the very borders our second horizon, in which what we formerly regarded as individual texts are grasped as “utterances” in an essentially collective or class discourse” (1945) the political allegory as being an “utterance” emphasizes the aspect of absence found within the text. In addition, the aspect of the collective like surface aggrandizes the text moving it from its own individual worth to a collective worth found when it is related to history. This type of reading seems to favor a more social reading to understand class, people etc. Though this reading does seem favorable for some texts, texts that concern themselves with argentine cinema illustrate the problems of seeing everything as a political allegory or artifact. They discuss how Jameson aspects do not fit with argentine film’s neo realism in which it does not involve itself with moral values or proclaim any form of specific political statement. I see this as a problem with other Latino literatures as well such as the one mention above or genres such as magical realism that seem to avoid the very real world in favor of themes related to pre European cultures. However Symptomatic reading is very favorable for the most part in many texts. 

Blog Post 1 ( Sorry Thought I published it )

The four articles we read for class, though challenging and at times incomprehensible to me, did provide some snippets that interested me and made me meditate on how I read as a scholar.  In summary of four articles, I believe they all led to the same premise of reading. That all forms of reading be it what was traditionally critical, uncritical, affect, and distant do stem from a similar root; therefore, critics must consider other forms of reading as a way to access literature. In addition, another aspect that stuck to me was the relationship created between the texts, media, etc.… that we analyze. It is not a simple connection between subject and object, us being the subject that “penetrates” the object but rather a fluidity between the work and the responses of the self. I am still unsure how to describe but that was an attempt.

Now with these summations, the works that most intrigued were those of Armstrong and Warner. With Warner it intrigued me how he presented his insights on how critical reading created a space where the critic could place themselves in the position of a revealer and antidote bringer of social ills. Armstrong states “Don’t read like Quixote, like Emma Bovary, like Ginny Weasley . . .  to quote another revealingly bland rallying cry: ‘Critical literacy means making one’s self present as part of a moral and political project that links the production of meaning to the possibility of human agency, democratic community, and transformative’” (14-15). To think about our reading as scholars, as critics, as a form of creating a means to social action illustrates what can at times be an idiocy of critical reading. Though valid in many aspects of our field, like we discuss in class Critical reading does not really solve the world’s problems nor has any empirical evidence that validates it as Armstrong suggests. Thus, to believe that critical reading is the only form of reading correctly is very narrow.

Another quote that brought insight to me was Warner’s thoughts as reading as a form of relationship.  The query of what if it is not true that “critical reading is the only way to suture textual practice with reflection, reason, and a normative discipline of subjectivity?” demonstrates that critical reading history stems from a history of reading that is vast and complicated. Warner continues “if we begin to understand critical reading as the coming-into- reflexivity of reading, but as a very special set of form relationships, then it might be easier to recognize rival modes of reading and reflection on reading as something other than pretheorectically uncritical” (16). This insight made me reflect upon my own reading and whether I have prescribed my other forms of reading as beneath me or not truly reading. In essence I have at times and feel a desire to change that within my own analysis of texts. Returning to the quote, the aspects of thinking of reading as “relationships” adds more depth to reading as a give and take between reader and text. The text becomes a partner in the production of insight instead of something to be ripped apart to get to some form of truism. In addition, as discussed in class it allows for readings such as the practice of repetition found in religious study to occur and be considered as valuable in the sphere of accessing work making me wonder how I can use aspects of affect, or repetition within my own work.

In regards to Armstrong, the aspects of bifurcation and erasure where extremely interesting. Though pretty hard to completely understand I did enjoy the aspect of these terms as palimpsestic. For example, the phrase “Thought is Erasure and cancellation is the principle of all symbol” (93) seems heavily insightful. If thought is the process of erasing and scratching out the thoughts that preceded before it, it demonstrates that reading and our analysis of works is in some shape or form, multiplictous. Though it may not be post structural it does make me wonder whether this type of reading is truly to be fully practiced and mastered. However, it is still interesting to think that our reading of something has been led to it by negations of other readings, emotions, and affect that exist to lead us to those thoughts. 

Margaret Miller_Week 2_Narratology in the Closet of Literature: Sometimes Women are [not] "just friends"

For this week's readings, I want to focus on sections of Margaret Cohen's argument, particularly those sections that reference Sharon Marcus and her notion of "just reading" because it feels like an intersection that is relevant, quite specifically, to the concerns and questions I'm wrestling with in my own work on Victorian literature.

In Cohen's piece, she includes a whole section of methodologies she uses in her "narratology in the archival of literature," which I honestly appreciated as someone who likes to understand the process of how various scholars conduct their research. More importantly though, she has a subsection dedicated to Marcus and how "just reading" fits with her distant reading that's closer to home than Moretti's, but not "too" close. Cohen says of Marcu's argument about 19th century female friendships that she "does not dismiss the intimate, often erotic representations of female friendship...but rather seeks 'to account more fully for what texts present on their surface but critics have failed to notice'" (60). Best says something similar in "Surface Reading" about Marcus's argument: "Taking friendship in novels to signify friendship is thus not mere tautology; it highlights something true and visible on the text's surface that symptomatic reading had ironically rendered invisible" (12). I'm doing my best to stay away from dismissal and critique and actually put pressure on what's being said and see what Marcus is actually upholding. So if a symptomatic reading is about manifesting that which is latent/repressed in a text and surface reading is about taking things as they are and as they present themselves, where does queerness actually fit in? Queerness by default of what it identifies (which is not metaphoric or symbolic) cannot be "on the surface" in the literal way these articles seem to imply. Queerness in and of itself is an unstable and ambiguous mode/frame of seeing and reading. In this way, reading queerness is always symptomatic reading (looking beyond the physical) in ways that heterosexuality does not have to be.

Marcus's piece on female friendship is the perfect example for what I mean by my above statements. Her piece, to iterate again, is about taking female friendship at face value--meaning that it's not really homoerotic. She suggests (as does Cohen) that this is a surface reading. However, I want to ask: aren't readings in and of themselves coded with certain types of value? To take female friendship at face value as friendship, and not potentially queer, codes surface reading as inherently heterosexual and never symptomatic. It never has to be discerned, but rather is presumed to be quite on the surface. Eve Sedgwick infamously says in her article, "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" that "the homo/hetero question is problematic for its anachronism: homosexual identities, and certainly female ones, are supposed to not have had a broad discursive circulation until later in the nineteenth century, so in what sense could heterosexual identities as against them?" (823). I bring Sedgwick's point up not to derail the conversation around Marcus and Cohen, but instead to suggest the underlying presumption of symptomatic and surface reading that seems in their arguments to only be invisible and latent: heterosexuality is the overarching framework for both--queerness only needs to be deemed repressed because it's functioning in a hetero-frame.

And furthermore, I would want to suggest that perhaps Marcus does not really follow the "rules" of surface reading outlined in Best's and Cohen's pieces. Let's for example, take a surface reading of romantic affection and suggest that the superficial or "literal"/physical clues are, in the 19th century: kissing hands/face/mouth, hand-holding, blushing at physical touch, etc. Let's say these are our units of measurement for romantic affection. Then, on the surface, if we are to "see" two characters interact in this way, we would acknowledge the romantic affection they are sharing (not an in-depth reading, just stating a fact). So then doesn't Marcus's reading actually repress and/or do the opposite of a surface reading of female friendship, if those friendships involve affection between two women? I wonder if surface reading cannot (as it is outlined) account for queerness in the way I have described because Marcus appears to conflate queer female affection with queer identity rather than seeing them as discrete and separate units. In The Woman in White Laura and Marian, who are half-sisters, share many, many, kisses and I would argue that is representative of queer sororal love rather than incestuous sexual desire (since we cannot discern that from simply reading on the surface). If a surface reading cannot account for discrete parts, which it should do as a potential mode of proto-distant reading (looking for a pattern among discrete parts), then is the way we read now, just really, really straight?

Blog Post 2: Symptomatic vs. Surface

Is it just me or are these readings making anyone else feel old-fashioned? I do a lot of Marxist-adjacent work and this week's readings offered critiques of Marx and Jameson. I don't quite feel personally attacked, but maybe a little bit embarrassed and more anxious that I'm doing things right. I have to keep reminding myself that there's more than one way to read and I don't have to pick right now.

 As far as methodologies go, I felt that Margaret Cohen's offered a process that wasn't so different than symptomatic reading; Cohen's narratology combined features of Moretti's distant reading (primarily the emphasis on patterns) and elements of Jameson's maxim "Always historicize." When she describes her reading of sea adventure narratives, she identifies a pattern in Robinson Crusoe, and then she uses that pattern as evidence of how a literary work can address "the historical conjecture of its era" (66). It's different from symptomatic reading in that it doesn't "unpack" anything, but it seems to have the same kind of goal: "a more complete view of reality" (Best 19).

It seems like the difference is the reader's relationship to the text. For the symptomatic reader, a text is hiding something: "...the most significant truths are not immediately apprehensible and may be veiled or invisible"(Best 4). So the reader must be distrustful( or perhaps paranoid) and demonstrate what the text's unconscious reveals which ideologies are working beneath the surface.

In contrast, a surface reader takes what the text is saying at face value. The surface reader trusts the literal is a performance of the text's truth. So Melville's chapters about whale anatomy aren't some metaphor for an ideology, they belong to a broader narrative context. So a Cohen reading might ask the question: "Are there other books that talk about whale anatomy?" or "Why would a book talk about whale anatomy?" This last question is significantly different than "What does the whale anatomy really mean?" The "why" question offers answers that are situated in the historic context. The "what" question de-prioritizes the written text in favor of its absent meaning.  It's a friendlier approach to the text.

Obviously there's a resonance to what we talked about last week: paranoid reading vs. reparative reading. Cohen's version of reparative reading is rooted in aesthetics, not affect. Thus Cohen's method seems kind of familiar; the form is literally the content. Best firmly asserts that surface reading isn't a trivial, depoliticized pursuit. Even though the reader might be concentrating only on the literal details of the plot, the relationship of the reader to the text is a more egalitarian one than Jameson's. Taking note of the text's surface verifies the text's identity, an action that we think of as "empowering," and thus, we give the text a kind of legitimacy and agency.  The symptomatic reader is engaged in that power relationship of Subject/Object.

Cohen also believes that surface reading has the power to get rid of that thing we are all (at least) annoyed by: the literary canon. Surface reading is like Moretti's distant reading in that it takes a step back and looks at all texts. So you might look at everything written in the 19th century and perform surface reading on any of the texts. There isn't a group that's privileged according to taste or race or gender, and all texts are in relation to each other. Cohen describes the period which we call the rise of the novel as "a thick process of contestation and transformation among a range of competing and diverse narrative subgenres" (Cohen 55). So Moby-Dick is not the best novel of the 19th century, it's a novel in which travelogue, sea adventure narrative, and naturalist journal (to name a few) compete against each other. Thus the naturalist journal is as important as Moby-Dick is and can be said to have its own subgenres (perhaps ones that are narrative vs. the catalogue). Patterns of style and content are privileged, not the text's position on a scale of taste. Since it's rooted in aesthetics, it doesn't mean that literary studies becomes cultural studies, where anything is considered a "text." Cohen also makes that weird point about how it lets English majors be truthful to the "English" part of it.

While I am puzzled by the need to establish "literary" at all, I feel much more comfortable with surface reading rather than distant reading. I feel like I actually understood this close reading (sorry Armstrong)!

Week 2: Stretching the limits of spatial metaphor in Best and Marcus

Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus challenge the supremacy of so-called “symptomatic reading,” which they associate with the reading practices of Frederic Jameson and Louis Althusser. They claim that the symptomatic reader always describes the Truth (with a capital T) in terms of a particular spatial metaphorics that comes with a particular set of assumptions about the epistemology of the text and the role of the interpreter. To the symptomatic reader, “…the most interesting aspect of a text is what it represses…interpretation should therefore seek ‘a latent meaning behind a manifest one.’ The interpreter ‘rewrite[s] the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretive code’ and reveals truths that ‘remain unrealized in the surface of the text’” (Best 3). Best and Marcus argues that the spatial metaphorics of latent/manifest, repressed/unrepressed, and presence/absence implies that a text can become known only through the “heroic” role of the critic who peers through the text to gaze at its underlying Truth and then brings that Truth to the surface by translating it into a demystifying master code.

Best and Marcus reject the epistemology implied in these spatial metaphorics and offer “surface reading” as an alternative. Reading the surface of a text means to read “what is evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth” (Best 9). Although they do not reject the spatial metaphorics that they claim Jameson and Althusser make use of—because they are still using such terms as “geometrical sense,” “length,” “breadth,” and “thickness”—they advocate instead for using them differently to produce a different epistemology. A text with “length and breadth but no thickness” has knowledge and meaning immediately and easily available to the reader, and has no need for a master code known only to the academic critic.

Margaret Cohen further attacks Jameson’s project in The Political Unconscious, which affirms, as Marxism does, “a primacy of theory which is at one and the same time a recognition of the primacy of History itself” (last sentence of the Preface). In order to denaturalize and defamiliarize Jameson’s assertion that Marxism, with all of its attendant interpretative operations, offers the best theorizing framework, Cohen points out that Jameson cuts the teeth of his reading practice by applying it to only realist and modernist narrative. Cohen raises the issue that “in the case of novels that do not confirm to the realist or modernist paradigms, symptomatic reading loses its bearings” (Cohen 58). Best and Marcus make the same move to denaturalize by arguing that Althusser’s (Jameson’s stated ally in symptomatic reading) theory, one that “divulges the undivulged event in the text it reads” (Althusser 28), can actually be traced back to the “Gnostic concept of truth as too complex to describe” (Best 5). Cohen, Best, and Marcus all make the move to denaturalize Jameson and Althusser in order to disarm their call to historicize via Marxist, symptomatic reading practices.

But I want to return in particular to Best and Marcus’ peculiar use of spatial metaphorics to mount their attack against Jameson (and Althusser). I think that Best and Marcus rely too much on spatial metaphors of “latent/manifest, repressed/unrepressed, and presence/absence” to make their case against Jameson and Althusser’s symptomatic reading, and then appropriate the language of space and legibility that they use against Jameson and Althusser to advance their own reading practice. As mentioned above, they advocate for an epistemology of the text that is “evident, perceptible, apprehensible” to readers and associate that epistemology to a spatial metaphorics of surface.

But Best and Marcus stretch the limits of their metaphor in defining surface reading. Such a practice reads surfaces—not hidden depths containing Truth—and they argue that “a surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must train ourselves to see through” (Best 9). Later, in their description of reading surface as literal meaning, they synthesize Foucault’s statement about his relationship to archives and employ it in service of their surface reading practice. They claim that “Just reading sees ghosts as presences, not absences, and lets ghosts be ghosts, instead of saying what they are ghosts of” (Best 13).

Best and Marcus are implying that when we read a surface (when we look at it), we must see it as opaque. However, we can all come up with surfaces that have transparency such as glass or plastic or a lens. This metaphor is poor and is further undermined by their use of the metaphor of the ghost, which is at least a partially transparent spirit. How can we see a ghost without perhaps seeing the place where a ghost haunts? How can we see a ghost as a presence without also seeing its relations to people and places, possibly a presence that also resolves a contradiction between the person which it is supposed to embody and the place to which that person is indelibly attached?

I’m not necessarily saying that just because Best and Marcus use some confusing spatial metaphorics that their entire surface reading practice is problematic, but I do think it raises some questions about whether they rely too heavily of “space” to conceptualize what their reading practice does.