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.