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)!
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