Farah Khan- Blog Post 2

            For this week’s blog post, I plan to focus primarily on Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus’ piece “Reading ‘The Way We Read Now.’” I found this piece to be an extremely helpful and rapid overview of the many different styles of surface reading that are emerging in response to what seems like a long-held and almost religious dedication to symptomatic reading that has dominated criticism. The essay begins by defining symptomatic reading- “It was not just any idea of interpretation that circulated among the disciplines, but a specific type that took meaning to be hidden, repressed, deep, and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter” (1).  When reading about Jameson, who is often cited as an influential symptomatic reader, I can’t help but be reminded of Sedgwick’s cautioning against paranoid reading or Armstrong’s criticism of the gendered mastering, manipulation, or domination of texts. It seems that symptomatic reading also is most influenced by the works of Freud and his ideas about the repressed and unconscious, as well as Marx’s ideas on commodity.

            This essay in particular points to three specific pairs of oppositions that are often “conflated” in symptomatic reading: “present/absent, manifest/latent, and surface/depth.” (4). Since symptomatic reading is often concerned with absences or gaps and uncovering the meanings of these absences or gaps, these oppositions often come up. However, Best and Marcus claim “These are not compatible sets of terms. What is absent is simply not there; what is latent is present but invisible, unrecognized either because it is concealed or because it is undeveloped; what is deep is fully present and thus theoretically visible, but is positioned so far down, in, or back relative to a viewer, or is so completely covered by an opaque surface, that it can only be detected by an extreme degree of penetration or insight” (4).

            The essay brings up several influential symptomatic readers and their central arguments, such as Jameson, but then it goes on to list new ways of reading that are more concerned with the surface instead of the hidden meaning that must be exposed. Marcus and Best refer to Margaret Cohen, for example, who focuses on the ways that symptomatic reading does not actually work on all genres. Cohen dives into the archives of literature and exhumes forgotten genres, subgenres, and narratologies that symptomatic reading would not really do much with- such as the genre of sea adventure fiction. Christopher Nealon is also mentioned, who argues that texts do not need to be grappled with or interpreted (or read symptomatically) in order to work subversively. “Nealon finds the conflict between freedom and capitalism already present in poetry, which ceaselessly configures and reconfigures matter…for Nealon, the poem itself is where politics surface” (8).

            Annie Cheng is also cited. She urges for a type of reading that is far removed from Jameson’s, and argues for a “mutual pedagogy of erotics” in reading. The summary of her reading styles was harder for me to grasp, however it did remind me, again, of last week’s readings with Armstrong and Sedgwick. Particularly because it seems that Cheng is trying to get away from this idea of mastery that so often comes up with reading to expose or reading to uncover.

            In the section titled “Surface Reading,” there is a list of different types of surface reading presented. “Surface as materiality” reminds me of Franco Moretti’s call for distant reading. This type of reading is interested in literal surfaces, and involves “histories of reading, publication, and circulation studies as things that link their producers, sellers, and users” (9). I also particularly liked “Embrace of the surface as an affective and ethical stance.” This type of reading seems especially invested in moving away from domination of texts. Sedgwick’s proposal of reparative reading is mentioned here as a way to practice this. While I still find myself struggling with the idea that we are not, as readers, supposed to try to expose injustice within texts, this type of reading seems to make sense when I think about it in such gendered terms. Critics like Sontag, for example, are more invested with working with the reality of texts to show their truth, instead of manipulating them to fit to a pre-conceived notions that the reader may have of the repressed evil lying below the surface.

            Many of the other critics mentioned also seem to have some investment in the idea of simply showing texts for what they are. From what I understand, this is a strong theme in surface reading. Instead of transforming texts to show their truth, surface readers are more interested in accepting them and understanding them how they exist already.  And, while this may at first seem like an acceptance of injustice or the oppression that underlies certain texts, I am seeing how it may actually be a necessary step to actually changing reality. As Best and Marcus suggest, “to begin to challenge the state of things, or the distortions of ideology, we must strive to produce undistorted, complete descriptions of them” (18).