As we’ve discovered through the readings from this week and last, literary scholarship in the most recent decades has tended to overwhelmingly privilege and tirelessly promulgate textual interpretations inspired by Frederic Jameson’s concept of symptomatic reading, which “inquires into the repressed material history that shapes works of literature, delving into textual poetics to find the conflicts and contradictions that could not be articulated in propositional form” and calls for the critic to “rewrite the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretative code” in order to decipher what “remains unrealized in the surface of the text” (Cohen 57; Jameson 60, 48). In essence, a mode of reading that assumes there to be “something latent or concealed” in the text, probing the significance of  “absences, gaps, and ellipses” in order to ascertain a text’s true meaning (Best 3). That is, what a text says is not what it really means. By contrast, surface reading reorients the prevailing critical outlook to consider what is “evident, perceptible, apprehensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in a geometrical sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no depth” (Best 9). Surface reading as a methodology, theory and practice, does not mean to diminish or dismiss theoretical frameworks that primarily employ symptomatic approaches but works to correct the assumption that the only valuable ways of reading and interpreting within the literary academy should be symptomatic.

            Margaret Cohen, in her “Narratology in the Archive of Literature,” for example, advocates for a mode of surface reading that generates “generic horizons” through archival engagement to recover “forgotten literatures” that have been overshadowed and obscured by a preoccupation with canonized texts. She suggests that tracing a history of poetics, charting the development of aesthetic literary propensities, or taste, would allow us to rescue “forgotten literatures” from obscurity by showing how the ideal texts of literary cannons can be situated in larger networks of generic convention (or “horizons”) that stretch beyond the superficial superlatives espoused by the ideology of cannons. To illustrate, she turns to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, a novel that typically falls within the nineteenth-century cannon. In her reading, however, she plucks the novel from its secure canonical position, and re-situates it on the “generic horizon” of sea adventure fiction that produces “a somewhat different account of modernism than that usually given by Marxian literary history and by symptomatic reading specifically,” an account that would not otherwise have come to light, given academic trends that continue to primarily practice and celebrate the vantage point of symptomatic reading.

            And, I think that’s the larger point that dissenting voices like Sedgwick, Warner, Best, and Cohen are pointing us towards: Literary theories are conjectures about a text’s meaning, and the truth about a text probably emerges from a range of competing and contradictory theoretical approaches that create a composite, rather than monolith of absolute meaning. They encourage us to criticize critique itself as being haunted by ideology and replete with historical prejudice and assumption. I’m not sure if I can get on board with any theory that claims to comprehend the totality of a text’s meaning (is Jameson’s symptomatic reading doing that?). After all, isn’t the truth about a text the meanings we build on the surface or in the depths of any given thing we are reading? Maybe there’s such thing as the truest truth for each text? But I’m not sure that’s something we can know. Even if there was such a thing, how could we know it was that?