Leanna O'Brien Post on Week 2 Readings

Blog Post 2

In Best’s chapter, I was struck by the language that was used to describe symptomatic readings. There’s a lot of talk of “unmasking” and “rewriting” the original text, mostly quoted from Jamison (Best, 5). (Note: I am, at the moment, only halfway through Jamison’s essay and so I’m not going to attempt to comment on the pages from Political Unconscious in their own right.) This language gives the critic a large amount of power over the text. While neither Best nor Cohen was dismissive of symptomatic reading—and while I would not dismiss it outright—the discourse surrounding it did give me pause.

Namely, I began to wonder where the line lay between interpretation and imposition. As far as I can tell, there is no hard divide between the hidden meaning that the critic sees inside of the text and the presuppositions and pet theories that a critic might impose onto the text. The fact that the critic is entering the text with their own experiences and biases cannot be ignored. If it falls to the critic to dredge up meaning that isn’t immediately apparent and that derives from things that aren’t present on the page, it isn’t always easy to tell when they’ve locked on a meaning that’s been deeply repressed and when they’ve simply misconstrued the text.

I noticed that Best mentioned the use of Freud’s theories of psychoanalysis in his discussion of past practices. I immediately thought of Dora, an exemplary case study in which Freud continually insisted that a young woman was in love with an older man who had sexually assaulted her, despite her protests. When she rejected his explanation as absurd, he asserted that she had repressed the information. While his reading of the situation is deeply problematic, his claims of repression make it so that his theory cannot be objectively proved wrong. By his model, no one truly knows the depths of his patient’s mind, just as no one knows the deepest meanings hidden in a text.

Literary criticism being peer reviewed, there are checks in place against critics making up interpretations from whole cloth. However, based on Best’s discussion of the study of female friendships in Victorian literature—namely of how Sharon Marcus noticed that homosocial relationships did not necessarily weaken after one party’s marriage, as many critics thought (Best, 12)—does suggest that it’s possible for facts to be ignored in service of a particular reading.

Symptomatic reading is valuable. Conspicuous gaps in the text are worth looking into. But, as with paranoid readings (which seem to have some degree of overlap with the symptomatic reading), I do think that they should be viewed with a critical eye, seeing how there is a reasonable potential for misuse.

On an unrelated note, I also want to look at a bit more closely at the idea of reading “just enough” that Cohen presents as part of her discussion of surface reading methods (Cohen, 60-1). This caught my interest because the question of how much is enough is actually fairly complicated. Reading exhaustively is impractical, inefficient, and often unnecessary when searching for trends. But simply because a couple of common traits appear in a handful of books does not mean that they’re characteristic of—or even present in—the rest of the genre. Moreover, if the critic is searching for something previously undocumented, how do they know that they’ve selected a sample of books that are representative of the genre? Or, if the critic is trying to define a genre based on the emerging patterns, how big of a sample would they need to suggest that the books belong to a distinct genre, as opposed to sharing a few commonalities with each other? At what point are the commonalities strong enough to be defined as a genre?

The question of sampling books also called back to Moretti’s discussion of the challenges of surveying large bodies of literature, when exhaustive reading stopped being an option. In particular, I noticed that the study of world literature and that of forgotten/decanonized literature both mentioned trying to address the problem of scope by using data mining to seek out useful texts. As such, both seem to run the risk of missing things that have not been documented yet. Since the technology involved in this is relatively new, it seems likely that it will evolve in two important ways. First, the algorithms will improve as people begin to pay more attention to how technology can be used to serve the Humanities. Second, as digital archiving expands and as the digitization of early and pre-modern manuscripts becomes more widespread there will be a larger and more accessible body of work for these algorithms to operate on.

There are current limits on the use of technology in sampling literature and identifying patterns but it does seem that over time some of the restrictions may become less.

A side note: I wasn’t sure what to make of Cohen’s claim that sea adventure novels defied close reading. She says that they contain “narrative aesthetics that make no sense from the vantage point of close reading,” and that they “[are] not susceptible to intensive reading” (Cohen, 62 and 63). For another seminar I just finished going over some essays featuring close readings of the very same, so I was initially tempted to dismiss her claim. However, I think a more relevant question than whether or not any genre can confound close reading entirely is the question of how exactly Cohen defines close reading, and what it means to think of surface reading as separate from traditional close reading.

As I’m still getting used to the idea that close reading is more complicated than the practice of paying attention to the particular language of the text, I don’t have an answer for this yet, but I would be open to thoughts on the matter.