JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of California Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Representations.The title of this special issue raises many questions. To begin with, who are "we"? Although Representations is a multidisciplinary journal, this issue's contributors and editors constitute a relatively homogeneous group of scholars who received doctoral degrees in either English or comparative literature after 1983. Our shared training delimits what we mean and don't mean by the term "read." As literary critics, we were trained to equate reading with interpretation: with assigning a meaning to a text or set of texts. As scholars formed in the era of interdisciplinarity, we take for granted that the texts we read and interpret include canonical and noncanonical literary works. We also feel licensed to study objects other than literary ones, using paradigms drawn from anthropology, history, and political theory, which themselves borrowed from literary criticism an emphasis on close reading and interpretation after the linguistic turn of the 1970s.One factor enabling exchanges between disciplines in the 1970s and 1980s was the acceptance of psychoanalysis and Marxism as metalanguages. 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. This "way" of interpreting went by the name of "symptomatic reading." We were trained in symptomatic reading, became attached to the power it gave to the act of interpreting, and find it hard to let go of the belief that texts and their readers have an unconscious.So much for the way we read. What about "now"? In the last decade or so, we have been drawn to modes of reading that attend to the surfaces of 1 A B S T R A C T In the text-based disciplines, psychoanalysis and Marxism have had a major influence on how we read, and this has been expressed most consistently in the practice of symptomatic reading, a mode of interpretation that assumes that a text's truest meaning lies in what it does not say, describes textual surfaces as superfluous, and seeks to unmask hidden meanings. For symptomatic readers, texts possess meanings that are veiled, latent, all but absent if it were not for their irrepressible and recurring symptoms. Noting the recent trend away from ideological demystification, this essay proposes various modes of "surface reading" that together strive to accurately depict the truth to which a text bears witness. Surface reading broadens the scope of critique to include the kinds of interpretive activity that seek to understand the complexity of literary surfaces-surfa...
The following has been transcribed and edited for clarity by Sean O'Sullivan. SharonMarcus (SM): I'm Sharon Marcus-I'm a Professor of English at Columbia University: I'm a Victorianist, and I work on nineteenth-century French literature, so I'm well-acquainted with the history of seriality. I'm also the Dean of Humanities and Editor of publicbooks.org. I would like to thank Lauren Goodlad and Sean O'Sullivan and EileenGillooly and everyone at the Heyman Center for putting this on today. I am going to introduce our panelists, although they don't really need an introduction. They say of great actors that you would be happy to listen to them read the phone book. I think we can say of our panelists that we' d be happy to hear them write a review of the phone book, write a novel based on the phone book, or produce the phone book as a radio podcast.[laughter] But rituals are important, so here we go: Lev Grossman is the author of five novels, including the #1 New York Times-bestselling Magicians trilogy, which is now an
Universally practiced across the disciplines, description is also consistently devalued or overlooked. In this introduction to the special issue “Description Across Disciplines,” Sharon Marcus, Heather Love, and Stephen Best propose that description is a critical practice more complex (and less contradictory) than its detractors have taken it to be. They argue that turning critical attention toward description’s nuances gives us access to the ways that scholars conventionally assign and withhold value and prestige. The authors set forth a number of principles (using their contributors’ essays as a guide) toward the end of “building a better description.”
JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact
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