Live Free or Describe: The Reading Effect and the Persistence of Form

Abstract

This article returns to the question “what is it to read?” through two texts: Louis Althusser's Reading Capital (1965) and The Way We Read Now, a special issue of Representations (2009). Rooney analyzes the issue's introduction, Sharon Marcus's and Stephen Best's “Surface Reading,” examining its accounts of description and “minimal critical agency” and its skepticism concerning radical freedom and the interpretative heroics of literary analysis from the point of view of Althusser's radically different account of reading as a “guilty” practice, one marked by productivity and the contingency of “surprise.” The author argues that the surface method of “critical description,” which seeks to “indicate what a text says about itself” and to describe what it makes “evident, perceptible, apprehensible,” fails when Marcus and Best describe Althusser's text but overlook the fact that his lecture symptomale sharply critiques the metaphor of depth and cautiously deploys a metaphor of terrain. This article proposes that from an Althusserian perspective, the metaphors of surface and depth as they appear in “Surface Reading” are twin brothers, two sides of a coin. Whether in the form of the religious myth of immediate, surface reading or the empiricist conception of the text as veiled truth, these approaches proclaim their critical “innocence” and disavow the metalanguages that bring the textual surface into view. Rooney argues that the figure of terrain enables a reading that confesses its mediating power, while conceding that it moves in a field not of its own making.

Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis and the Value of Scale

“…Some of the most thoughtful responses to "Surface Reading," both negative and positive, elucidated the stakes of the debates it prompted by moving from metaphors of surface and depth to a vocabulary of description and interpretation (Love 2010;Rooney 2010). As a result, instead of quarreling over the aptness of a particular metaphor, we can address general questions of method and discuss more explicitly what we as literary critics value in literary criticism.…”

The affects of not reading: Hating characters, being bored, feeling stupid

“…As the critiques of Best and Marcus's theory of surface reading have persuasively argued, it is a mistake to back away from the important theoretical and methodological recognition that all reading is productive, 'that our ''reading'' is always also a writing' (Rooney, 2010: 124). It is true that in attempting to disarticulate reading as the primary methodology through which literary studies produce knowledge from specific theoretical traditions Best and Marcus may be accused of attempting to return us to a prelapsarian state before the methodologies practiced under 'objectivity' and 'the text itself' had sustained a level of critique which made them unutterable without qualification, if utterable at all (Rooney, 2010: 123-125 see also Weed, 2012). However, the debate regarding symptomatic and surface reading is informed by feelings about the work we do, just as the applied pedagogical research is informed by feelings about teaching.…”

Building reading resilience: re-thinking reading for the literary studies classroom

“…Some even suggest setting less reading (Piscioneri & Hlavac, 2012). Such responses occur alongside a growing debate in literary studies pedagogical research about the role of close reading as a methodology in the production of knowledge (Best & Marcus, 2009;Culler, 2010;Hayles, 2010;Love, 2010;Poletti, Seaboyer, Kennedy, Barnett, & Douglas, 2014;Rooney, 2010;Weedon, 2012).…”