Diffractive Reading

New Materialism, Theory, Critique

Häftad, Engelska, 2023

639 kr

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Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings – in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts – this volume proposes a criticalintervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined. Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different ‘agential cuts’ in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to reading’s intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which we live.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2023-04-06
Mått154 x 223 x 21 mm
Vikt562 g
FormatHäftad
SpråkEngelska
SerieNew Critical Humanities
Antal sidor352
FörlagBloomsbury Publishing Plc
ISBN9781538155677

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Kai Merten is professor of British literature at the University of Erfurt. His main research and teaching interests are British literature and culture from various medial, material and global perspectives. He is the founder of the Erfurt Network on New Materialism (ENNM) and has initiated cooperations in the field of New Materialist methodologies with similar research groups in Erfurt (Max-Weber-Kolleg), Weimar, Utrecht, Berlin, Aarhus, Odense, Kiel and Warsaw.

1. Introduction - Kai Merten (Erfurt, Germany)PART I: Diffractive Reading: Groundwork2. On the Politics of Diffractive Reading - Birgit M. Kaiser 3. Heraclitus’s speculative onto-story: Impossible appointments and the importance of the encounter - Max Walther4. Decoherent Reading: On the Constitutive Exclusions of Diffractive Reading - Stacey Moran5. Reading speculative horror readings diffractively - Peter Schuck PART II: Diffracting Literature: Diffractions of the World-Text-Reader Entanglement6. Poem, Epic, and Epoch: A Diffractive Reading of William Carlos Williams’s Paterson and Georg Lukács’s Theory of the Novel in the Age of New Materialism - Brendan Johnston 7. Sauron’s Sliding Door: The Diffraction of Mythological and Intimate ‘Evil’ in Tolkien - Bo Kampmann Walther 8. Sensing I and Eyes in Ali Smith’s How to Be Both - Daniela Keller 9. Practices of Entanglement: UnReading the Genre in China Miéville’sThe Scar - Agnieszka Kotwasinska 10. The Entanglements of Harry Burden: A Diff

Reading is never neutral, never distant: it always makes a difference, it always interferes. That is the message—in theory and practice—of this volume insightfully edited by Kai Merten. In an entangled conversation of topics and voices, Diffractive Reading has a double goal: refining a methodology and involving more readers in the process. Reality, it tells you, is in the making even as you read these words.