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.