Pub Date : 2020-04-29DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0007
J. Matz
The fantasy that close reading should be some purer, more total encounter with a text is usefully dispelled by readings that achieve their closeness precisely because they have a specific need for proximity with their particular text. As this chapter shows in developing a queer reading of The Waste Land, that ‘need’ might make a reading blind to things that do not suit its purposes, but this blindness must always be a factor even in the purest of close readings. A specific need that has been made explicit has the virtue of calling indirect attention to a reading’s blind spots. The transformation of Eliot’s text from an early twentieth-century moment of non-specific disorientation to a proto-trans opportunity to celebrate bodily transformation is not a violation of the text itself but a valid use for it—an insight into the text itself sharpened by a sense of discursive opportunity.
{"title":"Queer Surrealism","authors":"J. Matz","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0007","url":null,"abstract":"The fantasy that close reading should be some purer, more total encounter with a text is usefully dispelled by readings that achieve their closeness precisely because they have a specific need for proximity with their particular text. As this chapter shows in developing a queer reading of The Waste Land, that ‘need’ might make a reading blind to things that do not suit its purposes, but this blindness must always be a factor even in the purest of close readings. A specific need that has been made explicit has the virtue of calling indirect attention to a reading’s blind spots. The transformation of Eliot’s text from an early twentieth-century moment of non-specific disorientation to a proto-trans opportunity to celebrate bodily transformation is not a violation of the text itself but a valid use for it—an insight into the text itself sharpened by a sense of discursive opportunity.","PeriodicalId":286464,"journal":{"name":"Modernism and Close Reading","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124083237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2020-04-29DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0012
hannah freed-thall
This chapter understands modernist close reading in an expanded sense, as an open-ended practice of attention to the look and feel of things. This practice is not exclusively directed at literary texts. Rather, it is a way of seeing that takes a wide variety of phenomena—from a poem to a fiddler crab—as lifeworlds to be read. Close reading, understood in this manner, is less a specific strategy than an ethical relation. Sensitive to variations and valances of difference, elisions and silences, the close reader cultivates patience as she learns to listen for the intermittent and the unexpected. The chapter examines two works that exemplify close reading’s imaginative possibilities: marine biologist Carson’s 1955 book, The Edge of the Sea, and literary and cultural theorist Roland Barthes’s 1977–78 seminar at the Collège de France, The Neutral.
{"title":"Thinking Small","authors":"hannah freed-thall","doi":"10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198749967.003.0012","url":null,"abstract":"This chapter understands modernist close reading in an expanded sense, as an open-ended practice of attention to the look and feel of things. This practice is not exclusively directed at literary texts. Rather, it is a way of seeing that takes a wide variety of phenomena—from a poem to a fiddler crab—as lifeworlds to be read. Close reading, understood in this manner, is less a specific strategy than an ethical relation. Sensitive to variations and valances of difference, elisions and silences, the close reader cultivates patience as she learns to listen for the intermittent and the unexpected. The chapter examines two works that exemplify close reading’s imaginative possibilities: marine biologist Carson’s 1955 book, The Edge of the Sea, and literary and cultural theorist Roland Barthes’s 1977–78 seminar at the Collège de France, The Neutral.\u0000","PeriodicalId":286464,"journal":{"name":"Modernism and Close Reading","volume":"84 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130355672","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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