Modernism and Close Reading

Erscheinungsjahr 2020
ISBN: 978-0-19-874996-7
Verlag: Oxford University Press

Buch, Englisch, 260 Seiten, Print PDF, Format (B × H): 152 mm x 236 mm, Gewicht: 522 g

The kinship between modernism and close reading has long between taken for granted. But for that reason, it has also gone unexamined. As the archives, timeframes, and cultural contexts of global modernist studies proliferate, the field's rapport with close reading no longer appears self-evident or guaranteed--even though for countless students studying literary modernism still invariably means studying close reading. This authoritative collection of essays illuminates close reading's conceptual, institutional, and pedagogical genealogies as a means of examining its enduring potential. David James brings together a cast of world-renowned scholars to offer an account of some of the things we might otherwise know, and need to know, about the history of modernist theories of reading, before then providing a sense of how the futures for critical reading look different in light of the multiple ways in which modernism has been close read.

Modernism and Close Reading responds to a contemporary climate of unprecedented reconstitution for the field: it takes stock of close reading's methodological possibilities in the wake of modernist studies' geographical, literary-historical, and interdisciplinary expansions; and it shows how the political, ethical, and aesthetic consequences of attending to matters of form complicate ideological preconceptions about the practice of formalism itself. By reassessing the intellectual commitments and institutional conditions that have shaped modernism in criticism as well as in the classroom, we are able to ask new questions about close reading that resonate across literary and cultural studies. Invigorating that critical venture, this volume enriches our vocabulary for addressing close reading's perpetual development and diversification.

Autoren/Hrsg.

James, David

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturtheorie: Poetik und Literaturästhetik
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

- Introduction

- PART I: HISTORIES OF MODERNISM AND CLOSE READING

- 1: Max Saunders: Modernist Close Reading

- 2: Peter Howarth: Close Reading as Performance

- 3: Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan: Poetry Explication: The Making of a Method

- 4: Joseph Brooker: Slow Revelations: James Joyce and the Rhetorics of Reading

- 5: Jean-Michel Rabaté: When Did Close Reading Acquire a Bad Name?

- PART II: FUTURES FOR CLOSE READING MODERNISM

- 6: Jesse Matz: Queer Surrealism

- 7: Vidyan Ravinthiran: Nabokov and the Privilege of Style

- 8: Paige Reynolds: Bird Girls: Modernism and Sexual Ethics in Contemporary Irish Fiction

- 9: Derek Attridge: Tom McCarthy's Modernism: Close Encounters of a Pleasurable Kind

- 10: Melba Cuddy-Keane: Experiencing the Modernist Storymind: A Cognitive Reading of Narrative Space

- 11: Hannah Freed-Thall: Thinking Small: Ecologies of Close Reading

Über Autor(innen)

David James is a Professorial Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, before which he was Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at Queen Mary, University of London. Author, most recently, of Modernist Futures (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Discrepant Solace (Oxford University Press, 2019), his edited volumes include The Legacies of Modernism (Cambridge University Press, 2012) and Modernism's Contemporary Affects (Modernist/modernity, 2018). For Columbia University Press he co-edits the book series Literature Now.