Suchergebnisse

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.

ellen rooney is Associate Professor of Modern Culture and Media and English at Brown University. She is the author of Seductive Reasoning:Pluralism as the Problematic of Contemporary Literary Theory (Cornell University Press, 1989) and is currently at work on a book entitled A Semiprivate Room.

The relationship of vulgar Marxism to different types of feminism is examined. It is suggested that feminist essentialism parallels vulgar Marxism by seeking to resolve political questions as a matter of form & erasing the gap between different social groups of women. However, it is also argued that, in the context of political change, feminism is always conscious of the complicit relationship between language & reality, which vulgar Marxism never addresses. 9 References. L. Baker

Seductive Reasoning takes a provocative look at contemporary Anglo-American literary theory, calling into question the critical consensus on pluralism's nature and its status in literary studies. Drawing on the insights of Marxist and feminist critical theory and on the works of Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault, Rooney reads the pluralist's invitation to join in a "dialogue" as a seductive gesture. Critics who respond find that they must seek to persuade all of their potential readers. Rooney examines pluralism as a form of logic in the work of E. D. Hirsch, as a form of ethics for Wayne Booth, as a rhetoric of persuasion in the books of Stanley Fish. For Paul de Man, Rooney argues, pluralism was a rhetoric of tropes just as it was, for Fredric Jameson, a form of politics.

Seductive Reasoning takes a provocative look at contemporary Anglo-American literary theory, calling into question the critical consensus on pluralism's nature and its status in literary studies. Drawing on the insights of Marxist and feminist critical theory and on the works of Althusser, Derrida, and Foucault, Rooney reads the pluralist's invitation to join in a "dialogue" as a seductive gesture. Critics who respond find that they must seek to persuade all of their potential readers. Rooney examines pluralism as a form of logic in the work of E. D. Hirsch, as a form of ethics for Wayne Booth, as a rhetoric of persuasion in the books of Stanley Fish. For Paul de Man, Rooney argues, pluralism was a rhetoric of tropes just as it was, for Fredric Jameson, a form of politics.

In this interview, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revisits the debate between essentialism and anti-essentialism by reconsidering various theoretical frameworks she has engaged with over her intellectual journey. These frameworks include deconstruction, Marxism, and feminisms, alongside reflections on the role of philosophy. One key focus of her reflection is the concept of strategic essentialism in understanding social movements, diverging from her previous stances. Spivak suggests viewing it as an ongoing critique of essentialist approaches, emphasizing the importance of maintaining critical, strategic, and indispensable elements within a minimalizable essence. She also stresses the significance of authorial positioning and autobiographical narratives, drawing on childhood lessons. She explores teaching as a practice that can convey the impossibility of fixed essences rather than engaging in theoretical debates. She examines her own place within the Subaltern Studies Group and the political connotations of the "Third World." Towards the end, she delves into the practical perspective on essences concerning empirical realities and the dynamic between researchers and their audiences.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Introduction: Feminism's Critical Edge -- Part I. Over the Edge -- The Impossibility of Women's Studies -- Feminism, Institutionalism, and the Idiom of Failure -- Part II. Edged OUT -- Teaching and Research in Unavailable Intersections -- Feminism, Democracy, and Empire: Islam and the War of Terror -- Transfeminism and the Future of Gender -- Part III. Edging IN -- Discipline and Vanish: Feminism, the Resistance to Theory, and the Politics of Cultural Studies -- Whither Black Women's Studies: Interview -- Success and Its Failures -- Works Cited -- Contributors -- Index