January 30, 2015

Close Reading and the Global University (Notes on Localism)*

Rey Chow

What might close reading, the literary method associated with critics such as I. A. Richards and his contemporaries and followers such as Allen Tate, J. C. Ransom, M. Beardsley, W. K. Wimsatt, William Empson, T. S. Eliot, Cleanth Brooks, and others, and strategic to the consolidation of English as a (historically recent) field of study, have to tell us about the shifting academic institutional relations around 2015?

Futures

January 30, 2015

Future Reading

Rebecca Walkowitz

How will we read literary works in the future? And how does thinking about the future of literary works change the way we read?

Ideas of the Decade

April 1, 2014

Pseudotranslation

Brigitte Rath

The idea of pseudotranslation sharpens some central concepts of Comparative Literature. “World Literature,” according to David Damrosch, is “always as much about the host culture’s values and needs as it is about a work’s source culture” (283). Foregrounding a text’s imaginary origin in a different culture reads this “double refraction” as already built into a text. It thus stresses the conjecture and transnational imagination that is always involved in reading a text as world literature. Pseudotranslation as a mode of reading has also much to contribute to questions of translatability, representation, voice, authorship, authenticity, and multilingualism.

Ideas of the Decade

February 21, 2014

The Hermeneutics of Suspicion

Rita Felski

“The hermeneutics of suspicion” does not just describe the recent history of criticism; it redescribes it, giving us a fresh slant on the state of the field. The phrase signals a shift away from the broad philosophical or political questions associated with “theory” to a new concern with the specifics of method: how and why we read.