Working Conditions

The Work of World Literature - Cultural Inquiry ◽

10.37050/ci-19_08 ◽

2021 ◽

pp. 173-207

Author(s):

Jarad Zimbler

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Working Conditions ◽

Cultural Distance ◽

Literary Experience

To what extent does cultural distance interfere with or limit literary experience? What kind of intimacy is needed to make a text into a work? This essay seeks to answer these questions by focusing on the writings of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. In doing so, it suggests that the challenges of cultural distance may be most acute when dealing with texts from homo-linguistic literary environments, and that we might overcome these challenges by undertaking a world literary criticism that attends to localized fields and materials without forgetting the charge of particular works.

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Reading

Overwhelmed ◽

10.23943/princeton/9780691192925.003.0002 ◽

2019 ◽

pp. 19-56

Author(s):

Maurice S. Lee

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽

Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽

Close Reading ◽

Robinson Crusoe ◽

Main Concept ◽

Interpretive Practices ◽

The Relationship ◽

Literary Experience

This chapter reviews some roots of modern literary criticism by showing how some romantics respond to textual excess by variously resisting and adopting informational strategies of skimming and excerpting. A main concept of the chapter is “deserted island reading,” an ideal of immersive literary experience formed in opposition to mass print. The fantasy of losing oneself in a book unfolds across the legacy of Robinson Crusoe, which projects an account of intensive hermeneutics from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Deserted island reading was especially attractive to romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a founding figure of modern close reading whose aesthetics and interpretive practices were formed under the pressures of information. But whereas Coleridge offers an agonistic example of the relationship between information and literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson presents a more modulated case in which the prophet of subjectivity, intuition, and motility that proves surprisingly open to informational modes of reading.

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Eye Movement, I. A. Richards, and the Limits of Embodied Reading

Poetics Today ◽

10.1215/03335372-8720029 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 41 (4) ◽

pp. 475-501

Author(s):

Benjamin Kossak

Keyword(s):

Literary Criticism ◽

Eye Movement ◽

Experimental Psychology ◽

The Body ◽

Close Reading ◽

New Criticism ◽

Cognitive Sciences ◽

Literary Experience

I. A. Richards is often remembered as a father of close reading and New Criticism, but his work was also deeply indebted to experimental psychology. That cross-disciplinary foundation introduces not only a reader but also a reading body. This article traces Richards’s continual invocation and deferral of the body, with particular attention to the eyes, which for Richards stand at the beginning and outside of the literary experience. The author argues that this deferral exists in Richards’s work and persists into embodied cognitive science’s research into eye movement in reading today because in both cases the movement is filtered down to what is meaningful for cognition or experience. Turning to recent literary criticism that engages with eye movement, the article suggests a path forward that uses the body of research built over 140 years in psychology and cognitive sciences to open new ground for criticism, disrupt our understanding of reading, and develop new bodily poetics.

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