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The Master's Voice: A Close Reading of James

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

James Curley-Egan
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Extract

I find myself returning to the theme of reading against noise and reimagining it as something more like reading up against noise, in which noise is a foe or fiend, something one is up against: not only a challenge, close and insistent, that presents itself whenever one takes up a text (the literal noise that invades one's chair or couch, the ads in the margins of an e-book or a Web page, the wandering thoughts or obligations that draw one away), but also a challenge that is spatially there—up against one's ears and body, encroaching on the very space of one's reading. To read, in this sense, is thus inevitably to come up against noise, to attempt to overcome it–and yet to keep it, as part of the very act of reading, within reach.

Type
talks from the convention
Information
PMLA , Volume 133 , Issue 5: Special Topic Cultures of Reading , October 2018 , pp. 1251 - 1258
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2018

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