Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-lj6df Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-03T05:41:20.117Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Weird Times

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

C. Namwali Serpell
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

Recently, some literary critics have proposed that we might relate to texts in a different way than we're used to. Instead of plunging into critique, plumbing a text's depths, or coolly analyzing its symptoms, instead of “digging down and standing back,” as Rita Felski puts it, critics might adopt a less skeptical, less paranoid— less critical—stance. We might attend to a text's surfaces, in Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's terms. We might get “close but not deep,” as Heather Love suggests. We might practice a new formalism, neither naive nor nostalgic but keyed to the aesthetic and the political.

Type
Theories and Methodologies
Information
PMLA , Volume 132 , Issue 5 , October 2017 , pp. 1232 - 1238
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 The Modern Language Association of America

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Best, Stephen, and Marcus, Sharon. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations, vol. 108, no. 1, Fall 2009, pp. 1–21.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Felski, Rita. “Digging Down and Standing Back.” English Language Notes, vol. 51, no. 2, 2013, pp. 7–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Felski, Rita. Uses of Literature. Wiley-Blackwell, 2008.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Freud, Sigmund. Civilization and Its Discontents. Translated by Strachey, James, W.W. Norton, 1989.Google Scholar
Gibson, Eleanor. The Psychology of Reading. MIT P, 1975.Google Scholar
Gibson, James. The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Houghton Mifflin, 1979.Google Scholar
Glazer, Jonathan, director. Under the Skin. Studio Canal, 2014.Google Scholar
Jung, C.G. Synchronicity: An Acausal Principle. Translated by Hull, R.F.C., Princeton UP, 1973.Google Scholar
Lesjak, Carolyn. “Reading Dialectically.” Criticism, vol. 55, no. 2, Spring 2013, pp. 233–77.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Levine, Caroline. Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton UP, 2015.Google Scholar
Levine, Caroline. “Narrative Networks: Bleak House and the Affordances of Form.” Novel: A Forum on Fiction, vol. 42, no. 3, 2009, pp. 517–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Love, Heather. “Close but Not Deep: Literary Ethics and the Descriptive Turn.” New Literary History, vol. 41, no. 2, 2010, pp. 371–91.Google Scholar
Lovecraft, H.P. “The Call of Cthulhu.” “The Call of Cthulhu” and Other Weird Stories, Penguin Books, 1999, pp. 139–69.Google Scholar
Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Harvard UP, 2005.Google Scholar
Norman, Donald. The Psychology of Everyday Things. Basic Books, 1988.Google Scholar
Serpell, C. Namwali. The Ethics of Uncertainty: Reading Twentieth-Century American Literatures. 2008. Harvard U, PhD dissertation.Google Scholar
Serpell, C. Namwali. Seven Modes of Uncertainty. Harvard UP, 2014.CrossRefGoogle Scholar