Diffractive Reading

New Materialism, Theory, Critique

Diffractive Reading cover

Diffractive Reading

New Materialism, Theory, Critique

Quantity
In stock
$56.65 RRP $62.95 Website price saving $6.30 (10%)

This product is usually dispatched within 3 days

Description

Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings – in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts – this volume proposes a criticalintervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined.

Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different ‘agential cuts’ in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to reading’s intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which we live.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction - Kai Merten (Erfurt, Germany)
PART I: Diffractive Reading: Groundwork
2. On the Politics of Diffractive Reading - Birgit M. Kaiser
3. Heraclitus's speculative onto-story: Impossible appointments and the importance of the encounter - Max Walther
4. Decoherent Reading: On the Constitutive Exclusions of Diffractive Reading - Stacey Moran
5. Reading speculative horror readings diffractively - Peter Schuck
PART II: Diffracting Literature: Diffractions of the World-Text-Reader Entanglement
6. Poem, Epic, and Epoch: A Diffractive Reading of William Carlos Williams's Paterson and Georg Lukács's Theory of the Novel in the Age of New Materialism - Brendan Johnston
7. Sauron's Sliding Door: The Diffraction of Mythological and Intimate 'Evil' in Tolkien - Bo Kampmann Walther
8. Sensing I and Eyes in Ali Smith's How to Be Both - Daniela Keller
9. Practices of Entanglement: UnReading the Genre in China Miéville'sThe Scar - Agnieszka Kotwasinska
10. The Entanglements of Harry Burden: A Diff

Product details

Published Apr 06 2023
Format Paperback
Edition 1st
Extent 352
ISBN 9781538155677
Imprint Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Illustrations 21 b/w illustrations;
Dimensions 223 x 154 mm
Series New Critical Humanities
Publisher Bloomsbury Publishing

About the contributors

Anthology Editor

Kai Merten

ONLINE RESOURCES

Bloomsbury Collections

This book is available on Bloomsbury Collections where your library has access.

Related Titles

Environment: Staging