Diagnosis

Abstract

The trope of critical reading as diagnosis draws on health humanities scholarship to enable responsive, collaborative readings that pair attention to form (symptoms and signs) with a meticulous address to how author, publisher, text, and reader co-create diverse strands of meaning within different settings. This model can assess how most Victorian texts feature a spectrum of overlapping literary genres, and how these genres are formed in the working partnerships that texts and readers create across changing contexts. The text itself becomes not an inert object to be cataloged but a living, changing organism. Diagnostic reading can address both the ostensible meanings of a passage and other possibilities latent within the text or new meanings that arise as texts circulate to new audiences. It also insists that texts and readers are both embodied, thus bridging literary scholarship and print culture studies by reminding us that readers know texts as cognitive, affective, and physical interlocutors. Medical diagnosis usefully addresses not just disease but many human conformations, and—as with readers and texts—it opens up a relationship between caregiver and patient that evolves as conditions change. Overall, the diagnostic model encourages a more versatile and inclusive understanding of scholarly work.