Thinking Across: The Fictive, Reading, Conditionality

Abstract

Ranjan Ghosh and J. Hillis Miller’s Thinking Literature Across Continents begins with something like critical agreement yet concludes with dialogue about their “contrastive habits” of reading.1 The dialogical book also details the two writers’ sense of the purposive “rhythm” of their conversations “across continents.”2 Ghosh’s “Epilogue” describes the writers’ years of “genuine listening” to each other, as their “toleran[ce]” for the other’s “thoughts and positions” created a “democratic community” that welcomed readers, too, to listen. I am grateful for having been invited to write about my own listening to the “disturbance that dialogism brings,” as “difference becomes understanding.”3 First, let me outline the differences between Ghosh’s commitment to “(in)fusion-trans-now,” (a simultaneous joining and extracting that both respects and breaches boundaries) and Miller’s dedication to “rhetorical reading” (the way the “tropological dimension of any discourse interferes with its statement of a clear, logical meaning”).4 Ghosh’s oracular reading, which Miller calls “the simultaneous affirmation of opposites,” and Miller’s rhetorical reading structure the authors’ considerations about the globalization of literature as world literature, about whether the teaching of literature matters now, and if interpretation is an ethics.5 For Miller, teaching literature now trains millennial students to “spot lies, ideological distortions, and hidden political agendas” currently drenching the mediated texts they consume.6 For Ghosh, the (in)fusional method creates an “intra-active transculturality” that “builds an entangled habitation”; he argues for a play that creates “self-transcendence,” a “possibility of redemption and deliverance.”7 Ghosh welcomes the opportunity to create a “performative classroom,” a space for “intersubjective vitality”; Miller is alarmed and anxious about the current catastrophic threats—from climate change, to digital culture, income inequality, and globalization— to literary reading and teaching as well as to the maintenance of a democratic society. He worries about literature’s mattering less and less to cultural consumers and especially to young people, who now rarely read books for pleasure.8