Scenes Of Reading Research Articles

An Examination of Etho-Poetic Reading Scenes in the Works of Jorge Luis Borges and Pascal Quignard

This paper examines reading scenes in the works of Jorge Luis Borges and Pascal Quignard with the objective of studying the thematization and presentation of the etho-poetic aspects of reading in contemporary literature. An introductory chapter presents an overview of recent reading theories and the concept of the ‘reading scene’, which originated in writing studies (Campe, Barthes, Stingelin et al.) as well as the notion of ‘etho-poetics’ (Barthes, Foucault). Thereafter, the analysis turn to two works by Jorge Luis Borges, <i>La biblioteca de Babel</i> and <i>El libro de arena,</i> and then to Pascal Quignard’s <i>Lectio</i> and his novella <i>Le lecteur</i>. The objective of this paper is to define the different ways in which reading and life are intertwined, examining this relationship at three distinct levels: Firstly, at the level of creating literature out of reading, which represents a crucial element of the poetics of both Borges and Quignard. As will be demonstrated, both authors make extensive reference to Proust’s <i>Sur la lecture</i>. Secondly, the relationship between reading experiences and life will be examined in the context of the diegetic world. Thirdly, at the level of the reception, metalepsis functions as a means of inciting the concrete reader to consider reading from an etho-poetic perspective. In addition to these parallels, it can be assumed that in the texts of Borges, the transformative potential of the reading act is depicted as commensurate with the social life of the readers. In contrast, Quignard’s work illustrates the etho-poetic dimension of reading as an asocial practice, dissociating the reader from the social context.

‘It's all there in the language’—a conversation with Garrett Stewart

AbstractWhat does a famed literary theorist have to say about the interaction between ‘literature’ and ‘philosophy’? Well, if he's Garrett Stewart, the celebrated agent of pyrotechnic style in the service of durable insights across disparate disciplines and media, then we have much reason to lean in and listen. Stewart is the author of 20 books that range with uncanny competency across Victorian narrative, contemporary American fiction, written auralities, poetics and prose stylistics, cinematic evolution from silver oxide to screen pixel, book art, scenes of reading in painting, and most recently, the vocal drama of Barbra Streisand. The distances between his disciplinary terrains are as vast as his close readings of them are coordinated and trenchant. Here, sitting down before a shared conversational canvas, Stewart fields questions from David LaRocca, who asks how he, if he, thinks about the program of literature and philosophy. LaRocca, editor of the recent Attention Spans: Garrett Stewart, a Reader (Bloomsbury, 2024) and the forthcoming Bandwidths: Reading Across Media with Garrett Stewart (Bloomsbury), tracks the urgency of our moment—in which literature and philosophy are independently besieged and yet may concede little rapprochement. Where does philosophy happen in literature (a philosopher's question) is turned around by Stewart such that we see literature conjuring philosophy at the level of the sentence. We are not peering ‘in’ so much as looking ‘at’ the art of literature teaching philosophy through refined reading and the analytical inquest of the syllable and the sayable. Anyone who works at the fraught fissure of these realms will benefit from the ways Stewart makes literature and philosophy sensible to one another—even as he productively unsettles the terms and conditions of their affiliation.

Homer and the Simile at Sea

In this paper I consider ways in which seawater––both on its surface and in its depths––opens up alternative forms of thought and expression in Homer, especially with respect to the body. By tracking the relationship between body and simile as it is mediated by the surface of the sea, I argue that water emerges as an especially mobile and adaptive medium for expressing the transformation that takes place between self and simile in Homer. In the Iliad, similes are well-known for bringing weather, waves, and other aspects of the natural environment into the poem, whereas in the Odyssey those aspects more often introduce similes of their own. I offer a reading of the shipwreck scene in Odyssey 5 to suggest that the body’s struggle to stay afloat is matched there, on a formal level, by the role of waves in drawing simile and body to the sea’s surface. I then address a different kind of figurative language (closer to metaphor and associated with grief) that takes place in the depths, through readings of scenes in Books 18 and 24 of the Iliad and Archilochus fragment 13.

뇌 인지과학적 관점에서 본 영어 내러티브 읽기 교육에 대한 비판적 고찰

This paper explores the intersection of brain cognitive science and teaching English narrative reading, identifying three key brain characteristics observed during this process. Firstly, the brain fills in information gaps from incomplete sensory data. Secondly, it actively engages in imaginative and experiential involvement with the narrative, facilitated by the action-perception circuit and mirror neurons. Thirdly, narrative reading activates the Default Mode Network, prompting self-exploration. Despite these insights, textbooks, teaching methods, and assessments exhibit discrepancies, with a focus on didactic messages, grammar, and language testing. This paper advocates for a shift towards immersive narrative reading experiences by integrating brain cognitive science findings. It proposes four reading approaches—inferential, experiential, imagery, and scene reading. Bridging these gaps can enhance education by encouraging direct engagement, imaginative exploration, and alignment of assessments with teaching goals, fostering a deeper connection between students and narrative texts.

The Scene of the “Holiday” in the Draft and Printed Text of Dostoevsky’s “Demons”

The article analyzes the material of the draft manuscript of F. M. Dostoevsky’s novel “Demons”, specifically, the pages containing the scene of Karmazinov reading his work “Merci”. The draft manuscript of the novel “Demons” is a syntactically coherent text containing a large number of author’s edits between the lines and in the margins. The analysis of the manuscript made it possible to identify inaccuracies in its reading by publishers that negatively affect the interpretation of the text. In addition, this analysis helped to correct these errors and accompany them with the necessary textual commentary, affecting, in particular, such problems as the establishment of the text, the identification and analysis of new discrepancies (variants) between the sources of the text, as well as text omissions in print. The textual part of the work is continued by the historical-literary and real commentary proposed in the article based on the newly discovered information about the features of the creation of the artistic concept of “Demons,” explaining the significance of literary and historical motifs that are associated with ancient culture and history for the novel plot. In the process of analyzing handwritten and printed sources, literary and historical allusions were established, which the specified episode of the novel “Demons” contains. In addition, the article examined the historical subtext and symbolism of ancient motifs that were reflected in the scene of literary reading in “Demons,” as well as the content of some historical sources (works by ancient authors on the history of Ancient Rome; lectures by T. N. Granovsky, who became the prototype of the hero of the novel, Stepan Trofimovich Verkhovensky). New information revealed during the study of the draft manuscript of “Demons” indicates, on the one hand, that the ancient “trace” played an important role in the development of the idea of this novel, on the other hand, the complexity of the novel’s narrative structure.

Törleß and the Scene of Reading

The article reads Robert Musil’s debut novel Die Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß (The Confusions of Young Törless) (1906) as a novel of the institution (Campe) in which diverse forms of violence are intertwined. Contrary to the assumption that Musil’s novel aims at the depiction of sado-masochistic transgressions, my argument focuses on a reading scene that mediates the novel’s various potentials of violence: only when Törleß reads Kant does it become clear which violence and which pain are meant by Musil’s text. The experience of reading becomes a masochistic act in the course of which the pleasure of the text is recast in terms of a negative textual jouissance. Musil’s novel, in turn, becomes readable not as an exhibition of schoolboys in disgrace, but as an exploration of the violent structure of practical reason itself.

Neues Lesen. Unikalität und Multisensorik als Strategien der Literaturvermittlung

Neues Lesen<b>. Unikalität und Multisensorik als Strategien der Literaturvermittlung</b>

PRINCESS AS AREADER. THE SENSE OF THE REMINISCENSES IN OL’HA KOBYLYANS’KA’S NOVEL

Comparative literature sets our home tradition in a differential frame and takesus out of our culture altogether, offering us the provisional freedom to imagine our world, and ourselves, differently. But what if we remained in this new world forever, with only some Romantic Ideals taken from our family culture? That is the sense of the Neo-Romantic discours in Ol’ha Kobylyans’ka’s novel “A Princess” (“Tsarivna”) in comparison with the German Romantic tradition (Kobylyans’ka’s family culture). Some critics then and now suggest that Kobylyans’ka’s feminist ideas and her special feminine style were taken from E. Marlitt’s novels for women. But E. Marlitt’s novels sure weren’t the only German sourse of Kobylyans’ka’s novel. Many pages of the book are given to the scenes of reading and discussion German (and other European) poetry and fiction and listening German (and other European) music. The central role in this literature / musical discours plays Heinrich Heine’s Lorelei.

Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire

Imperial Beast Fables: Animals, Cosmopolitanism, and the British Empire

On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, by Andrew H. Miller

Reviewed by: On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives by Andrew H. Miller David LaRocca (bio) On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives, by Andrew H. Miller; pp. xvii + 207. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020, $31.00, £24.95. "Lit by sly wonders," On Not Being Someone Else: Tales of Our Unled Lives is Andrew H. Miller's marvelous, melancholic, middle-aged meditation on the meaning of lives unled (183). One attribute of the human condition that we appear to know, at least from a scientific perspective, is that an individual has but one life—often measured by the mere fact of a body's duration in time and space. Yet we also have a sense—an inkling—that, within such singularity, one could have made other choices, not taken the path one did (what we call personal history). This fact of limitation and this impression of freedom are the consolidated motivating force behind Miller's book: I could have done otherwise than I did; indeed, there were many choices to make. At this point, your personal ontology will determine the extent to which Miller's book will grip you. In scenes of reading defined by a paratactic style, Miller largely sidesteps the aid of philosophers and wisdom literature that reflects on freedom and fate (though Stanley Cavell appears as a patron saint of the endeavor, and has the book's final word)—turning instead, earnestly and wistfully, to a series of vignettes on the arts, principally movies, short stories, novels, poems, and paintings. With these resources at hand, including Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" (1916), Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life (1946), Henry James's "The Jolly Corner" (1908), Carl Dennis's "The God Who Loves You" (2001), Ian McEwan's Atonement (2001), and Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway (1925), Miller shows us how alternate paths, unled lives, and counterfactuals are human preoccupations, especially for artists called to reflect on our vexing condition. Yet to what extent is the premise of an "unled life" viable as more than a compelling structure for artistic invention? The works of art upon which Miller dwells give words, [End Page 466] pictures, and sounds for addressing the drama of an inner life spent (more for some than others) engulfed mindlessly in anxiety and doubt, tormented by negative emotions, toggling between "regret and relief": wishing things had been otherwise or being grateful that they were not (or were not worse) (96). Does the mere belief in "unled lives"—with its focus on what did not happen—cultivate ugly feelings? Regret and relief are both predicated on the conviction that one could have done or chosen differently. In short, both mental gestures—and the varied emotions that track them—take for granted that humans are, to some extent or other, free. Some ethicists pick up this supposition in their formulations of culpability, responsibility, and moral choice, while others probe the countermanding notion of moral luck. Who wants to say that a person chooses to be a refugee, a climate migrant, an orphan, diseased, or homeless? If we are fated, there is no reason to regret (or to feel relieved) because things could not have been otherwise than they are. As art is ever an accomplice to philosophical insight, it is no wonder that Miller's careful study should provide counsel for existential and phenomenological matters, as well as moral ones. Why are such thoughts especially poignant at middle age, as Miller suggests? Because one has made enough decisions, done enough to regret, to wonder after "untaken" paths. Yet, caught up in that middlescence mindset, one wonders: could other paths really have been taken? There is no way to disprove or dispute the course of one's history as one's own; counterfactuals persist as speculative fictions (for example, if T. S. Eliot did not catch a cold and had instead visited Woolf, would she still have committed suicide?). Alas, regret and relief are epiphenomena of a private faith in freedom. Though Miller presumes free agency, his observations are plaintive, often somber. Meanwhile, mechanistic, deterministic, and fatalistic valences are left aside, as are the practitioners...

Le merveilleux dans le Don Sylvio de Wieland

Wieland&#8217;s novel begins with reading scenes in which the comic is mixed with the marvellous. The beginning of the novel suggests a fairy tale, even before what is read enters and defines the readers&#8217; minds. The predominance of the fairy-tale-like within the adventures ensures a smooth transition between the real and the imaginary, which is also revealed in the hero&#8217;s dreams. What is the status of the marvellous as the trigger for these unsettling but also glorious metamorphoses? Wieland attributes it to a &#8220;blind instinct&#8221;, which he places in an anthropological light.

David Malouf and the Secret of Literature

ABSTRACT In three of the nine novels that David Malouf has produced to date, problems of literature are figured in important ways at the level of narrative. Practices of literary culture and scenes of reading, writing and representation feature particularly prominently in Child's Play (1982), Johnno (1975), and The Great World (1990). This article examines the configurations of the literary in these three novels. It argues that even as the literary may be evoked, referred to, and analysed in the three narratives thematically, it still retains its event-like character, its secret way of exceeding the various contexts of its production, reception, and circulation. The novels can then be read as explorations of the aesthetic, ethical, and political implications of the way the literary does not make itself completely available to understanding and analysis.

Comic Interpreting in African Literatures

This article proposes a comparative approach that connects Anglophone and Francophone colonial contexts through an underlying dynamic that hinges on humor. Reading scenes from Amadou Hampaté Bâ, Ferdinand Oyono, Chinua Achebe and Athol Fugard, it examines the fundamental assumptions that transmitters and receivers of messages make about their purpose and authority in an interpreting exercise. This is in order to show how those rules are belittled by interpreters in colonial or settler fiction, when their function is comic. Even so, the humor transcends the colonial encounter. Deliberately or through ignorance, the interpreters studied here create a form of cultural mediation that takes advantage of the disarray created by existing power differentials. They create a new narrative where appearances matter more than accuracy or fidelity and where “official” messages are subverted to the benefit of humor.

Contagion and Confinement

Abstract This article takes two epidemics, one historical and the other allegorical, for comparison against the current Covid-19 crisis. Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year consists of a narrator whose objectivity and existence are ambiguous. José Saramago’s Blindness, published in the original Portuguese as an “essay,” traces the journey of a cluster of citizens through a polis afflicted by a sudden, infectious outbreak. The respective experiences of confinement: at home, in a disused mental hospital, and within the wider spaces of the city, are analysed in this article with reference to Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, alongside seminal works by Giorgio Agamben, Michel de Certeau and Susan Sontag. The article also aims to indicate how the current Covid-19 crisis may provide a scene of reading, alongside a contemporary response from Slavoj Žižek.

‘You are what you read’: beside a book, beside a self

ABSTRACT This essay addresses the topic of reading—and focuses on non-professional readers who resort to books as an escape from the burden of being oneself and as a means of self-care. Think of people who do not want to discuss their personal dissatisfactions or concerns, and instead simply resort to dealing with those negative feelings by reading books or watching television. Scholarly and political emphases on consciousness, liberal agency, and speech acts have made it difficult to formulate theories about one’s desire to break free from one’s identity, and from the familial, social, political, and historical duties associated with it. Our culture of confession and openness also ignores the wishes of those who want to remain silent and private. By analyzing various moments and scenes of reading in literary works and in real-life examples, I can begin to speculate about a humanism based on silence, vicariousness, and suspended agency.

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635

Mary Rowlandson and Restorative Reading

This article explores the concept of restorative reading, defined as a practice in which sacred texts are read for affective assurances of previously established religious convictions, as it is described in A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson (1682). I identify nine scenes of restorative reading in the narrative, and interpret each of them through a theological framework constructed by readings of the major Puritan theologians William Perkins, William Ames, John Preston, and Richard Baxter and with attention to the Augustinian Christian tradition to which their thinking on religious emotions is indebted. The article contends that Rowlandson participates in the Puritan theological discourse on the affections as much by writing from it as by living it out, and that her narrative furthermore preserves, though it antagonistically misreads, Indigenous understandings and uses of the emotions. The arguments in this article can be best understood in the context of discourses on the postsecular and the postcritical in literary studies.

Pen Pals

Pen Pals

Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities by Andrew Newman (review)

Reviewed by: Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities by Andrew Newman Steffi Dippold Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities. By Andrew Newman. Williamsburg, Va., and Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. Published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. 236 pages. Cloth, paper, ebook. What was a book? What was the role of reading in colonial America? In his absorbing Allegories of Encounter: Colonial Literacy and Indian Captivities, Andrew Newman reconsiders these important questions by looking at the physicality of printed texts and the reception and circulation of books within seventeenth- and eighteenth-century captivity narratives. Newman challenges conventional approaches to early modern literacy and intertextual allusion by drawing attention to scenes in which captives engage with a spectrum of print practices and books as material objects—both their own and those of their Indigenous captors. His focus is on nonfictional stories of captives because he recognizes this genre—gestated from harrowing conditions of isolation, violence, and trauma—as a rare archive not only of Indigenous behavior and belief systems but also of colonial hermeneutic strategies that, because of their unfamiliarity and historical distance, require reconstruction. Breathing new life into American book studies and histories of reading, Newman’s ambitious work issues a riposte to the understanding of literacy and print culture as exclusively imperial. Its revelation of arresting and untracked colonial and Native uses of books joins exciting new scholarship by Lindsay DiCuirci, Phillip H. Round, Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, and Kristina Bross and Hilary E. Wyss that complicate assumptions of how texts and literacy mattered across cultures in early America.1 As Newman’s title stresses, his work is both a study in allegory and an appeal for a better understanding of the complex lives of print and writing in the colonies. Many stories of captivity, he shows, brim with teasing metareflections about books (often gifted by Native captors), scattered material cultures of letters and notes, and scenes of reading and remembering other texts. To do justice to this rich spectrum of activities, Newman deliberately broadens the narrow concept of literacy defined as “the ability to read and write” and explores instead what he open-endedly calls “literacy events” (3). This shift is significant. It creates critical awareness for a [End Page 774] network of undertheorized practical, embodied, and imagined practices and anxieties of the period related but not limited to print. A case in point is the paranoid fantasy of the kidnapped James Smith, who panicked out of fear that “reading my books” might push his Iroquois captors into “puting [sic] me to death” (1).2 Why do captives imagine death by reading, Newman asks? What can such literacy events tell us about the understanding of books, self, community, and American cultures of reading at large? Much like a captivity narrative, Allegories of Encounter moves from familiar canonic materials to the increasingly unfamiliar and underexplored. The first four chapters discuss symbolic reading and consumption of texts, or how captives attributed “another sense” (13)—typically a secondary allegorical spiritual meaning—to their literal descriptions of capture and exile. Here Newman’s primary target of analysis is Christian typology, the hermeneutic heart of Puritan practical piety, as he shows how ordinary people recycled biblical scripts to articulate a sense of self in extraordinary circumstances. Guiding readers from Mary Rowlandson’s canonical The Soveraignty and Goodness of God in the first chapter, to captivity’s model master narrative Psalm 137 in the second, to accounts of capture by the Jesuit missionary Isaac Jogues and the Puritan minister John Williams in the third, and to the narratives of the converted Mohawk saint Kateri Tekakwitha and the Puritan-abductee-turned-Native Marguerite Kanenstenhawi (also known as Eunice Williams) in the fourth, Newman’s detailed close-readings unpack messy multilayered textual cultures that linger in-between the spoken, the embodied, the handwritten, and the printed.3 Refusing to distinguish theory from practice or the symbolic from the experiential, Newman recovers how, not only in retrospective scribal practices but in their actual lives, captives lived allegory “like lucid dreamers, aware and motivated by the significance of the stories they were...

Imagine there’s no university: sustaining academic identifications in pandemic times

Through an autoethnographic exercise, this article reflects on the destabilisations that the Covid-19 pandemic has provoked for academic identifications. Drawing from Lacanian psychoanalysis and Ernesto Laclau’s theory, the pandemic is conceptualised as an ‘imaginary dislocation’. This analytical device is deployed to examine the author’s scenes of reading and writing during the first year of his PhD in the UK. By conceptualising the pandemic as an imaginary dislocation, the interpretation focuses on the unconscious content repressed in both scenes as an indicator of the struggles to endure in his academic identity vis-à-vis the erosion of his imaginary of the university. In order to capture this messy, elusive content, the interpretation relies on the idea of the tremor. Emerging incessantly in the author’s readings during the pandemic, the tremor is explored here as a trope staging, in unison, unconscious encounters, a trait of the author’s identity and a metaphor of the pandemic. Therefore, by both advancing a conceptual proposal and interpreting an empirical case, the article seeks to contribute to the understanding of how the pandemic has affected the imaginary frameworks within which our symbolic identifications find stability.