Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels

Description

Mere Reading argues for a return to the foundations of literary study established nearly a century ago. Following a recent period dominated by symptomatic analyses of fictional texts (new historicist, Marxist, feminist, identity-political), Lee Clark Mitchell joins a burgeoning neo-formalist movement in challenging readers to embrace a rationale for literary criticism that has too long been ignored—a neglect that corresponds, perhaps not coincidentally, to a flight from literature courses themselves. In close readings of six American novels spread over the past century—Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and The Road, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—Mitchell traces a shifting strain of late modernist innovation that celebrates a species of magic and wonder, of aesthetic “bliss” (as Barthes and Nabokov both coincidentally described the experience) that dumbfounds the reader and compels a reassessment of interpretive assumptions. The novels included here aspire to being read slowly, so that sounds, rhythms, repetitions, rhymes, and other verbal features take on a heightened poetic status—in critic Barbara Johnson’s words, “the rigorous perversity and seductiveness of literary language”—thwarting pressures of plot that otherwise push us ineluctably forward. In each chapter, the return to “mere reading” becomes paradoxically a gesture that honors the intractability of fictional texts, their sheer irresolution, indeed the way in which their “literary” status rests on the play of irreconcilables that emerges from the verbal tensions we find ourselves first astonished by, then delighting in. Cover page Halftitle page Title page Copyright page Epigraph Dedication CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ABBREVIATIONS INTRODUCTION: SLOWING DOWN I. Slow Reading and Wonder II. Symptomatic Reading III. Missteps of Close Reading IV. An Ethics of Reading V. Problems of Paraphrase VI. Getting It Wrong VII. Clash of Values VIII. Late Modernism IX. A Disruptive Reading X. Medley of Styles XI. “Mere” Reading Notes Chapter 1 POSSESSION IN THE PROFESSOR’S HOUSE (1925) I. Unnerving Descriptions, Wondrous Visions II. Defying Sequence III. Selfl ess Wonder, Yet Possession Persists IV. Lives Suspended Notes Chapter 2 OSCILLATION IN LOLITA (1955) I. Style and Desire II. Evasions and Oscillations III. Dualities, Indeterminacy, Literature Notes Chapter 3 HOSPITALITY IN HOUSEKEEPING (1980) I. Keeping House, Amid Loss II. “If I Had Been Th ere” III. Transiency IV. A Closure that Resists Notes Chapter 4 VIOLENCE IN BLOOD MERIDIAN (1985) I. Defying Expression II. “Language Usurps Th ings” III. The Failed Promise of “Optical Democracy” IV. Violations of Simile V. Savagery and Transfi guration Notes Chapter 5 TALK IN THE ROAD (2006) I. Dead Landscapes, Strange Words II. Legacies III. Sustaining the Mysteries Notes Chapter 6 BELATEDNESS IN THE BRIEF WONDROUS LIFE OF OSCAR WAO (2007) I. “What’s past is prologue.” (Th e Tempest, II: 1: 253) II. Ventriloquisms III. Postmodern Inflections IV. Blank Pages V. Centrifugal Narrative Notes EPILOGUE: RESISTING RULES Note BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX