Mere Reading - by Lee Clark Mitchell (Paperback)

About the Book

"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 Daiaz'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."--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"In recent years, literary critics have (once again) debated how to read--whether one should focus on the gaps and silences of a text, remain fixed on its surface, or survey it from a distance. Mitchell (Princeton) offers his own theory of "mere reading"--a return to close analysis of literary language that nevertheless allows for ethical and social interpretations. Mitchell situates his approach within a larger history of literary reading practices, from the new critics to surface and distance reading, then applies that approach in close readings of six American novels, starting with Willa Cather's The Professor's House (1925) and concluding with Junot Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007). Each chapter provides a focused analysis that highlights how literature often refuses simple paraphrase or consolidation for irresolvable contradiction and paradox--a refusal that makes the work unique among cultural productions and commits one to reading the poetics of language in the novel as a means of understanding its unique vision. Offering an important meditation on the importance of seeing literature in all its messy wonder, Mitchell's book will resonate with literary scholars of all stripes. Summing Up: Essential." - CHOICE

About the Author

Lee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, USA. Among his previous publications are Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response (1981), Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (1996), and Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism (1989).