Diffractive Reading: New Materialism, Theory, Critique

By Kai Merten

Book Overview

Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings - in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts - this volume proposes a criticalintervention into the practice of reading itself. In this book, reading and reading methodology are probed for their materiality and re-considered as being inevitably suspended between, or diffracted with, both matter and discourse. The history of literary and cultural reading, including poststructuralism and critical theory, is revisited in a new light and opened-up for a future in which the world and reading are no longer regarded as conveniently separate spheres, but recognized as deeply entangled and intertwined.

Diffractive Reading ultimately represents a new reading of reading itself: firstly by critiquing the distanced perspective of critical paradigms such as translation and intertextuality, in which texts encountered, processed or otherwise subdued; secondly, showing how all literary and cultural readings represent different 'agential cuts' in the world-text-reader constellation, which is always both discursive and material; and thirdly, the volume materializes, dynamizes and politicizes the activity of reading by drawing attention to reading's intervention in, and (co)creation of, the world in which we live.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1538155672
• ISBN13: 9781538155677
• Release Date: May 2023
• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
• Length: 352 Pages
• Weight: 1.04 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"
• Grade Range: Postsecondary