Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels

Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels

Mitchell, Lee Clark

Hardcover

Literary Criticism

ISBN10: 1501329650
ISBN13: 9781501329654
Publisher: Continnuum-3PL
Published: Apr 20 2017
Pages: 280
Weight: 1.05
Height: 1.00 Width: 5.60 Depth: 8.60
Language: English

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.

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