Introducing: The ReadeeSzendy, Peter; Szendy, Peter
doi: 10.1215/10407391-12356210pmid: N/A
In order to preface the question that was asked of the contributors to this issue of differences (“for whom do we read?”), it seemed necessary to introduce the notion of the readee, the addressee of reading (with all the misdirections that such an address can involve). Absent from the theories of reading, the readee is nonetheless omnipresent, encountered or silently presupposed everywhere, recognizable in historical documents and painted reading scenes.
Reading ForeApter, Emily; Szendy, Peter
doi: 10.1215/10407391-12356220pmid: N/A
This essay tracks the history and theory of the critical reading as it emerged from structuralism, poststructuralism, and reception theory and prepared the ground for contemporary debates around postcritical reading, “sovereign reading” (as theorized by Peter Szendy), and what is referred to as “reading fore”—in the sense of preparing for or setting up a reading that conjures an absent subject through vocative modes of address. Drawing on Barbara Johnson's signal essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” which focused on Gwendolyn Brooks's address to “abortions” as the object of apostrophe in her poem “The Mother,” this essay considers the figure of the text's addressee as a kind of pre-person or unborn subject impossible to disentangle from the politics of reproductive justice.
A Politics of Proxy ReadingPrice, Leah; Szendy, Peter
doi: 10.1215/10407391-12356230pmid: N/A
This essay asks why nineteenth-century British children's fiction locates illiteracy in the West Indies. I compare abolitionists’ accusation that planters mistake the bodily work of looking at books for the mental effort of understanding them with post-Emancipation debates about the balance of power between a woman who reads aloud and a man who listens. Finally, I ask how that dyad changes once proxy reading becomes confined to two scenarios: an upper-middle-class parent reading to a child or a paid voice actor recording audiobooks for a multitasking consumer.
Letters from UndergroundMorris, Rosalind C.; Szendy, Peter
doi: 10.1215/10407391-12356250pmid: N/A
What is the difference between reading and “giving a reading”? This essay explores that question and the different forms of approaching it given by anthropology and literary criticism while examining letters sent from underground by informal miners who have been the object of state-sponsored sieges in South Africa. It considers these brief missives against the backdrop of a rich tradition of letter-writing and reading by migrant miners (where epistles are frequently read aloud and in public), as well as the solicitation of affidavits for cases brought on behalf of the miners in human rights cases. Attentive to the mediatic status of the letters as they circulate in the mass media, the essay explores a history of theorizing reading and authorship as either a demand or a condemnation of “literalness” and explores the relationship between this demand or condemnation and the problem of demetaphorization in accusations of inhumanity, especially as it gets coded as cannibalism.
From Readers to Readers: Sovereign Acts of Reading in Anglophone Caribbean Women's WritingGreenwood, Emily; Szendy, Peter
doi: 10.1215/10407391-12356260pmid: N/A
The struggle for sovereign reading is constitutive of Caribbean literature, and the long durée of colonialism and postcolonialism mean that it is still a current topic. In the Anglophone Caribbean, writers such as George Lamming, C. L. R. James, Derek Walcott, Austin Clarke, M. NourbeSe Philip, Jamaica Kincaid, and Michelle Cliff have all put the formation of the reading subject at the heart of Caribbean self-making. But it is only with Dionne Brand's An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading that we have an explicit theory of Caribbean, ethical reader-response criticism. In response to Brand's essay, this article considers the idea of reading for one's mother as a governing metaphor in Caribbean literature and the ironies and problems with this metaphor as theorized in the works of three Anglophone Caribbean women writers: Jamaica Kincaid, M. NourbeSe Philip, and Dionne Brand.
Toward a Theory of the Black SuperaddresseeMcCarthy, Jesse; Szendy, Peter
doi: 10.1215/10407391-12356270pmid: N/A
This paper argues for the usefulness of Bakhtin's concept of the superaddressee to adjudicating debates at the intersection of black literary studies and novel theory. Reframing Bakhtin's theory of a third-party addressee that stands outside and above the social order allows for a new way of thinking about the function of rhetorical address with respect to arguments advanced by Kenneth Warren and Stephen Best about the value and coherence of group identity, signifying practices, traditionalism and innovation, and historicity. Similarities and divergences with the Bakhtinian definition are examined in a series of readings that range across canonical texts in the black literary tradition, including slave narratives and abolitionist writings, with a special emphasis on the modern novel, including Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and selected examples from contemporary fiction, including Vinson Cunningham's Great Expectations and Raven Leilani's Luster.
For the ProletariatNorth, Paul; Szendy, Peter
doi: 10.1215/10407391-12356280pmid: N/A
An inquiry into the structure of address in Marx's Capital, a book that is read by but not for the one reading it. Instead, a reader of Capital reads it for a collective that does not yet exist. What's more, it will always be read in a displacing way, insofar as, once the collective exists, it won't need to be read any longer. However, reading for the proletariat should not be confused with advocacy. Rather than advocacy, reading Capital is an act of evocacy, of reading the proletariat into existence.
Reading Bits and PiecesHeller-Roazen, Daniel; Szendy, Peter
doi: 10.1215/10407391-12356290pmid: N/A
This essay explores the practice of detecting crucial signs in unexpectedly encountered words and sentences. Beginning with Walter Benjamin, who presents “reading pure and simple” as the grasping of fleeting likenesses that alter the perceiver, the article treats three exemplary scenes of hearing and seeing in Augustine, Descartes, and Leibniz that suggest that the interpretation of apparently circumstantial scraps of discourse can exert a life-changing power, for better and for worse.