Diffractive Reading

Kai Merten

doi:10.5771/9781786613974

Summary

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.

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Bibliographic data

Copyright year: 2021
ISBN-Print: 978-1-78661-396-7
ISBN-Online: 978-1-78661-397-4
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield, Lanham
Language: English
Pages: 346
Product type: Edited Book

1. Contents No access
1. Diffraction and Diffractive Reading in Barad No access
2. Diffractive Reading in the Light of Other (Neo)Materialist Reading Theories No access
3. Diffractive Reading and Biosemiotics: Human Intervention, Language, and Text No access
4. Chapter Overview No access
5. Notes No access
1. 1. Reading Journey to Mount Tamalpais No access
  2. Pattern Does Not Equal Pattern No access
  3. A Politics of Diffractive Reading No access
  4. Notes No access
2. 1. Guidelines and Seatbelts No access
  2. Reading Relata. Re-reading Relationality No access
  3. A Critical Survey: Nets, Webs, and Meshes No access
  4. Mesh(-Work) No access
  5. Encounter No access
  6. Entanglement/(Entangled) Webs No access
  7. (Heraclitus’s) Onto-Stories No access
  8. Heraclitus’s (Onto-Stories) No access
  9. One: Pantha rhei’ No access
  10. Two: Lightning and Water No access
  11. Three: River Readings No access
  12. Four: Different Difference No access
  13. Re-Reading Ends No access
  14. Notes No access
3. 1. Introduction No access
  2. Inventing the Myth of Quantum Bodies No access
  3. Contesting Positivity No access
  4. Conclusion No access
  5. Notes No access
4. 1. 1. Welcome No access
  2. 2. Hidden Writing/Diffractive Reading No access
  3. 3. Thacker Reading Leiber No access
  4. 4. Galloway/Thacker No access
  5. 5. Parenthesis as Plot Hole No access
  6. 6. The Black Infinity of ( )hole complex No access
  7. 7. Flowing Holes No access
  8. 8. Negarestani/Barad No access
  9. 9. (Non-)Simultaneity as Black illumination No access
  10. 10. Open Frames, Open Readings No access
  11. Notes No access
1. 1. Introduction No access
  2. Conclusion No access
  3. Notes No access
2. 1. I No access
  2. II No access
  3. III No access
  4. IV No access
  5. V No access
  6. VI No access
  7. Notes No access
3. 1. Diffractive Structure No access
  2. Extra-Textual Entanglements No access
  3. Notes No access
4. 1. 1. Entangled and Diffracted: A Note on Theory No access
  2. 2. Enstranging the Weird in The Scar No access
  3. 3. The Re-Made: Monsters, Hybrids, and Genres No access
  4. 4. Bellis: Lost and Found in Translation No access
  5. 5. Toward a Potential Un-Ending No access
  6. Notes No access
5. 1. Reading Diffractively No access
  2. The Entanglements of Harry Burden No access
  3. “The Proliferations”: Perspectives on Harry No access
  4. Are you Sirius?: The Onto-Epistemological Entanglements of Siri Hustvedt No access
  5. The Brightest Star in the Brooklyn Sky No access
  6. Notes No access
6. 1. I. Surfacing Experiment No access
  2. II. Books and Houses: Building Surfaces No access
  3. III. Ghosts on the Surface No access
  4. Notes No access
1. 1. Notes No access
2. 1. Notes No access
3. 1. A Distillation of Key Principles No access
  2. Ground-Figure Reversibility in Barad No access
  3. Diffracting U2 No access
  4. Notes No access
4. 1. God Has Already Been Playing Dice: Rhetorical Programming/Programming Rhetoric No access
  2. Querying the API as Rhetorical Inquiry No access
  3. Toward a Diffractive Epistemology: Findings and Limitations No access
  4. Notes No access
Bibliography No access Pages 307 - 330
Index No access Pages 331 - 342
About the Contributors No access Pages 343 - 346