Steven Best and Sharon Marcus, "Surface Reading, An Introduction"

Surface Reading: An Introduction
Author(s): Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus

Source: Representations, Vol. 108, No. 1 (Fall 2009), pp. 1-21
Published by: University of California Press
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REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 1
STEPHEN BEST AND SHARON MARCUS
Surface Reading: An Introduction
Reading “The Way We Read Now”
The title of this special issue raises many questions. To

begin with, who are “we”? Although Representations is a multidisciplinary jour-
nal, this issue’s contributors and editors constitute a relatively homoge-
neous group of scholars who received doctoral degrees in either English or
comparative literature after 1983. Our shared training delimits what we
mean and don’t mean by the term “read.” As literary critics, we were trained
to equate reading with interpretation: with assigning a meaning to a text or
set of texts. As scholars formed in the era of interdisciplinarity, we take for
granted that the texts we read and interpret include canonical and non-
canonical literary works. We also feel licensed to study objects other than lit-
erary ones, using paradigms drawn from anthropology, history, and political
theory, which themselves borrowed from literary criticism an emphasis on
close reading and interpretation after the linguistic turn of the 1970s.
One factor enabling exchanges between disciplines in the 1970s and
1980s was the acceptance of psychoanalysis and Marxism as metalanguages.
It was not just any idea of interpretation that circulated among the disci-
plines, but a specific type that took meaning to be hidden, repressed, deep,
and in need of detection and disclosure by an interpreter. This “way” of
interpreting went by the name of “symptomatic reading.” We were trained in
symptomatic reading, became attached to the power it gave to the act of
interpreting, and find it hard to let go of the belief that texts and their read-
ers have an unconscious.
So much for the way we read. What about “now”? In the last decade or
so, we have been drawn to modes of reading that attend to the surfaces of
A B S T R A C T In the text-based disciplines, psychoanalysis and Marxism have had a major influence on
how we read, and this has been expressed most consistently in the practice of symptomatic reading, a
mode of interpretation that assumes that a text’s truest meaning lies in what it does not say, describes
textual surfaces as superfluous, and seeks to unmask hidden meanings. For symptomatic readers, texts
possess meanings that are veiled, latent, all but absent if it were not for their irrepressible and recurring
symptoms. Noting the recent trend away from ideological demystification, this essay proposes various
modes of “surface reading” that together strive to accurately depict the truth to which a text bears wit-
ness. Surface reading broadens the scope of critique to include the kinds of interpretive activity that
seek to understand the complexity of literary surfaces—surfaces that have been rendered invisible by
symptomatic reading. / R E P R E S E N T A T I O N S 108. Fall 2009 © The Regents of the University of California.
ISSN 0734–6018, electronic ISSN 1533–855X, pages 1–21. All rights reserved. Direct requests for per-
mission to photocopy or reproduce article content to the University of California Press at http://www.
ucpressjournals.com/reprintinfo.asp. DOI:10.1525/ rep.2009.108.1.1. 1
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 2
texts rather than plumb their depths. Perhaps this is because, at the end of
the first decade of the twenty-first century, so much seems to be on the sur-
face. “If everything were transparent, then no ideology would be possible,
and no domination either,” wrote Fredric Jameson in 1981, explaining why
interpretation could never operate on the assumption that “the text means
just what it says.”1 The assumption that domination can only do its work
when veiled, which may once have sounded almost paranoid, now has a nos-
talgic, even utopian ring to it. Those of us who cut our intellectual teeth on
deconstruction, ideology critique, and the hermeneutics of suspicion have
often found those demystifying protocols superfluous in an era when images
of torture at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere were immediately circulated on the
internet; the real-time coverage of Hurricane Katrina showed in ways that
required little explication the state’s abandonment of its African American
citizens; and many people instantly recognized as lies political statements
such as “mission accomplished.”2 Eight years of the Bush regime may have
hammered home the point that not all situations require the subtle ingenu-
ity associated with symptomatic reading, and they may also have inspired us
to imagine that alongside nascent fascism there might be better ways of
thinking and being simply there for the taking, in both the past and the pre-
sent.3 We find ourselves the heirs of Michel Foucault, skeptical about the
very possibility of radical freedom and dubious that literature or its criticism
can explain our oppression or provide the keys to our liberation. Where it
had become common for literary scholars to equate their work with political
activism, the disasters and triumphs of the last decade have shown that liter-
ary criticism alone is not sufficient to effect change. This in turn raises the
question of why literary criticism matters if it is not political activism by
another name, a question to which we return in the last section of this essay.
We have chosen our title for its resonance but are aware of the many
readers and ways of reading that our contributors do not discuss at all, some
of which our co-editors address in the afterword. “The Way We Read Now”
calls to mind the title of Anthony Trollope’s 1875 novel The Way We Live Now,
echoed in recent books by Amanda Anderson (The Way We Argue Now) and
Elaine Freedgood (in the coda to The Ideas in Things, entitled “Victorian Thing
Culture and the Way We Read Now”).4 As a rubric, the phrase announces that
we plan to perform a self-assessment, to survey the present—the deictic
“now” carrying with it a note of urgency. It connotes change, the sense that
now we do things a bit differently than they did back then. These essays also
incorporate a site-specific “now” and “then,” since the majority were first
delivered at a 2008 conference jointly sponsored by Columbia University
and New York University, which in turn emerged from a 2006 American
Comparative Literature Association seminar convened to mark the twenty-
fifth anniversary of Fredric Jameson’s publication of The Political Unconscious
2 R E P R E S E N TAT I O N S
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 3
(1981), the book that popularized symptomatic reading among U.S. literary
critics. The 2008 conference invited speakers to reflect on the current place
of symptomatic reading, but in asking our contributors to expand their talks
into essays, we set a somewhat different agenda, requesting that they articu-
late what alternatives to symptomatic reading currently shape their work,
and how those alternatives might pose new ways of reading.
These essays represent neither a polemic against nor a postmortem of
symptomatic reading. Our contributors trace nascent practices in the text-
based disciplines, some of which evolve from symptomatic reading, some of
which break from it. The “way” of our title should not be construed as a uni-
tary mode or a pilgrimage to a single point, but as a road branching in mul-
tiple directions, like Jorge Luis Borges’s garden of forking paths. It would be
inaccurate, however, to call this issue “the ways we read now,” because these
articles demonstrate significant overlap among our contributors. To that
extent, a different literary allusion is also apt for picturing how these articles
are related, that of Swann’s way, which initially appears separate from the
Guermantes way but turns out to be connected to it at key points.
Symptomatic Reading
All of the contributors to this volume are responding to a particu-

lar notion of interpretation that came to be known as symptomatic reading.
Broadly speaking, this practice encompasses an interpretive method that
argues that the most interesting aspect of a text is what it represses, and
that, as Fredric Jameson argued, interpretation should therefore seek “a
latent meaning behind a manifest one” (60). The interpreter “rewrite[s]
the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more funda-
mental interpretive code” (60) and reveals truths that “remain unrealized
in the surface of the text” (48). As the letter of invitation to the 2008 con-
ference put it, symptomatic reading asserts that “what a text means lies in
what it does not say, which can then be used to rewrite the text in terms of a
master code. By disclosing the absent cause that structures the text’s inclu-
sions and exclusions, the critic restores to the surface the deep history that
the text represses.”5
When symptomatic readers focus on elements present in the text, they
construe them as symbolic of something latent or concealed; for example, a
queer symptomatic reading might interpret the closet, or ghosts, as surface
signs of the deep truth of a homosexuality that cannot be overtly depicted.
Symptomatic readings also often locate outright absences, gaps, and ellipses
in texts, and then ask what those absences mean, what forces create them,
and how they signify the questions that motivate the text, but that the text
itself cannot articulate.6 Symptomatic reading thus often conflates three
Surface Reading: An Introduction 3
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 4
pairs of oppositions: present/absent, manifest/latent, and surface/depth.

Strictly speaking, these are not compatible sets of terms. What is absent is
simply not there; what is latent is present but invisible, unrecognized either
because it is concealed or because it is undeveloped; what is deep is fully
present and thus theoretically visible, but is positioned so far down, in, or
back relative to a viewer, or is so completely covered by an opaque surface,
that it can only be detected by an extreme degree of penetration or insight.
The different connotations of manifest and surface are especially significant.
The surface is associated with the superficial and deceptive, with what can be
perceived without close examination and, implicitly, would turn out to be
false upon closer scrutiny. The manifest has more positive connotations, as
what is truthful, obvious, and clearly revealed.
The notion underlying all forms of symptomatic reading, that the most
significant truths are not immediately apprehensible and may be veiled or
invisible, has a very long history. Umberto Eco traces it back to the Gnostics
in the second century CE, who, in contrast to Greek philosophers who
defined reason as noncontradiction, posited truth as secret, deep, and mys-
terious, and language as inadequate to meaning.7 Eco might also have
noted, however, the equally Greek roots of the idea that truth does not lie in
evidence directly available to the senses, since this was the point of Plato’s
parable of the cave, which influenced not only the Gnostics but also Chris-
tians such as Paul, and led to their emphasis on allegory.8 Symptomatic read-
ing thus has links to what Eco calls the hermetic theory of interpretation: the
idea that words “hide the untold” and the secret of meaning is its impossibil-
ity (39–40). The notion of truth as recessive was not limited, however, to
ancient mystics; as Mary Crane explains in her contribution to this volume,
the idea that meaning and verity must be deep and inaccessible to view was
also promoted by a technique that had close ties to science: the develop-
ment of perspective in early modern European painting.
The nineteenth-century roots of symptomatic reading lie with Marx’s
interest in ideology and the commodity and Freud’s in the unconscious
and dreams.9 In an important essay entitled “Clues: Roots of an Evidential
Paradigm,” Carlo Ginzburg noted that Freud was “accustomed to divine
secret and concealed things from unconsidered or unnoticed details”; in
psychoanalysis, “infinitesimal traces permit the comprehension of a deeper,
otherwise unattainable reality.”10 Those traces are clues, symptoms, details
on the surface that indicate the form and content of hidden depths to the
trained and intuitive interpreter. In Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpre-
tation (1970), Paul Ricoeur showed how Freud’s model of interpretation was
particularly suited to symbolic language, which he defined as any form of
language “where another meaning is both given and hidden in an immedi-
ate meaning.” Ricoeur defined the symbolic function as “to mean something
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 5
other than what is said,” and posited that “to interpret is to understand a
double meaning.” What he called a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in Freud
described a method of understanding double meaning based not on the
religious model of revealed meaning but on the demystification of illusion.11
This hermeneutics of suspicion became a general property of literary criti-
cism even for those who did not adhere strictly to psychoanalysis.
The other set of critics invested in symptomatic reading were Marxists
engaged with the writings of Louis Althusser. In Reading Capital (published
in French in 1968, in English translation in 1970), Althusser unfolded a
method of symptomatic reading that he found in Marx and used to read
Marx, one that “divulges the undivulged event in the text it reads, and in the
same movement relates it to a different text, present as a necessary absence
in the first.”12 For Althusser, symptomatic reading makes “lacunae percepti-
ble” (86); it assumes that texts are shaped by questions they do not them-
selves pose and contain symptoms that help interpreters articulate those
questions, which lie outside texts as their absent causes. Althusser dismissed
“the religious phantasm of epiphanic transparency” (35), the theory of read-
ing as one of logos, in which each part immediately expresses the whole and
there is no split between manifest and latent meaning. Although Althusser
equated religious reading with instantaneous transparency, his theory actu-
ally harkens back to the Gnostic concept of truth as too complex to describe,
because he defined history as what could not be read in manifest discourse,
as “the inaudible and illegible notation of the effects of a structure of struc-
tures” (17). This concept of truth as antilogos, as what cannot be immedi-
ately understood, also resonates with Jacques Derrida’s critique of truth as
presence.
In The Political Unconscious (1981), Fredric Jameson argued that only
weak, descriptive, empirical, ideologically complicit readers attend to the
surface of the text. In an affirmative version of symptomatic reading, Jame-
son insisted that the “strong” critic must rewrite narrative in terms of master
codes, disclosing its status as ideology, as an imaginary resolution of real con-
tradictions (13). Like Althusser, Jameson saw the text as shaped by absence,
but unlike Althusser, Jameson saw only one absent cause, history itself, and
insisted that interpretation should seek a repressed, mystified, latent mean-
ing behind a manifest one (60). For Jameson, interpretation is “unmasking”;
meaning is the allegorical difference between surface and depth; and the
critic restores to the surface the history that the text represses (20). That
restoration entails the “semantic enrichment and enlargement of the inert
givens and materials of a particular text” (75, emphasis added). Jameson’s
image of the critic as wresting meaning from a resisting text or inserting it
into a lifeless one had enormous influence in the United States, perhaps
because it presented professional literary criticism as a strenuous and heroic
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 6
endeavor, one more akin to activism and labor than to leisure, and there-
fore fully deserving of remuneration.13 The influence of Jameson’s version
of symptomatic reading can be felt in the centrality of two scholarly texts
from the 1990s: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet (1991),
which crystallized the emergent field of queer theory, and Toni Morrison’s
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), which set
forth an agenda for studying the structuring role of race in American litera-
ture.14 Both showed that one could read a text’s silences, gaps, style, tone,
and imagery as symptoms of the queerness or race absent only apparently
from its pages.
Symptomatic Reading Now
In the course of meditating on the way we read now, and perform-

ing current ways of reading, our contributors situate their practices in re-
lation to symptomatic reading, positing their interpretive method as a
variation on, supplement to, or critique of it. Those who want to continue
using some version of symptomatic reading differ from one another in the
degree of their willingness to stay inside texts, in contrast to Jameson’s prac-
tice of moving beyond the text and across several interpretive “horizons” to
reach frameworks too vast and abstracted to achieve direct textual expres-
sion (75). Those who take the greatest distance from symptomatic reading
do so either to be less resisting, masterful readers or as part of a larger pro-
ject of attending to the material life of books and thus to the many things
done to and by books that do not involve reading at all. Almost all our con-
tributors also seize on the surface/depth distinction so central to symp-
tomatic interpretation in order to articulate what is new about the way we
read now.
Closest to Jameson is Mary Crane, whose essay, “Surface, Depth, and the
Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Reading of The Political Unconscious,” draws on
cognitive science to interpret the metaphors of surface and depth that Jame-
son uses to describe symptomatic reading. For Jameson, the unconscious is a
function of repression, but for Crane, as a cognitive reader, the unconscious
consists simply of mental activities too rapid and too complex to be per-
ceived. The differences between the cognitive and the psychoanalytic versions
of the unconscious produce different ways of interpreting contradictions in
texts. Jameson’s notion of the “political unconscious” leads him to argue that
history, the dialectical conflict between freedom and necessity, is the
repressed cause that explains how a text imaginarily resolves contradictions
that are themselves not readily visible. Crane, by contrast, sees textual contra-
dictions as manifest rather than hidden, and caused by a combination of bio-
logical, cultural, temporal, and personal factors. Crane takes as her example
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 7
of textual contradiction The Political Unconscious itself, which she finds gener-
ates incompatible figurations of surface—as sediment, disguise, exoskeleton,
and horizon. Those conflicting images point to underlying tensions in Jame-
son’s theory: for example, between a reader who exposes a text’s disguised
truths, and a reader who actually produces those truths by secreting them
like a carapace. Crane sees herself as performing a symptomatic reading on
Jameson, since she argues that his conflicting images of the surface are signs
of tacit contradictions in his theory that his propositional statements do not
make explicit. She differs from Jameson, however, in explaining the form
those contradictions take. Where Jameson reads contradictions as clues to
the veiled operations of history, Crane understands an author’s complex
“spatial imaginary” as an effect of how cognition works.
For Margaret Cohen, in “Narratology in the Archive of Literature,” Jame-
son is not sufficiently conscious of how much he takes genre for granted and
thus limits himself to an overly restrictive canon. Cohen points out that
symptomatic reading does not necessarily work equally well on all genres.
Certain kinds of forgotten literature do not need to be decoded to be under-
stood, and even the genres that Jameson subjects to decoding might be bet-
ter understood if placed in a wider archive that includes nonliterary types of
writing with which they have elements in common. Where Jameson presents
his method as having the power to disclose the text’s hidden depths, Cohen
suggests that placing a text in its discursive contexts can illuminate textual
features that are obvious but which critics have overlooked. Jameson uses the
metaphor of the horizon to gesture toward what is beyond it, toward invisi-
ble levels of structural causality that only the critic can make visible within
the grain of the text itself. Where Jameson’s horizons recede infinitely,
Cohen conceives of a horizon as a legible set of points one can use to navi-
gate within a literary field. She describes a reading practice that uses large
archives to reconstruct “the lost horizon of poetics,” a horizon that defines
the position of given texts and exists on the same plane or surface as the
texts it explains. Turning to Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim, a text that figures
prominently in The Political Unconscious, Cohen argues that, rather than
locate the novel’s value in its artful narrative poetics or sublime prose, we
should situate it within the epistemological frames it shares with maritime
writing: information, navigation, and practical reason.
In “Reading on the Left,” Christopher Nealon offers a genealogy of the
long-dominant idea, central to Jameson’s notion of symptomatic reading,
that the activist component of literature is a value added by the critic.
Nealon observes that some critical theorists, such as Jean-Paul Sartre, believe
that human action has priority over matter, while others, such as Jameson,
Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt,
believe that matter has priority over human action on it. What this entire
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 8
cohort shares, Nealon notes, is the conviction that they must determine
which comes first. Literature, and poetry in particular, Nealon asserts, enacts
the struggle between matter and human action rather than the victory of
one over the other. Where symptomatic reading goes outside the text to find
revolutionary subjects, or labor working on matter, Nealon finds the conflict
between freedom and capitalism already present in poetry, which ceaselessly
configures and reconfigures matter. If other theorists see politics as external
to poetry, the depth that only the critic can bring to the surface, for Nealon
the poem itself is where politics surface. The surface of the poem can thus
contain its own hermeneutic; hermeneutics is not what critics do to the
poem, since interpretation is happening in the poem. Using as his chief
example a poem by Lisa Robertson, Nealon suggests that the very literari-
ness of poetry emerges from bids for freedom internal to capitalism, not
from revolutionary breaks with it. The left-leaning literary critic thus need
not add theory to the text or gather texts that exemplify his theories; it is
enough simply to register what the text itself is saying.
Where what Nealon finds internal to the text is its meaning, Leah Price
immerses herself in books that direct us to go not only beyond interpreta-
tion but even beyond the act of reading itself. In “From The History of a
Book to a ‘History of the Book,’” Price breaks completely with symptomatic
methods by suggesting that we do not, and need not, read books at all. Iron-
ically, she locates the authority for that research program in books them-
selves, albeit ones that tell stories about how books are collected, displayed,
and exchanged; used, abused, and reused; toted, shared, and preserved—
everything but read. Historians of the book might discover a theory of their
operations, Price proposes, in “it-narratives”—eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century fictional autobiographies “in which a thing traces its travels among
a series of richer and poorer owners.” It-narratives draw our attention to
the literal surface of books, often missed in a hasty desire to plumb the
depths of texts. But rather than teaching us simply to look at books in order
to catalog their material characteristics, it-narratives teach us a new way
to think about the classic opposition between the inert surface of things
and the vibrant depths of persons. It-narratives about books do not simply
reverse that opposition by personifying objects as subjects, Price shows,
because they endow books with consciousness in order to have them recount
histories that divert us from their interiority toward their superficial materi-
ality, thus returning them to objecthood, but of an unusually vivid and signif-
icant kind.
Equally distant from Jameson is Anne Cheng, whose “Skins, Tattoos, and
Susceptibility” urges that we replace suspicion and critical mastery with a sus-
ceptibility that could undo the dichotomy between subject and object. Not-
ing that we can never separate surface from depth, that underneath surface
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 9
there is only more surface, Cheng advocates a “mutual pedagogy of erotics”

in which the critic inhabits and is inhabited by what she studies, and
embraces the loss of critical certainty and the gain in intimacy that result.
Cheng sees a hermeneutics of suspicion as allied with a politics of identity,
since what often motivates the reading of the surface as a symptom of hid-
den depths is the desire to restore and make visible the authenticity veiled by
spectacle. She suggests that we replace the symptom, which depends on the
contrast between surface and depth, with a constellation of multiple surfaces
understood as concealing nothing. The essay itself does this by juxtaposing
multiple representations of surfaces: Adolf Loos’s writings on architectural
cladding, the facade of a house he designed for Josephine Baker, and
Baker’s photographic presentation of her body, especially its skin. If critics
fasten their attention on these surfaces, she argues, they can see how the
modern and the primitivist exist on a single plane. The streamlined mod-
ernist surface associated with white masculine subjects merges with the black
woman’s skin, marked by ascriptions of nudity on the one hand and over-
adornment on the other. Though skin and the facade are marked by sex and
race, they are thus also sites where racial and sexual distinctions break down.
Surface Reading
Surface looms large in the vocabulary of our contributors, but

rarely do they mean the literal surface of texts: paper, binding, typography,
the sounds of words read aloud. Nor do they construe surface as symp-
tomatic readers often have—as a layer that conceals, as clothing does skin,
or encloses, as a building’s facade does its interior. Following the lead of our
contributors, we take surface to mean what is evident, perceptible, appre-
hensible in texts; what is neither hidden nor hiding; what, in the geometri-
cal sense, has length and breadth but no thickness, and therefore covers no
depth. A surface is what insists on being looked at rather than what we must
train ourselves to see through.15
Many types of reading, some quite old, some fairly new, might come
under the rubric of “surface reading.”
Surface as materiality. This kind of surface emerges primarily in two

forms—in the history of the book and in cognitive reading. Bibliography
attends to the literal surfaces of books themselves, making signs inseparable
from their material supports. Histories of reading, publication, and circula-
tion study books as things that link their producers, sellers, and users. Cogni-
tive studies of literature attend to the material workings of the brain during
the reading process and show how writing prompts readers to imitate what
Elaine Scarry calls “the material conditions” that structure perception.16
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Scarry shows that we can best produce mental images of depth and solidity
by picturing one surface passing in front of another, because surfaces are
easier to imagine than three-dimensional objects (10–12). The verbal arts,
Scarry points out, are often associated with immateriality because they are
“counterfactual” and ask us to picture what does not exist, but they are also
significantly “counterfictional,” because they infuse our ordinarily pallid
imaginings with vivacity (38). Crucial to this process are objects, such as flow-
ers, that we can easily envision and that thus become “the tissue of the men-
tal images themselves—not the thing pictured, but the [mental] surfaces on
which the images will get made” (48).
Surface as the intricate verbal structure of literary language. This understand-

ing of surface produces close readings that do not seek hidden meanings,
but focus on unraveling what Samuel Otter, in a recent account of New For-
malism, has called the “linguistic density” and “verbal complexity” of literary
texts.17 This type of surface reading, as Otter shows, would move slowly, if at
all, from text to context, from parsing meaning to interpreting signifi-
cance.18 This valorization of surface reading as willed, sustained proximity to
the text recalls the aims of New Criticism, which insisted that the key to
understanding a text’s meaning lay within the text itself, particularly in its
formal properties. Formalisms new and old argue against the traditional
association of the surface with what is too simple to merit notice. As I. A.
Richards pointed out, though such criticism “is very largely . . . an exercise in
navigation” it still requires great skill. Since most readers have trouble con-
struing the sensuous form and literal sense of poetry, simply paraphrasing a
text or understanding its verbal meaning is a demanding “craft.”19
Embrace of the surface as an affective and ethical stance. Such an embrace

involves accepting texts, deferring to them instead of mastering or using
them as objects, and refuses the depth model of truth, which dismisses sur-
faces as inessential and deceptive. An early and influential statement of this
approach was Susan Sontag’s “Against Interpretation” (1966), which argued
that interpreters do not disclose the text’s true meaning but alter it. Instead
of saying, “Look, don’t you see that X is really—or, really means—A?” Sontag
admonished, the critic of a work should “show it is what it is, even that it is
what it is, rather than . . . show what it means.” Sontag’s manifesto against the
model of interpretation drawn from Freud and Marx refused the notion that
meaning and content define the work of art and proposed that we set aside
the theory of mimesis in favor of the experience of art in its “pure, untrans-
latable, sensuous immediacy,” a stance that she also called an “erotics of
art.”20 Such an erotics can take the form of attending to the text, or to one’s
affective responses to it. Other versions of receptiveness and fidelity to the
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 11
text’s surface, as opposed to suspicious and aggressive attacks on its con-

cealed depths, include Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “reparative reading” (dis-
cussed in the afterword to this issue), Timothy Bewes’s “reading with the
grain,” and Jane Gallop’s meditation on the ethics of close reading.21
To these we would add three other ways of doing surface reading that
deeply interest us and that we hope will generate more discussion:
Attention to surface as a practice of critical description. This focus assumes

that texts can reveal their own truths because texts mediate themselves; what
we think theory brings to texts (form, structure, meaning) is already present
in them. Description sees no need to translate the text into a theoretical or
historical metalanguage in order to make the text meaningful. The purpose
of criticism is thus a relatively modest one: to indicate what the text says
about itself. Though we would not endorse Paul de Man’s insistence on the
“void that separates” poetic intent from reality, we remain intrigued by his
observation that poetry is the “foreknowledge” of criticism, and that the
interpreter therefore “discloses poetry for what it is” and articulates “what
was already there in full light.”22 Similarly, Joel Fineman’s Shakespeare’s Per-
jured Eye argued that the traditional questions for criticism of the sonnets are
already questions in the sonnets themselves; there is no need for a critical
metalanguage to explain the sonnets because, as Aaron Kunin has recently
observed, “the poems provide the most accurate description of their own
operations.”23 Here, depth is not to be found outside the text or beneath its
surface (as its context, horizon, unconscious, or history); rather, depth is
continuous with surface and is thus an effect of immanence.
Surface as the location of patterns that exist within and across texts. This notion
includes narratology, thematic criticism, genre criticism, and discourse anal-
ysis. Symptomatic reading looks for patterns in order to break free of and
reach beyond them to a deep truth too abstract to be visible or even locat-
able in a single text. Jameson thus urges interpreters to sketch the ideologi-
cal rectangles that structure texts only in order to move toward what lies
outside them. Surface readers, by contrast, find value in the rectangles them-
selves and locate narrative structures and abstract patterns on the surface, as
aggregates of what is manifest in multiple texts as cognitively latent but
semantically continuous with an individual text’s presented meaning. In this
type of surface reading, the critic becomes an anatomist breaking down texts
or discourses into their components, or a taxonomist arranging and catego-
rizing texts into larger groups. The anatomist and taxonomist rearrange
texts into new forms but nonetheless attend to what is present rather than
privilege what is absent. Examples of this kind of work include Clifford
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Siskin’s demonstration that large-scale shifts in how literature defines reality

coincide with epochal changes in media history, and Marc Angenot’s study
of “social discourse,” in which he looks at everything published in France in
a particular year in order to chart “a global typology of the prevailing
sayable.”24 Unconvinced that literature differs significantly from other kinds
of writing, Angenot places literary surfaces on the same plane as “social dis-
course,” defined as “the total network of meaning.”25 For Angenot, what
defines ideology is its dispersal, and to understand it we must chart its extent
as a commonplace worldview, not expose its falsity.
Surface as literal meaning. What Sharon Marcus has called “just reading”
accounts for what is in the text “without construing presence as absence
or affirmation as negation.”26 Her example is female friendship in Victo-
rian novels, which has often been read as a cover story for an otherwise
unspeakable desire between women. Because critics assume that novels
ending in marriage eliminate lesbian desire, they have also assumed that
courtship plots exile female friendship to the narrative margins. In fact,
Marcus shows, female friends rarely lose their centrality in novels with
marriage plots, but critics have overlooked this out of an insistence on
reading female friendship as something other than it is. Taking friendship
in novels to signify friendship is thus not mere tautology; it highlights
something true and visible on the text’s surface that symptomatic reading
had ironically rendered invisible. Similarly, Benjamin Kahan argues that,
rather than interpret celibacy as repressed homosexuality, we adopt a
“depthless hermeneutic” that would take celibacy as “the ‘absence’ of sex
that it is.”27 Ann Stoler, in Along the Archival Grain, looks at imperial vio-
lence that was never hidden, and attends to the colonial state’s interests in
family life as a genuine preoccupation, not as “metaphors for something
else.”28
Other examples suggest an emerging interest in literal readings that
take texts at face value. In his study of rumor in the archive, Stephen Best
reads first-person testimony by Caribbean slaves who believed that the
British monarch had freed them, viewing their words neither as evidence
irredeemably corrupted by the sovereign power that extracted them, nor as
verbatim speech through which we can recover subjects lost to history.
Those words are, rather, exactly what they appear to be: “impossible
speech” that oscillates between loyalty and insurgency, speech and para-
phrase, fact and prophecy, confession and coercion, and in that sense
reflects back to us the deeply felt uncertainty of the enslaved. Attention to
the rumors on the surface of the archive challenges our conception of the
latter as a repository of latent voices and “hidden transcripts,” and requires
that we reconsider whether the story of slavery can ever be narrated “from
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below” if our aim is to register what is inaccessible in the voice of the

enslaved.29 Elisa Tamarkin similarly reads the American love of hierarchy,
caste, and British traditions as meaning what it said. Unlike cultural historians
who have read Anglophilia symptomatically, as a “guilty conscience that
will not own [the egalitarian democracy] it has fought to gain,” Tamarkin
takes Anglophilia literally, as a statement of American national character that
comprises attachment to deference as well as allegiance to independence.30
These understandings of what one can learn from surfaces resonate with
a rarely cited statement Foucault made about his relationship to archives:
rather than dig for “relations that are secret, hidden, more silent or deeper
than . . . consciousness,” he described himself as seeking “to define the rela-
tions on the very surface of discourse” and “to make visible what is invisible
only because it’s too much on the surface of things.”31 Just reading sees
ghosts as presences, not absences, and lets ghosts be ghosts, instead of saying
what they are ghosts of.
Freedom in Attentiveness
If criticism is not the excavation of hidden truths, what can it add

to our experience of texts? Can surface reading be anything other than a
tacit endorsement of the status quo, the academic version of resignation’s
latest mantra, “It is what it is”? These questions are especially urgent
because many of our most powerful critical models see criticism as a prac-
tice of freedom by locating autonomy, self-reflexiveness, detachment, and
liberatory potential either in the artwork itself or in the valiant labor of the
critic. In the former case, a measure of heroism is attributed to the artwork
due to its autonomy from ideology; the latter makes the critic a hero who
performs interpretive feats of demystification. The surface readers in this
volume place noticeably less faith than many other critics in the heroic
qualities of art, and they understand their critical activity as something
other than wresting truths from the hidden depths of resisting texts. We
feel it is important, therefore, to situate this volume in relation to domi-
nant tendencies and to significant emergent moments within recent liter-
ary criticism that position themselves in relation to the two poles of critical
freedom.
First, the dominant trends. One of the most emphatic recent articulations
of the notion that freedom lies in aesthetic objects and aesthetic play can be
found in the broad field styled as “New Formalist.” As Marjorie Levinson
describes in her recent review essay on the movement, a common assump-
tion in much New Formalist work is that we do not need to criticize art-
works, because they contain their own “critical (and self-critical) agency.”
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New Formalists characterize the task of the critic as restoring the artwork to
its “original, compositional complexity,” a position that corresponds by and
large to the aims of the old New Criticism and distances itself from what it
perceives as attacks on literary form by New Historicism.32 In this essentially
modernist view of art as a locus of critical autonomy, reading becomes what
Levinson calls “learned submission,” which is not as submissive as it sounds,
because in submitting to the artwork, we come to share its freedom, by experi-
encing “the deep challenge that the artwork poses to ideology, or to the flat-
tening, routinizing, absorptive effects associated with ideological regimes”
(560). Immersion in texts frees us from the apathy and instrumentality of cap-
italism by allowing us to bathe in the artwork’s disinterested purposelessness.
As Levinson rightly observes, the New Formalist view of the artwork’s
sovereignty over itself, its autonomy from ideology, largely ignores a materi-
alist criticism that sees the artwork’s freedom more dialectically, as an expres-
sion of struggles with its historical conditions and limits. This tradition is
perhaps best represented by the writings of Theodor Adorno, whose essay
“Commitment” proclaims that the office of art is to resist “solely through
artistic form, the course of the world, which continues to hold a pistol to the
heads of human beings.”33 On the one hand, the artwork’s claim to auton-
omy stems from its bid to detach itself from empirical reality, but that
detachment is never complete: “There is no content, no formal category of
the literary work that does not, however unrecognizably transformed and
unawarely, derive from the empirical reality from which it has escaped” (90).
On the other hand, the very bid to escape from empirical reality, no matter
how inevitably incomplete, makes the form of art inseparable from a dream
of freedom in which the artwork’s authors and critics can participate. “As
pure artifacts, products, works of art, even literary ones, are instructions for
the praxis they refrain from: the production of life lived as it ought to be”
(93–94). Not surprisingly, then, Adorno elsewhere suggests the desirability
of a mimetic relation between critics and their objects. As he wrote in his
essay on the essay form, “nothing can be interpreted out of something that is
not interpreted into it at the same time,” and he adds a bit later, “thought’s
depth depends on how deeply it penetrates its object, not on the extent to
which it reduces it to something else.”34 Adorno thus advocates an immer-
sive mode of reading that does not need to assert its distance and difference
from its object. As Nealon observes in his essay for this volume, if we under-
stand literary texts already to be “documents in the history of human strug-
gles to be free,” we can then “allow ourselves to imagine a mimetic relation
between literature and criticism” without worrying that in doing so we are
blunting our critical edge.
Equally interested in freedom, but locating it elsewhere, are those critics
who believe that the text is a mystification and that the critic must therefore
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 15
distance himself from it by adopting a point of view at variance with its optic.
For this kind of critic, freedom emerges from an agon with the ideological
text. There is perhaps no stronger advocate for this position than the Jame-
son of The Political Unconscious, who posits the Marxist critic as heroic in his
or her own right, wrestling to free the truth hidden in the depths of the text.
This vision accentuates the agency of the critic by using the violent imagery
to which Mary Crane draws our attention, citing Jameson’s description of
the critic who penetrates a text’s protective exoskeleton in an effort to
retrieve “‘a whole historical ideology that must be drawn, massy and drip-
ping, up into the light before the text can be considered to have been
read.’”35 To the extent that authors are associated with freedom, Jameson
posits the critic as the real author; the critic does not literally produce the
text, but does produce whatever in it is related to truth. In this sense, Jame-
son is not only doing what E. D. Hirsch called usurping the place of the
author (5); he is also more daringly associating the power of the critic with
that of the God of biblical hermeneutics, who can transcend the blinkered
point of view of humankind. Although Jameson notes that Augustine’s Chris-
tian philosophy of history “can no longer be particularly binding on us”
(18), and although Jameson differentiates his method of allegorical reading
from Augustine’s, he himself notes in passing the similarities between his
totalizing Hegelian Marxism and Augustine’s drive to read all texts in terms
of Christian truth (12, 285). The structural similarities between Jameson’s
and Augustine’s visions are in fact quite numerous. When Jameson writes
that “the human adventure is one” (19), “a single vast unfinished plot” (20),
he seeks to return to human life a unity that Augustine found only in God.
Just as historical facts have only limited validity for Augustine, whose master
code was Christianity, non-Marxist codes have only “sectoral validity” for
Jameson, who overtly takes as his mission the task of rewriting texts in terms
of a master code (10). Similarly, “always historicize” is a transhistorical
imperative whose temporality matches the eternity Augustine ascribed to
God. Where Augustine viewed God as the best author, Jameson sees the
critic as the best author, and it is Jameson’s transcendent faith in his critical
values that allows him to insist, contra the poststructuralist critics whom he
debates in his first chapter, “On Interpretation,” that we must interpret texts
and posit their meanings (58). Though Jameson distances himself from
deconstructionists in this regard, his foundational belief in Marxism corre-
sponds to their foundational belief in antifoundationalism, a belief that
poses an irreconcilable contradiction for their thought.
At our most speculative and exploratory, we want to ask what it might
mean to stay close to our objects of study, without citing as our reason for
doing so a belief that those objects encapsulate freedom. We pose this ques-
tion, in part, out of a sense of political realism about the revolutionary
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 16
capacities of both texts and critics, and doubts about whether we could ever
attain the heightened perspicacity that would allow us to see fully beyond
ideology. We also detect in current criticism a skepticism about the very pro-
ject of freedom, or about any kind of transcendent value we might use to jus-
tify intellectual work. A variety of critical styles in the second half of the
twentieth century were marked by a utopian strain and a striving for
redemption. Sontag subscribed to the “cult of art,” Jameson expressed the
divine aspirations of revolutionary critics, and those pursuing various forms
of identity politics (feminism, queer studies, critical race studies) believed in
the authority imbedded in particular subject positions. Across these various
styles, the project of freedom came to be associated with what Christopher
Nealon calls a “comportment”; he points out that for long it seemed to be the
mandated task of either the artwork or the critic’s theories about it to provide
a finite array of stances from among which we had to choose “the one that will
count as resistant, or subversive.”36 This appears to be less the case now if we
take our contributors as at all representative. All seem to be relatively neutral
about their objects of study, which they tend less to evaluate than to describe,
and which they situate in landscapes neither utopian nor dystopian. Cohen is
interested in the world of work and information that unfolds on ships, but
stops short of the suggestion that we generalize from life at sea to life itself;
Nealon does not take his central poet to task for her interest in fashion and
other phenomena that mimic the antic pace of the commodity’s life and
death in capitalism; Cheng recognizes that Baker’s composition of herself as
modern was inseparable from her objectification of herself as primitive.
Surface reading, which strives to describe texts accurately, might easily
be dismissed as politically quietist, too willing to accept things as they are. We
want to reclaim from this tradition the accent on immersion in texts (with-
out paranoia or suspicion about their merit or value), for we understand
that attentiveness to the artwork as itself a kind of freedom. This strikes an
ideal expressed most succinctly by Charles Altieri: “an ideal of being able not
to worry about performing the self so that one can pursue potentials within
the range of ongoing practices that are blocked by worries about identity
and authenticity . . . [a freedom to be able] to enjoy what and where one is
without having to produce any supplemental claims that promise some ‘sig-
nificance’ not immediately evident.”37 To some ears this might sound like a
desire to be free from having a political agenda that determines in advance
how we interpret texts, and in some respects it is exactly that. We think, how-
ever, that a true openness to all the potentials made available by texts is also
prerequisite to an attentiveness that does not reduce them to instrumental
means to an end and is the best way to say anything accurate and true about
them. Criticism that valorizes the freedom of the critic has often assumed
that an adversarial relation to the object of criticism is the only way for the
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 17
critic to free himself from the text’s deceptive, ideological surface and uncover
the truth that the text conceals. We want to suggest that, in relinquishing the
freedom dream that accompanies the work of demystification, we might be
groping toward some equally valuable, if less glamorous, states of mind.
This brings us to two emergent styles of doing literary criticism that res-
onate with the work in this volume—work that attends as much to the com-
plexities of the critic’s position as to those of the artwork, but seeks to occupy
a paradoxical space of minimal critical agency.
We have in mind here, first, the recent turn toward computers, databases,
and other forms of machine intelligence across a range of fields and prac-
tices, from book history to distant reading. Where the heroic critic corrects
the text, a nonheroic critic might aim instead to correct for her critical sub-
jectivity, by using machines to bypass it, in the hopes that doing so will produce
more accurate knowledge about texts. Where the heroic text commands
admiration of its unique features, computers can help us to find features
that texts have in common in ways that our brains alone cannot. Computers
are weak interpreters but potent describers, anatomizers, taxonomists. New
media create new forms of knowledge, and digital modes of reading may be
the inspiration for the hope that we could bypass the selectivity and evalua-
tive energy that have been considered the hallmarks of good criticism, in
order to attain what has almost become taboo in literary studies: objectivity,
validity, truth. This might raise alarm that we are destroying existing ratio-
nales for studying the humanities: critical thinking, the uniqueness of art
and culture, and the correspondingly distinctive ways that humanist disci-
plines study them. But to suggest that there might be ways of studying cul-
ture that would neither attack nor defend it is not to suggest that we
abandon the study of culture altogether. It is to propose that rather than
evaluate culture as masterworks of genius or documents of barbarism, we
instead define what is unique about the disciplines that study culture as their
interest in human artifacts, in contrast to the sciences, which focus on pro-
cesses beyond our creation and control. To adopt some of the methods of
science to the study of culture is not to say that scientists would be the better
students of it, for scientists not only have little interest in studying cultural
objects but also lack training in how to study them qualitatively. We are not
envisioning a world in which computers replace literary critics but are curi-
ous about one in which we work with them to expand what we do.
We are thinking, second, of a critic like Anne-Lise François and her
interest in a form of reading whose minimal agency would match that of cer-
tain textual moments of silence, deferral, acceptance, “complaisance with-
out hope” (Open Secrets, xix). Taking its distance from the recuperative ethos
of earlier styles that seemed capable of reading only “for hidden meanings
and lost histories” (32), this type of criticism highlights “the agency of the act
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 18
of bearing witness to the given” (35). Instead of turning to literature for

models of how to overcome constraint, or for a right way to live under capi-
tal, or to register the difference between our critical freedom and the limits
placed on others, we are interested in how to register the ways that con-
straints structure existence as much as breaking free of them does. The neu-
trality of description is thus not neutrality about the constraints themselves,
which we may find ourselves moved to deplore, but neutrality about the exis-
tences entwined with them, which we would like to be able to recognize with-
out judging. Just as many dismiss surface reading as obvious, but find
themselves unable to sustain the slow pace, receptiveness, and fixed atten-
tion it requires, many readers might find that to refuse to celebrate or con-
demn their objects of study is, in practice, both difficult and discomfiting.
The essays that follow remind us that as much as our objects of study may
conceal the structures that give rise to them, they also wear them on their
sleeves; that the moments that arrest us in texts need not be considered
symptoms, whose true cause exists on another plane of reality, but can them-
selves indicate important and overlooked truths. As Edgar Allan Poe’s story
“The Purloined Letter” continues to teach us, what lies in plain sight is worthy
of attention but often eludes observation—especially by deeply suspicious
detectives who look past the surface in order to root out what is underneath
it. These essays also gesture toward a future for literary criticism that does
not involve the untenable claim that we are always more free than those who
produce the texts we study and that our insights and methods therefore have
the power to confer freedom. At the same time, we would suggest that to
begin to challenge the state of things, or the distortions of ideology, we must
strive to produce undistorted, complete descriptions of them. Of course,
one of the great questions of the last two centuries has been whether we can
ever set aside our responses in order to produce undistorted accounts of
things, since our responses are often unconscious and unknowable. Without
fully answering that question, we believe that even if we cannot exhaustively
explain what causes our responses, we can strive to describe them accurately,
and that there is nothing inherently truthful or misleading about them.
Sometimes our subjectivity will help us see a text more clearly, and some-
times it will not.
In closing, we want to underscore two points: that to see more clearly
does not require that we plumb hidden depths and that producing accurate
accounts of surfaces is not antithetical to critique; indeed, it may be, as
Bruno Latour has recently suggested, the best way to move past the impasses
created by what has become an excessive emphasis on ideological demystifi-
cation. Referring to the ease with which conservatives question global warm-
ing by referring to it as a social construction rather than a scientific truth, he
asks, “While we spent years trying to detect the real prejudices hidden
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 19
behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the

real objective and incontrovertible facts hidden behind the illusion of preju-
dices?”38 Latour reminds us that “the question was never to get away from
facts but closer to them” (231) and notes that the critic “is not the one who
debunks, but the one who assembles” (246). We began this essay by asserting
the distance we would like to take from the type of symptomatic reading we
inherited from psychoanalysis and Marxism, but in concluding we note that
the work of assembly and the desire for a more complete view of reality are
also aims of both schools of thought, which is one reason they remain cen-
tral to the critics whose works we have assembled here. We hope these reflec-
tions on the way we read now give us a clearer view of the past and open up
fertile paths of inquiry in the future.
Notes
We would like to thank the editorial board of Representations, which opened the
journal’s pages to us; the board members who met with us to discuss this issue;
and our contributors, who responded so thoughtfully to our editorial sugges-
tions. In addition, we would like to thank Ellis Avery, Amanda Claybaugh, Eric
Ganther, Saidiya Hartman, Colleen Lye, Samuel Otter, Martin Puchner, Elisa
Tamarkin, and our co-editors Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood for their com-
ments on drafts of this essay. Nicholas Dirks, Vice President for Arts and Sci-
ences at Columbia University, made this publication possible by providing the
crucial funding for the 2008 conference at which these papers were first pre-
sented; for their generous support of that conference, we also thank New York
University’s Humanities Initiative, its Office of the Dean of the Humanities, and
all cosponsoring departments at Columbia and NYU.
1. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act
(Ithaca, 1981), 61.
2. We note that there remain things that government powers go to extraordinary
lengths to keep hidden, to keep as state secrets, “extraordinary rendition”
being one of them. A hermeneutics of suspicion in which understanding
requires a subtle reading of the situation thus remains readily pertinent to the
work of critique. See, for example, Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map: The
Dark Geography of the Pentagon’s Secret World (New York, 2009).
3. We take this notion of what is there for the taking from Anne-Lise François,
Open Secrets: The Literature of Uncounted Experience (Stanford, 2008), 10, who
deploys it in a different historical context there than we do here.
4. Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory
(Princeton, 2006); Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in Things: Fugitive Meaning in
the Victorian Novel (Chicago, 2006).
5. Emily Apter, Elaine Freedgood, and Sharon Marcus, conference proposal,
“The Way We Read Now: Symptomatic Reading and Its Aftermath,” June 2007;
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 20
similar language appeared in the description of the March 2006 ACLA confer-
ence seminar “Symptomatic Reading and Its Discontents,” organized and
chaired by Sharon Marcus and convened in collaboration with Elaine Freed-
good, John Plotz, and Leah Price.
6. As Ellen Rooney has put it, symptomatic reading produces “the absent ques-
tion . . . that the reading . . . establishes as unthinkable within the text’s own
problematic”; “Better Read Than Dead: Althusser and the Fetish of Ideology,”
Yale French Studies 88 (1995): 187.
7. Umberto Eco, “Interpretation and History,” in Interpretation and Overinterpreta-
tion, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge, 1992), 31.
8. See Plato, The Republic, trans. G. M. A. Grube (Indianopolis, 1992), and Daniel
Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkeley, 1994).
9. On the interpretive homology between Marx’s analysis of the commodity and
Freud’s analysis of dreams, see Slavoj Žižek, “How Did Marx Invent the Symp-
tom?” Mapping Ideology, ed. Slavoj Žižek (New York, 1995), 296–331.
10. Carlo Ginzburg, “Clues: Roots of an Evidential Paradigm,” in Clues, Myths,
and the Historical Method, trans. John and Anne C. Tedeschi (Baltimore, 1989),
99, 101.
11. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation, trans. Denis Savage
(New Haven, 1979), 7, 12, 8, 56.
12. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (Lon-
don, 1997), 28.
13. Mary Poovey argues that this account of reading as work originated with John
Ruskin, who tended to cast meaning “not as self-evident because simply
denoted by the author’s words but as difficult and evasive.” See her Genres of the
Credit Economy: Mediating Value in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Britain
(Chicago, 2007), 312–13.
14. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley, 1991); Toni Morri-
son, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (New York, 1992).
15. Margreta de Grazia and Peter Stallybrass use this locution (of looking at, rather
than through) to discuss the importance of attending to errant textuality in
“The Materiality of the Shakespearean Text,” Shakespeare Quarterly 44 (Fall
1993): 255–83, 257.
16. Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book (New York, 1999), 9.
17. Samuel Otter, “An Aesthetics in All Things,” Representations 104 (Fall 2008):
116–25, 119. Otter’s description of the literary-critical enterprise as an unravel-
ing paraphrases Catherine Gallagher’s observations regarding the legacies of
New Criticism. See her “The History of Literary Criticism,” in American Aca-
demic Culture in Transformation: Fifty Years, Four Disciplines, ed. Thomas Bender
and Carl E. Schorske (Princeton, 1998), 151–72.
18. The distinction between meaning and significance belongs properly to E. D.
Hirsch, for whom the former describes what an author means by a chosen sign
sequence, whereas the latter names a relationship between that meaning “and
a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything imaginable.” E. D.
Hirsch Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, 1967), 8.
19. I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgment (1929; reprint, Lon-
don, 1973), 312, 11.
20. Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation,” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays
(New York, 1966), 6, 5, 14.
REP108_01 9/18/09 10:35 AM Page 21
21. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re
So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” in Touching Feeling:
Affect, Pedagogy, Perfomativity (Durham, 2003), 123–51; Timothy Bewes, “Read-
ing with the Grain,” unpublished manuscript, presented at 2006 ACLA seminar
on symptomatic reading and later expanded; Jane Gallop, “The Ethics of Read-
ing: Close Encounters,” Journal of Curriculum Theorizing 16, no. 3 (2000): 7–18.
22. Paul de Man, Blindness and Insight (New York, 1971), 34, 31.
23. Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye (Berkeley, 1986), 324 n.15; Aaron
Kunin, “Shakespeare’s Preservation Fantasy,” PMLA 124 ( January 2009): 95.
24. Clifford Siskin, “Textual Culture in the History of the Real,” Textual Culture 2,
no. 2 (Autumn 2007): 118–30; Marc Angenot, “Social Discourse Analysis: Out-
lines of a Research Project,” Yale Journal of Criticism 17 (2004): 199–215, 200.
25. See Marc Angenot, Ce que l’on dit des Juifs en 1889. Antisémitisme et discours social
(Saint-Denis, 1989), 177, translation ours.
26. Sharon Marcus, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian Eng-
land (Princeton, 2007), 75.
27. Benjamin Kahan, “‘The Viper’s Traffic-Knot’: Celibacy and Queerness in the
‘Late’ Marianne Moore,” GLQ 14, no. 4 (2008): 510, 512.
28. Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common
Sense (Princeton, 2009), 63.
29. Stephen Best, “Rumor in the Archive,” unpublished manuscript, presented at
“The Way We Read Now: Symptomatic Reading and Its Aftermath,” Columbia
University and New York University, May 2008.
30. Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago,
2008), xxiv, xxvi–xxvii.
31. Foucault Live: Interviews, 1961–84, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. John Johnston
(New York, 1989), 57–58.
32. Marjorie Levinson, “What Is New Formalism?” PMLA 122, no. 2 (March 2007):
558–69, 560.
33. Theodor Adorno, “Commitment,” in Notes to Literature: Volume Two, ed. Rolf
Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1992), 80.
34. Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature: Volume One, ed.
Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York, 1991), 11.
35. Margaret Crane, “Surface, Depth, and the Spatial Imaginary: A Cognitive Read-
ing of The Political Unconscious,” in this issue; citing Jameson, The Political Uncon-
scious, 245.
36. Christopher Nealon, “Un-Militant Thinking,” unpublished manuscript, deliv-
ered at “The Way We Read Now: Symptomatic Reading and Its Aftermath,”
Columbia University and New York University, May 2008.
37. Charles Altieri, “Cavell’s Imperfect Perfectionism,” in Ordinary Language Criti-
cism: Literary Thinking After Cavell After Wittgenstein, ed. Kenneth Dauber and
Walter Jost (Evanston, 2003), 216.
38. Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to
Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry 30, no. 2 (Winter 2004): 227.

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Surface Reading: An Introduction

Author(s): Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus

STEPHEN BEST AND SHARON MARCUS

Surface Reading: An Introduction

Reading “The Way We Read Now”

The title of this special issue raises many questions. To

All of the contributors to this volume are responding to a particu-

Surface Reading: An Introduction 3

pairs of oppositions: present/absent, manifest/latent, and surface/depth.

Surface Reading: An Introduction 5

Symptomatic Reading Now

In the course of meditating on the way we read now, and perform-

Surface Reading: An Introduction 7

there is only more surface, Cheng advocates a “mutual pedagogy of erotics”

Surface looms large in the vocabulary of our contributors, but

Surface as materiality. This kind of surface emerges primarily in two

Surface Reading: An Introduction 9

Surface as the intricate verbal structure of literary language. This understand-

Embrace of the surface as an affective and ethical stance. Such an embrace

text’s surface, as opposed to suspicious and aggressive attacks on its con-

Attention to surface as a practice of critical description. This focus assumes

Surface Reading: An Introduction 11

Siskin’s demonstration that large-scale shifts in how literature defines reality

below” if our aim is to register what is inaccessible in the voice of the

If criticism is not the excavation of hidden truths, what can it add

Surface Reading: An Introduction 13

Surface Reading: An Introduction 15

Surface Reading: An Introduction 17

of bearing witness to the given” (35). Instead of turning to literature for

behind the appearance of objective statements, do we now have to reveal the

Surface Reading: An Introduction 19

Surface Reading: An Introduction 21

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