Mere Reading

Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year 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 Diaz'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 "e;bliss"e; (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, "e;the rigorous perversity and seductiveness of literary language"e;-thwarting pressures of plot that otherwise push us ineluctably forward. In each chapter, the return to "e;mere reading"e; becomes paradoxically a gesture that honors the intractability of fictional texts, their sheer irresolution, indeed the way in which their "e;literary"e; status rests on the play of irreconcilables that emerges from the verbal tensions we find ourselves first astonished by, then delighting in.