Kingston-Reese, Alexandra Bailey orcid.org/0000-0002-4129-6042 (2020) The Individual Reader. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction. ISSN 1939-9138
Abstract
How do we read? For critics, now a few years deep into what has been called “the method wars”, the approaches are numerous, but most of all, are collective. Whether critique or postcritique, or the idiosyncratic in between, what is undeniable about the explosion of methods beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion is that it renders us, critics, in the plural. In his first collection of essays and interviews, Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov proclaimed that “a work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me”, but as Zadie Smith despaired in her 2004 essay “Read Better”, “the idea of the ‘individual reader’ [has] gone into terminal decline”. Looking to the contemporary autocritical novel, however, we find plenty of readers resistant to the interpretative habits of professional readers, drawing attention to the limitations of institutional reading and extoling the aesthetic affordances of reading limited to the individual. Rather than rehashing the motivations and sensibilities involved and required by reading critically that the method wars have revived, then, this article submits to the “individual reader” offered by autocritical novels by Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, and Valeria Luiselli.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
---|---|
Authors/Creators: |
|
Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2020 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details. |
Keywords: | Valeria Luiselli,Ben Lerner,literature and crisis,close reading,affect,autocritique,Rachel Cusk,postcritical turn |
Dates: |
|
Institution: | The University of York |
Academic Units: | The University of York > Faculty of Arts and Humanities (York) > English and Related Literature (York) |
Depositing User: | Pure (York) |
Date Deposited: | 04 Sep 2020 10:30 |
Last Modified: | 02 Apr 2025 23:17 |
Published Version: | https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2020.1810612 |
Status: | Published |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.1080/00111619.2020.1810612 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:165127 |
Download
Filename: The_Individual_Reader_ms_FINAL.docx
Description: The Individual Reader ms FINAL