Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels

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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 ignoreda neglect that corresponds, perhaps not coincidentally, to a flight from literature courses themselves. In close readings of six American novels spread over the past centuryWilla Cathers The Professors House, Vladimir Nabokovs Lolita, Marilynne Robinsons Housekeeping, Cormac McCarthys Blood Meridian and The Road, and Junot Dazs The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar WaoMitchell traces a shifting strain of late modernist innovation that celebrates a species of magic and wonder, of aesthetic bliss (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 statusin critic Barbara Johnsons words, the rigorous perversity and seductiveness of literary languagethwarting pressures of plot that otherwise push us ineluctably forward. In each chapter, the return to mere reading becomes paradoxically a gesture that honors the intractability of fictional texts, their sheer irresolution, indeed the way in which their literary status rests on the play of irreconcilables that emerges from the verbal tensions we find ourselves first astonished by, then delighting in.

Reviews

Mitchells readings offer an accomplished and refreshing approach to literary works. * Textual Practice *
In a career-long recoil from an early, maternally-induced, and short-lived brush with Evelyn Woods speed reading techniques, Lee Clark Mitchell has slackened the velocity, which is only to say tightened the grip, of his textual habits ever sinceand the yield, as in two engrossing and indispensable chapters on Cormac McCarthy, is sampled here in readings that neither hydroplane across the surface of the literary page, nor approach it in programmatic slow-mo, but that let a deliberately wide variety of stylistic traction and density pace the ear of reading and test the very possibilities of attention. Unostentatiously termed 'mere' (as in 'simply') reading, the results are instead, in their deployment of seasoned gifts, an intense and exemplary case of sheer reading. * Garrett Stewart, James O. Freedman Professor of Letters, University of Iowa, USA, and author of The Deed of Reading (2015) *
Remember how it felt to read books when you were a child The privacy, the concentration, the wonder At a time when, given the challenges of new media, novels are called upon to be more merely useful than ever before, Lee Mitchell argues that prose ought to be read at least as closely as poetryevery turn of syntax or figure a source of inexhaustible revelation. Not by regressing but by pushing us forward into ever more gratifyingly attentive modes of reading, Mere Reading restores us to a more truly purposeful bliss. * James Longenbach, Joseph Henry Gilmore Professor of English, University of Rochester, USA, and author of The Virtues of Poetry (2013) *
Mere Reading sparkles with quicksilver insights that wait around every bend of Lee Mitchells argument. He focuses less on what readers extract from literature and more on what they experience there. He is particularly attuned to the ways in which great stylists, from Willa Cather to Cormac McCarthy, make us, in Hemingways words, feel something more than we understand it. Mitchell continually reminds us that what we find in the best American fiction is far messier, fresher and more puzzling than most critics are willing to admit. * Michael Kowalewski, Lloyd McBride Professor of English & Environmental Studies, Carleton College, USA *

Author Bio

Lee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, USA. Among his previous publications are Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response (1981), Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (1996), and Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism (1989).