Diffractive Reading: New Materialism, Theory, Critique

Kai Merten (Curatore)

Rowman & Littlefield, 2023

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 critical intervention 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.

• Curatore: Kai Merten
• Editore: Rowman & Littlefield
• Collana: New Critical Humanities
• Anno: 2023
• Rilegatura: Paperback / softback
• Pagine: 352 p.
• Dimensioni: 223 x 154 mm
• Peso: 562 gr.
• EAN: 9781538155677

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