Resisting surfaces: Description, distance reading, and textual entanglement

Calling for surface reading practices that will not distort literary texts, Best and Marcus argue for descriptive and distant modes of surface reading, and assume a single, static, and objective model of the text. Besides risking the de-politicization and de-historicization of texts, advocates for purely descriptive criticism threaten the liveliness of pedagogical engagement. Devaluing critical work that is both popular and reproducible by students, Latour moves humanities critics far away from practices in the hard sciences that depend upon predictable and transmissible methodologies. Barad's quantum mechanics-based theory of intra-action shows how texts are not independent objects, but phenomena that incorporate personal, institutional, historical, and other material entanglements. Participants in the 2012 Exemplaria symposium illuminate Barad's claim, showing texts to be shaped by various disciplinary, historical, codicological, and affective forces. Much as physicists use various instruments in describing phenomena, literary analysts should see political and historical theories and commitments as just as vital and legitimate critical tools as aesthetic theories.