Table Of ContentModernism, Theory, and
Responsible Reading
ii
Modernism, Theory, and
Responsible Reading
A Critical Conversation
Edited by
Stephen Ross
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 Introduction: Responsible Reading 1
Stephen Ross
Part I Theory 21
2 The Positive of the Negative: Joycean
Post-Structuralism as Felskian Critique 23
Robert Baines
3 Responsible Reading of Theory 41
Fabio Akcelrud Durão
4 Modernism, Critical Theory, and Affect Theory Avant La Lettre 59
Yan Tang
5 The Case for Prosthetic Thinking 79
Kathryn Carney
Part II Method 91
6 Beyond the Search Image: Reading as (Re)search 93
Daniel Aureliano Newman
7 On the Advantages of Saying “No” (to Binaries, Totalizations,
“Weakness,” “Modesty,” “Humility”) 111
Cristina Ionica
8 Weak Theory, “Responsible” Reading, and Literary Criticism 131
Masami Sugimori
Part III Practice 151
9 Absolutely Small: Sketch of an Anarchist Aesthetic 153
Roger Rothman
vi Contents
10 Adorno as a Reader: Writing the Mediation of Literature and
Philosophy 169
Matthew Gannon
11 Writing from Somewhere, Reading from Anywhere: New
Criticism and (Neo)liberal Globalization 189
Sonita Sarker
12 Too Literal Translation: Some Poems of Roger Fry 207
Rivky Mondal
13 Afterword: Necessary–Impossible and Responsible–Irresponsible
Reading 225
Paul K. Saint-Amour
Notes on Contributors 235
Index 239
Acknowledgments
A volume like this takes a village to build. Apologies to those who wish these
thanks were briefer. First, I would like to thank the Modernist Studies Association
for continuing with the seminar format at their conferences. This book grew out
of initial conversations facilitated by that format, and owes its dialogic impulse—
and commitment to responsible reading—to it. Continuing that theme, I want
to thank all the participants in the seminar on “Modernism and Theory” at the
2019 MSA conference in Toronto. Not all of them appear in this volume, and
not all who appear in the volume were in the seminar, but the original group
provided powerful inspiration in their generous and nuanced contributions.
I spoke to Ben Doyle at Bloomsbury about this book at that same conference and
he expressed interest from the start. He has been a stalwart supporter and savvy
co-developer of it all along; I’m grateful to him and his team at Bloomsbury for
their aid the whole way.
This book simply would not exist were it not for the good offices of Deborah
Ogilvie, whose perspicacity and attention to detail more than made up for my
general lack of both. It’s thanks to her that we have a full manuscript and that
correspondence was handled so quickly and with such aplomb. Her own research
assistant, Grant, was a support in turn, I’m sure, and deserves a nod here as well.
I owe a debt of gratitude to those colleagues with whom I (seemingly
endlessly) bashed out the details and challenges of thinking through weak theory,
pensiero debole, critique and post-critique, weak modernism, affect, ethics, and
responsibility. Paul K. Saint-Amour’s special issue on “Weak Theory, Weak
Modernism” started it all, nudging me out of a rut to think about things anew.
I would like to single out J. Allan Mitchell, whose prior work on post-critique
was invaluable in my own process. Amy Tang, Graham Jensen, Christopher
Douglas, Nicholas Bradley, Erin Ellerbeck, Kevin Tunnicliffe, Misao Dean, Joe
Grossi, Marina Bettaglia, and basically anyone else who wandered too close to
where I was sitting in the campus coffee shop (hello Munchie Bar!) while I was
thinking through these issues. If I’ve missed your name here, it’s not because our
conversations were not valuable, but rather due to the shortage of perspicacity
mentioned above. David James and María del Pilar Blanco provided timely and
unbelievably useful feedback on a draft of the introduction, and continue to
viii Acknowledgments
inspire my thinking in these lines (hello to William). I am grateful to them for
taking the time to read, respond, and then chat online about it all.
Last, but never least, I want to thank my family. They put up with it all, as
usual, and kept me healthy and strong by insisting that we get outside every day,
play on the ocean and in the woods, and take time to squabble and laugh every
day. Stephanie, Kathleen, Adam: none of this matters without you.
1
Introduction: Responsible Reading
Stephen Ross
Seriously? Do we really need yet another <adjective> reading? We already have a
superabundance of approaches—close reading, distant reading, middle reading,
mere reading, surface reading, micro-sociological reading, reparative reading,
paranoid reading—and that’s without the various critical orientations that
themselves name characteristic methods: feminist reading, critical race reading,
historicist reading (old and new), post-structuralist reading, psychoanalytic
reading, Marxist reading and post-Marxist reading, phenomenological reading,
and so on. We’re not exactly hurting for options, here. So, why introduce another
option—yet another possible way of understanding what we do and should do as
literary and cultural critics? What is to be gained here, aside from incremental
career advancement and, perhaps, if all goes well, a brief moment in vogue
before the Next Big Thing? The contributors to this volume and I thought about
these questions at length before deciding it was worth it after all. In a series
of conversations, both en groupe and in smaller sub-sets, we decided that it
was worth the work to intervene in a debate that seemed to us to have missed
something essential. In broad terms, that debate is between something called
critique and something else called post-critique, and what seems to have gone
missing in action is a middle ground, a principled approach that we are calling
responsible reading.
This term—responsible reading—picks up a thread that has been dropped by
both contemporary practitioners of critique and theorists of post-critique. As
I will outline below, what goes by the name of critique today has devolved into
a purely destructive enterprise that ignores the drive toward justice embedded
in critique as it develops from Kant through Marx to Nietzsche, Freud, the
Frankfurt School, Foucault, Butler, and others. If the animating energy of critique
is essentially dialectical, pushing for what Marx called the “ruthless critique of
