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.
Kai Merten is professor of British literature at the University of Erfurt. His main research and teaching interests are British literature and culture from various medial, material and global perspectives. He is the founder of the Erfurt Network on New Materialism (ENNM) and has initiated cooperations in the field of New Materialist methodologies with similar research groups in Erfurt (Max-Weber-Kolleg), Weimar, Utrecht, Berlin, Aarhus, Odense, Kiel and Warsaw.
1. Introduction - Kai Merten (Erfurt, Germany) PART I: Diffractive Reading: Groundwork 2. On the Politics of Diffractive Reading - Birgit M. Kaiser 3. Heraclitus's speculative onto-story: Impossible appointments and the importance of the encounter - Max Walther 4. Decoherent Reading: On the Constitutive Exclusions of Diffractive Reading - Stacey Moran 5. Reading speculative horror readings diffractively - Peter Schuck PART II: Diffracting Literature: Diffractions of the World-Text-Reader Entanglement 6. Poem, Epic, and Epoch: A Diffractive Reading of William Carlos Williams's Paterson and Georg Lukacs's Theory of the Novel in the Age of New Materialism - Brendan Johnston 7. Sauron's Sliding Door: The Diffraction of Mythological and Intimate 'Evil' in Tolkien - Bo Kampmann Walther 8. Sensing I and Eyes in Ali Smith's How to Be Both - Daniela Keller 9. Practices of Entanglement: UnReading the Genre in China Mieville'sThe Scar - Agnieszka Kotwasinska 10. The Entanglements of Harry Burden: A Diffractive Reading of Siri Hustvedt - Matthias Stephan 11. Surfacing: A diffractive reading experiment with books and houses in Walter Benjamin's Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus and Carlos Maria Dominguez' Casa de papel - Annina Klappert PART III: Diffracting (in) Music, Visual and Digital Media 12. Diffractive Aesthetics & Holographic Literacies: Transcoding the Gigaton Volume Detector [A Diffracted Photo-Essay] - Jol Thoms 13. Diffracting Maternal and Female Midlife Sexual Assemblages in Postfeminist Popular Culture - Susan Yi Sencindiver 14. Ontoflecting Through U2 - Nathan D. Frank 15. Reprogramming Rhetoric: Toward a Diffractive Epistemology of Computer Composition - Sean McCullough
Reading is never neutral, never distant: it always makes a difference, it always interferes. That is the message-in theory and practice-of this volume insightfully edited by Kai Merten. In an entangled conversation of topics and voices, Diffractive Reading has a double goal: refining a methodology and involving more readers in the process. Reality, it tells you, is in the making even as you read these words. -- Serenella Iovino, Professor of Italian Studies and Environmental Humanities, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, co-editor of Material Ecocriticism How do we read a text, the world, the ideas of others, together? In this important book, Kai Merten gathers a range of contributions from different parts of academia, showing us the power of reading all that matters diffractively. These are affirmative and engaged mappings of a world in the making. A must read for all involved in how to analyse the contemporary. -- Rick Dolphijn, Assistant Professor in Media Theory/Cultural Theory, Utrecht University
