Filipendula literaria: Applied literary studies

Abstract

By definition, disengaged literary exegesis, vigorously pursued since the advent of Anglo-American New Criticism (and avidly recycled in various guises in the aftermath of the deconstructive spin), retreats from the prospect of integrating art and life (to revert to an older, belletristic idiom). It retreats, too, from the prospect of investing the discipline of literary studies with existential purpose or propensity. Although recent orientations such as ethnic and embodiment studies are routinely interfused with standard, often Levinasian, animadversions concerning moral and cultural circumstances and the amelioration of socio-political ills, the professional pursuit of interpretative fecundity compels their exponents to sorn upon the artefact and to treat the activity of reading ontolophagously - as an opportunity to infiltrate shopworn theories and viscid banalities into tedious and wearisome recensions of the literary text. The article proposes an exegetical model which has its source in a desire to rediscover the paradoxes, perplexities, and polarities - the unaccountable amalgam of dispossession, intimacy, and spectatorship - inherent in the act of reading. Beyond characterisation, beyond narrative progression, beyond action and reaction, even beyond the artifice of syntax and semantics, the reader is preoccupied with the singularity of consciousness as it seeks to organise experience. The article explores some of the ways in which consciousness is represented to consciousness, and some of the ways in which readers model consciousness in order to make it available to itself. © 2011 JLS/TLW.