Abstract
In order to really know a literary text, or a loved person, one must risk a sustained raptnesss of attention that transgresses the boundaries of the moderate and seemly, of common sense. This chapter’s principal aims, therefore, are twofold. The first is to rethink and rehabilitate two forms of intensive scrutiny that regularly draw skepticism and even scorn: what is called “overreading” in literary criticism, and what is termed “infatuation” in romantic and affectional life. In both spheres, I argue, a particular kind of attention, even hyperattentiveness, enables forms of knowing both valuable and legitimate (that is, objective). The sec- ond, related aim is to question traditional allegiance to the concepts of wholeness, unity, and generality in literary criticism — not in order to reject them, but to liberate the minute attention to parts that is inhibited by what Adorno calls “this passing-on and being unable to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular.”11 explore and advocate a conscious, New Formalist fetishizing of parts — of textual elements — to a point at which the whole they constitute recedes almost to vanishing, or is bracketed almost to the point of annihilation. Such an effort does not represent an ultimate denigration of textual or other artistic wholes, but it enables a realization of individual elements that would otherwise be impossible — a realization that can redeem both the charge of critical overreading and that of romantic infatuation.
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Notes
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections From Damaged Life, trans. E. F. N. Jephcott (London & New York: Verso, 2005), 74.
See James Benziger, “Organic Unity: Leibniz to Coleridge,” PMLA 66:2 (March 1951), 24
Philip E. Lewis, “Review: Athletic Criticism,” Diacritics, 1:2 (Winter, 1971), 5.
William K. Wimsatt, Jr., and Cleanth Brooks, Literary Criticism: A Short History (New York: Knopf, 1957), p. 507.
John Benyman, Collected Poems, 1937–1971, ed. Charles Thornbury (New York: Faber & Faber, 1991), 154.
See also Jacques Denida, “The Law of Genre,” trans. Avitall Ronell, Critical Inquiry, 7:1 (Autumn, 1980), 65
J. Hillis Miller, “The Critic as Host,” Critical Inquiry, 3:3, (Spring, 1977), pp. 439–47
Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1995), 51.
Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1998), 1.
Walter J. Ong, S. J., “The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn,” Essays in Criticism IV (July 1954), 319.
Angela Leighton, “About About: On Poetry and Paraphrase,” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXXIII (2009), 175.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. F. Max Müller (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 44–5.
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© 2013 Fredric V. Bogel
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Bogel, F.V. (2013). Textual Infatuation, True Infatuation. In: New Formalist Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362599_5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137362599_5
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