ENGL 334
Suspicious Mind Fall 2015
Division I
This is not the current course catalog

Literary critics have made suspicion an essential aspect of what it means to read. When we set out to do a “suspicious reading” of a text we assume a few things about it: that its true meaning consists in what it cannot say, know, or understand about itself; that such meaning lies at a certain remove from the reader; and that “symptoms” of meaning’s buried presence need to be “demystified” by the critical reader. This is a class on suspicious and non-suspicious modes of reading. We will interrogate the roots of suspicious reading, most pointedly in the writings of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud, in order to ask whether conceiving literary works as hiding their meaning or possessing an “unconscious” remain relevant ways to conceptualize texts in the age of the internet. To figure out whether there are alternatives to suspicion, we will explore recent shifts toward an “ethics of reading” that reorients reading from something we do to the text to something that is be done to us (where ethics refers not to the situation of readers and characters, or the author’s worldview, but to the varieties of formal relationality that works of literature afford in the process of reading). The course takes up its topic in three distinct observances: [1] the literary tradition in which a hermeneutics of suspicion is subjected to scrutiny (Henry James, The Turn of the Screw; Edgar Allan Poe, The Purloined Letter; Herman Melville, Benito Cereno); [2] the literary-critical turn toward “surface reading,” a portmanteau term that captures reading practices willing “to respect rather than reject what is in plain view,” in the words of Rita Felski, particularly those attributes of a text that in the past may have been dismissed as either too feminine or too queer, i.e., style, texture, surface, the ephemeral, the obvious, and the enchanting; and [3] works of literature and film that reward attentiveness to the play of their surfaces (Henry James, The Ambassadors; Haruki Murakami IQ84; Michael Haneke, The White Ribbon; Tom Ford, A Single Man).