This selection of essays arose from a lecture series at the University of Cape Town, “Great texts/big questions” which, in the introduction, the editors describe as having struck a compromise between two different generations of Humanities academics: those who put an emphasis on texts – the “older” generation – and those who put their faith in questions, presumably the younger generation for whom the inviolability of the text is qualified by the contexts of politics, history or, more overarching, theory. Where the two emphases find common concern, we are told, is in a culture of “close reading”, the basic unit of study in the Humanities and, as such, “a tool of wider cultural analysis, critique and resistance to the almost numbing dominance of neoliberal economics and politics in South Africa today”.

中文翻译：

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搬迁：南非的阅读文化

这些论文选集来自开普敦大学的系列讲座“伟大的文本/大问题”，在引言中，编辑们将其描述为在两代不同的人文学者之间达成了妥协：那些强调关于文本——“老一代”——以及那些相信问题的人，大概是年轻一代，他们认为文本的不可侵犯性受到政治、历史或更广泛的理论背景的限制。我们被告知，这两个重点共同关注的地方是“仔细阅读”的文化，人文学科的基本研究单位，因此，“一种更广泛的文化分析、批评和抵制几乎麻木的文化的工具。当今南非新自由主义经济和政治的主导地位”。