ABSTRACT

How do we read? For critics, now a few years deep into what has been called “the method wars”, the approaches are numerous, but most of all, are collective. Whether critique or postcritique, or the idiosyncratic in between, what is undeniable about the explosion of methods beyond the hermeneutics of suspicion is that it renders us, critics, in the plural. In his first collection of essays and interviews, Strong Opinions, Vladimir Nabokov proclaimed that “a work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me”, but as Zadie Smith despaired in her 2004 essay “Read Better”, “the idea of the ‘individual reader’ [has] gone into terminal decline”. Looking to the contemporary autocritical novel, however, we find plenty of readers resistant to the interpretative habits of professional readers, drawing attention to the limitations of institutional reading and extoling the aesthetic affordances of reading limited to the individual. Rather than rehashing the motivations and sensibilities involved and required by reading critically that the method wars have revived, then, this article submits to the “individual reader” offered by autocritical novels by Rachel Cusk, Ben Lerner, and Valeria Luiselli.

摘要

我们如何阅读？对于评论家来说，现在所谓的“方法战争”已经深入了几年，方法很多，但最重要的是，它们是集体的。无论是批判还是后批判，或者两者之间的特殊性，不可否认的是，超越怀疑的解释学的方法的爆炸式增长使我们这些批评者变成了复数形式。在他的第一部散文和采访集中，强烈的意见, 弗拉基米尔·纳博科夫 (Vladimir Nabokov) 宣称“艺术作品对社会没有任何意义。它只对个人重要，只有个​​别读者对我重要”，但正如 Zadie Smith 在她 2004 年的文章“阅读更好”中绝望的那样，“‘个人读者’的想法[已经]走向了绝境” . 然而，纵观当代自批判小说，我们发现很多读者抵制专业读者的解释习惯，引起人们对机构阅读的局限性的关注，并颂扬仅限于个人的阅读审美能力。这篇文章并没有通过批判性阅读方法战争已经复活而重新讨论所涉及和要求的动机和敏感性，而是提交给雷切尔·库斯克 (Rachel Cusk)、本·勒纳 (Ben Lerner) 的自批判小说提供的“个人读者”，