Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading ii Modernism, Theory, and Responsible Reading A Critical Conversation Edited by Stephen Ross BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Stephen Ross, 2022 Stephen Ross and contributors have asserted their rights under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on pp. vii–viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design by Eleanor Rose Cover shows Leni Akcelrud at the National Institute for Technology in Rio, 1968. Photograph by Clara Aguinsky Ackelrud All rights reserved. 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Contents Acknowledgments vii 1 Introduction: Responsible Reading 1 Stephen Ross Part I Theory 21 2 The Positive of the Negative: Joycean Post-Structuralism as Felskian Critique 23 Robert Baines 3 Responsible Reading of Theory 41 Fabio Akcelrud Durão 4 Modernism, Critical Theory, and Affect Theory Avant La Lettre 59 Yan Tang 5 The Case for Prosthetic Thinking 79 Kathryn Carney Part II Method 91 6 Beyond the Search Image: Reading as (Re)search 93 Daniel Aureliano Newman 7 On the Advantages of Saying “No” (to Binaries, Totalizations, “Weakness,” “Modesty,” “Humility”) 111 Cristina Ionica 8 Weak Theory, “Responsible” Reading, and Literary Criticism 131 Masami Sugimori Part III Practice 151 9 Absolutely Small: Sketch of an Anarchist Aesthetic 153 Roger Rothman vi Contents 10 Adorno as a Reader: Writing the Mediation of Literature and Philosophy 169 Matthew Gannon 11 Writing from Somewhere, Reading from Anywhere: New Criticism and (Neo)liberal Globalization 189 Sonita Sarker 12 Too Literal Translation: Some Poems of Roger Fry 207 Rivky Mondal 13 Afterword: Necessary–Impossible and Responsible–Irresponsible Reading 225 Paul K. Saint-Amour Notes on Contributors 235 Index 239 Acknowledgments A volume like this takes a village to build. Apologies to those who wish these thanks were briefer. First, I would like to thank the Modernist Studies Association for continuing with the seminar format at their conferences. This book grew out of initial conversations facilitated by that format, and owes its dialogic impulse— and commitment to responsible reading—to it. Continuing that theme, I want to thank all the participants in the seminar on “Modernism and Theory” at the 2019 MSA conference in Toronto. Not all of them appear in this volume, and not all who appear in the volume were in the seminar, but the original group provided powerful inspiration in their generous and nuanced contributions. I spoke to Ben Doyle at Bloomsbury about this book at that same conference and he expressed interest from the start. He has been a stalwart supporter and savvy co-developer of it all along; I’m grateful to him and his team at Bloomsbury for their aid the whole way. This book simply would not exist were it not for the good offices of Deborah Ogilvie, whose perspicacity and attention to detail more than made up for my general lack of both. It’s thanks to her that we have a full manuscript and that correspondence was handled so quickly and with such aplomb. Her own research assistant, Grant, was a support in turn, I’m sure, and deserves a nod here as well. I owe a debt of gratitude to those colleagues with whom I (seemingly endlessly) bashed out the details and challenges of thinking through weak theory, pensiero debole, critique and post-critique, weak modernism, affect, ethics, and responsibility. Paul K. Saint-Amour’s special issue on “Weak Theory, Weak Modernism” started it all, nudging me out of a rut to think about things anew. I would like to single out J. Allan Mitchell, whose prior work on post-critique was invaluable in my own process. Amy Tang, Graham Jensen, Christopher Douglas, Nicholas Bradley, Erin Ellerbeck, Kevin Tunnicliffe, Misao Dean, Joe Grossi, Marina Bettaglia, and basically anyone else who wandered too close to where I was sitting in the campus coffee shop (hello Munchie Bar!) while I was thinking through these issues. If I’ve missed your name here, it’s not because our conversations were not valuable, but rather due to the shortage of perspicacity mentioned above. David James and María del Pilar Blanco provided timely and unbelievably useful feedback on a draft of the introduction, and continue to viii Acknowledgments inspire my thinking in these lines (hello to William). I am grateful to them for taking the time to read, respond, and then chat online about it all. Last, but never least, I want to thank my family. They put up with it all, as usual, and kept me healthy and strong by insisting that we get outside every day, play on the ocean and in the woods, and take time to squabble and laugh every day. Stephanie, Kathleen, Adam: none of this matters without you. 1 Introduction: Responsible Reading Stephen Ross Seriously? Do we really need yet another <adjective> reading? We already have a superabundance of approaches—close reading, distant reading, middle reading, mere reading, surface reading, micro-sociological reading, reparative reading, paranoid reading—and that’s without the various critical orientations that themselves name characteristic methods: feminist reading, critical race reading, historicist reading (old and new), post-structuralist reading, psychoanalytic reading, Marxist reading and post-Marxist reading, phenomenological reading, and so on. We’re not exactly hurting for options, here. So, why introduce another option—yet another possible way of understanding what we do and should do as literary and cultural critics? What is to be gained here, aside from incremental career advancement and, perhaps, if all goes well, a brief moment in vogue before the Next Big Thing? The contributors to this volume and I thought about these questions at length before deciding it was worth it after all. In a series of conversations, both en groupe and in smaller sub-sets, we decided that it was worth the work to intervene in a debate that seemed to us to have missed something essential. In broad terms, that debate is between something called critique and something else called post-critique, and what seems to have gone missing in action is a middle ground, a principled approach that we are calling responsible reading. This term—responsible reading—picks up a thread that has been dropped by both contemporary practitioners of critique and theorists of post-critique. As I will outline below, what goes by the name of critique today has devolved into a purely destructive enterprise that ignores the drive toward justice embedded in critique as it develops from Kant through Marx to Nietzsche, Freud, the Frankfurt School, Foucault, Butler, and others. If the animating energy of critique is essentially dialectical, pushing for what Marx called the “ruthless critique of