ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Symptomatic reading is one of the most pervasive critical methods in literary studies. Though many literary critics disagree with the premises on which Louis Althusser and Fredric Jameson based their influential theories of symptomatic reading, our disciplinary adherence to the procedures of symptomatic reading is so thorough as to go unremarked. In The Political Unconscious (1981), Jameson defines the symptom as that “whose cause is of another order of phenomenon from its effects” (26) and states that what is most “interesting” in a text is what it represses (49). The critic’s task is “diagnostic revelation of terms or nodal points implicit in the ideological system which have, however, remained unrealized in the surface of the text” (48). Interpretation “always presupposes, if not a conception of the unconscious itself, then at least some mechanism of mystification or repression in terms of which it would make sense to seek a latent meaning behind a manifest one, or to rewrite the surface categories of a text in the stronger language of a more fundamental interpretive code” (60). Symptomatic reading is a surface/depth model of interpretation that defines the text’s true meaning as what it does not say; the text’s gaps, silences, disruptions, and exclusions become clues to the text’s absent cause and determining structures. The critic must therefore reconstruct and reveal the “other scene” (of history, empire, sexuality, gender trouble) whose exclusion shapes the text. The purpose of this panel is to ask what other kinds of reading are possible, and what theories of interpretation and of the textual object those ways of reading imply.

Friday, March 24

Timothy Bewes, Brown University
“Reading with the Grain”
Simon Stern, Harvard Law School
“Legal Interpretation and Symptomatic Reading”
Matthew Jordan, Liverpool John Moores University
“Self-esteem: An Ideologeme?”
John Plotz, Brandeis University
“Tone and Joints: The Asymptomatic Henry James”

Saturday, March 25

Elaine Freedgood, New York University
“Reading Things”
Isabel Hofmeyr, University of Witwatersrand
“Reading in Heaven”
Margaret Cohen, Stanford University
“The Cunning Reader: Robinson Crusoe”
Seth Lerer, Stanford University
“Symptoms of Historicism and the Early Literary Text”

Sunday, March 26

Leah Price, Harvard University
“From Page to Paper”
Sharon Marcus, Columbia University
“Just Reading: Female Friendship and the Marriage Plot”
Oren Izenberg, The University of Chicago
“Yeats, for Example”
April Alliston, Princeton University: Response