Spatial reading: evaluative frameworks and the making of literary authority

This essay uses Charles Taylor’s theory of evaluative frameworks to solve a problem that has challenged literary theory and historiography for some time: how do we square the tension between the private uses and the public authority of reading? Taylor’s notion of strong value brings out literature’s...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Leypoldt, Günter (Author)
Format: Article (Journal)
Language:English
Published: 2021
In: American journal of cultural sociology
Year: 2021, Volume: 9, Issue: 2, Pages: 150-176
ISSN:2049-7121
DOI:10.1057/s41290-020-00107-w
Online Access:Verlag, kostenfrei, Volltext: https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-020-00107-w
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Author Notes:Günter Leypoldt
Description
Summary:This essay uses Charles Taylor’s theory of evaluative frameworks to solve a problem that has challenged literary theory and historiography for some time: how do we square the tension between the private uses and the public authority of reading? Taylor’s notion of strong value brings out literature’s often-overlooked similarities with religious-moral or civil-sacred domains, while his concept of weak value helps us to understand more mundane moods of purpose-rational reading. Combining the concept of evaluative frameworks with a socio-institutional account of literary authority, this essay sketches an alternative history of reading, with a focus on the shifting authority of “spatial reading” (defined as attention to formal and intertextual depth). Looking at developments from the 1780s to the present, I will show how the distinction between spatial and flat reading emerges in the eighteenth century, is transformed by the modernist institutionalization of high- and middlebrow notions of spatial form, and continues to provoke tensions between the civil sphere and the literary-artistic field (as the recent scandal around Peter Handke’s Nobel Prize attests).
Item Description:Published online: 28 July 2020
Gesehen am 04.10.2021
Physical Description:Online Resource
ISSN:2049-7121
DOI:10.1057/s41290-020-00107-w