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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| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Article (Journal) |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
2021
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| 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 |
| 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). |
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| 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 |