Eye Movement, I. A. Richards, and the Limits of Embodied Reading

Poetics Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-501
Author(s):  
Benjamin Kossak
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Eye Movement ◽  
Experimental Psychology ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
New Criticism ◽  
Cognitive Sciences ◽  
Literary Experience

I. A. Richards is often remembered as a father of close reading and New Criticism, but his work was also deeply indebted to experimental psychology. That cross-disciplinary foundation introduces not only a reader but also a reading body. This article traces Richards’s continual invocation and deferral of the body, with particular attention to the eyes, which for Richards stand at the beginning and outside of the literary experience. The author argues that this deferral exists in Richards’s work and persists into embodied cognitive science’s research into eye movement in reading today because in both cases the movement is filtered down to what is meaningful for cognition or experience. Turning to recent literary criticism that engages with eye movement, the article suggests a path forward that uses the body of research built over 140 years in psychology and cognitive sciences to open new ground for criticism, disrupt our understanding of reading, and develop new bodily poetics.

Reading

Overwhelmed ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 19-56
Author(s):  
Maurice S. Lee
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Ralph Waldo Emerson ◽  
Samuel Taylor Coleridge ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Robinson Crusoe ◽  
Main Concept ◽  
Interpretive Practices ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Literary Experience

This chapter reviews some roots of modern literary criticism by showing how some romantics respond to textual excess by variously resisting and adopting informational strategies of skimming and excerpting. A main concept of the chapter is “deserted island reading,” an ideal of immersive literary experience formed in opposition to mass print. The fantasy of losing oneself in a book unfolds across the legacy of Robinson Crusoe, which projects an account of intensive hermeneutics from the eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries. Deserted island reading was especially attractive to romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a founding figure of modern close reading whose aesthetics and interpretive practices were formed under the pressures of information. But whereas Coleridge offers an agonistic example of the relationship between information and literature, Ralph Waldo Emerson presents a more modulated case in which the prophet of subjectivity, intuition, and motility that proves surprisingly open to informational modes of reading.

Outlaws and Misfits: The Identities of Modernist Criticism

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-356
Author(s):  
Ben Knights
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Industrial Capitalism ◽  
Emotional Maturity ◽  
English Departments ◽  
Emotional Autonomy ◽  
And Gender ◽  
Implicit Identity ◽  
The University ◽  
Cultural Positioning

The images of the writer as exile and outlaw were central to modernism's cultural positioning. As the Scrutiny circle's ‘literary criticism’ became the dominant way of reading in the University English departments and then in the grammar-schools, it took over these outsider images as models for the apprentice-critic. English pedagogy offered students not only an approach to texts, but an implicit identity and affective stance, which combined alert resistance to the pervasive effects of mechanised society with a rhetoric of emotional ‘maturity’, belied by a chilly judgementalism and gender anxiety. In exchanges over the close reading of intransigent, difficult texts, criticism's seminars sought a stimulus to develop the emotional autonomy of its participants against the ‘stock response’ promulgated by industrial capitalism. But refusal to reflect on its own method meant such pedagogy remained unconscious of the imitative pressures that its own reading was placing on its participants.

scholarly journals Development of a new method for assessing otolith function in mice using three-dimensional binocular analysis of the otolith-ocular reflex

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Shotaro Harada ◽  
Takao Imai ◽  
Yasumitsu Takimoto ◽  
Yumi Ohta ◽  
Takashi Sato ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movement ◽  
Three Dimensional ◽  
Vertical Component ◽  
Inertial Force ◽  
Linear Acceleration ◽  
The Body ◽  
Body Axis ◽  
Gravitational Acceleration ◽  
Ocular Reflex ◽  
Translational Movement

AbstractIn the interaural direction, translational linear acceleration is loaded during lateral translational movement and gravitational acceleration is loaded during lateral tilting movement. These two types of acceleration induce eye movements via two kinds of otolith-ocular reflexes to compensate for movement and maintain clear vision: horizontal eye movement during translational movement, and torsional eye movement (torsion) during tilting movement. Although the two types of acceleration cannot be discriminated, the two otolith-ocular reflexes can distinguish them effectively. In the current study, we tested whether lateral-eyed mice exhibit both of these otolith-ocular reflexes. In addition, we propose a new index for assessing the otolith-ocular reflex in mice. During lateral translational movement, mice did not show appropriate horizontal eye movement, but exhibited unnecessary vertical torsion-like eye movement that compensated for the angle between the body axis and gravito-inertial acceleration (GIA; i.e., the sum of gravity and inertial force due to movement) by interpreting GIA as gravity. Using the new index (amplitude of vertical component of eye movement)/(angle between body axis and GIA), the mouse otolith-ocular reflex can be assessed without determining whether the otolith-ocular reflex is induced during translational movement or during tilting movement.

Contesting Aristotle: Science, Theology and the Resurrection of the Body in Methodius of Olympus’ De Resurrectione and the Dialogue of Adamantius

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Dawn LaValle Norman
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Scientific Reasoning ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Scientific Authority ◽  
Early Christian ◽  
Parallel Text ◽  
Entire Text

Abstract The contest over the resurrection of the body used the scientific authority of Aristotle as ammunition on both sides. Past scholars have read Methodius of Olympus as displaying an anti-Aristotelian bias. In contrast, through close reading of the entire text with attention to characterization and development of argument, I prove that Methodius of Olympus’ dialogue the De Resurrectione utilizes Aristotelian biology as a morally neutral tool. To put this into higher relief, I compare Methodius’ dialogue with the anonymous Dialogue of Adamantius, a text directly dependent upon the Methodius’ De Resurrectione, but which rejects arguments based on scientific reasoning. Reading Methodius’ De Resurrectione with greater attention to the whole and putting it in the context of its nearest parallel text retells the traditional story of early Christian resistance to Aristotle. Methodius of Olympus’ characters, although they view scientific knowledge as subordinate to philosophy, see it as neutral in and of itself.

Les manifestes et les programmes littéraires en Afrique francophone subsaharienne : à propos de ‘l’invisibilité’ du corpus dans la critique littéraire

Literator ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Laude Ngadi M
Keyword(s):  
Literary Criticism ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Discourse ◽  
Literary Field ◽  
The West ◽  
Francophone Africa ◽  
French Speaking ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Geographical Space

Manifestos and literary programs in French-Speaking sub-Saharian of Africa: About ‘invisibility’ of the corpus in literary criticism. Despite an abundant production, the corpus of literary manifestos and programmes from sub-Saharan Francophone Africa is relatively invisible in literary criticism. With the exception of a few studies, critical works devoted to the programmatic works of writers are rare. This article proposes some hypotheses that can explain why the body of literature of authors’ ideas in this space is generally ‘invisible’. The approach of the literary field, applied to the sociology of scientific production, makes it possible to highlight three main causes for this invisibility: the importance of identity and cultural discourse, which makes it impossible to delimit the geographical space of writers from sub-Saharan Francophone Africa, whose production and reception are dominated by that of their colleagues from the West Indies and the Caribbean; the omnipresence of political and social discourse which takes precedence over poetic reflection; the metalanguage of the manifesto due to the fact that writers are also generally literary critics.

World Literature as a Speculative Literary Totality: Veselovsky, Auerbach, Said, and the Critical-Humanist Tradition

2021 ◽  
Vol 82 (2) ◽  
pp. 225-251
Author(s):  
Ben Etherington
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Distant Reading ◽  
Literary Practice ◽  
The Face ◽  
Humanist Tradition ◽  
Literary Experience

Abstract This essay revisits critical-humanist approaches to literary totality that have largely been sidelined during the recent revival of world literature studies. While there has been no shortage of defenses of close reading in the face of distant reading and other positivist approaches, this essay argues that it is precisely the hermeneutic attention to particular works that has allowed critical humanists to think about literary practice within the most encompassing purview. For those in this tradition, “world literature” can never be a stable object but is a speculative totality. The essay discusses three exemplary critical concepts that assume a speculative epistemology of literary totality: Alexander Veselovsky’s “historical poetics,” Erich Auerbach’s “Ansatzpunkt,” and Edward Said’s “contrapuntal reading.” Each, it is argued, is grounded in the distinctive qualities of literary experience, a claim for which Theodor Adorno’s account of speculative thinking serves as a basis.

The Justified Body: Hauerwas, Luther and the Christian Life

2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-78
Author(s):  
Justin Nickel
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Sacramental Theology ◽  
Christian Life ◽  
Stanley Hauerwas ◽  
The One ◽  
God's Grace ◽  
Ethical Significance ◽  
The Way

Stanley Hauerwas and others argue that Luther’s understanding of justification denies the theological and ethical significance of the body. Indeed, the inner, spiritual person is the one who experiences God’s grace in the gospel, while the outer, physical (read: bodily) person continues to live under law and therefore coercion and condemnation. While not denying that Luther can be so read, I argue that there is another side of Luther, one that recognizes the body’s importance for Christian life. I make this argument through a close reading of Luther’s reflections on Adam and Eve’s Fall in his Lectures on Genesis (1545) and the sacramental theology in ‘Against the Heavenly Prophets’. For this Luther, disconnection from our bodies is not a sign of justification but rather the sin from which justification saves us. Accordingly, justification results in a return to embodied creatureliness as the way we receive and live our justification.

scholarly journals “Celebration of the Body”: Marshall McLuhan and the Sensory Conceptualism of N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.

2015 ◽  
Vol 40 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam Lauder
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Art ◽  
The Body ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Marshall Mcluhan ◽  
Friedrich Kittler ◽  
Artist's Book ◽  
Livre D'artiste

Through a close reading of the 1976 artist’s book and exhibition catalogue “Celebration of the Body,” the N.E. Thing Co. Ltd.’s pioneering representations of the body’s “informationalization” are situated within the conceptual company’s creative reworking of Marshall McLuhan’s sensory media theories. In turn, McLuhan’s thought is located within a genealogy of physiological aesthetics that troubles conventional narratives of Conceptual art as a movement defined by its engagement with theories of cognition, language, and systems. Friedrich Kittler’s analysis of modernism as reflecting the decomposition of the body under a regime of psychophysical experimentation provides the framework for this article’s re-evaluation of the Toronto School theorist and his influence on the foundational Vancouver-based “critical company.”En utilisant une lecture attentive du livre d’artiste et catalogue d’exposition « Celebration of the Body », 1979, les représentations du corps numérisé de N.E. Thing Co. sont encadrées dans le remaniement créatif des théories médiatique de Marshall McLuhan entreprit par la compagnie.  À leurs tours, les pensées de McLuhan sont placées dans une généalogie d’esthétique physiologique qui dérange les récits conventionnels de l’art conceptuel comme étant un mouvement défini par son engagement avec les théories de la cognition et du langage. L’analyse de Friedrich Kittler de modernisme comme réflexion de la décomposition du corps effectuée par des expériences psychophysique fournit le cadre pour cette réévaluation du théoricien de l’École de Toronto et son impact sur la « compagnie critique » fondatrice de Vancouver.

‘Till the whisper…You know…When you can't hear the words’: Narrated Memory and the ‘Fragmented’ Body in Samuel Beckett's Late Drama

2021 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-155
Author(s):  
Michelle Charalambous
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
The Body ◽  
Narrative Form ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Late Works

Samuel Beckett's interest in the experience of memory and the central role the body plays in the re-experience of the past has been most evident since the time he composed Krapp's Last Tape (1958), one of his most famous memory plays where the body can actually ‘touch’ its voice of memory. In this context, the present article provides a close reading of two of Beckett's late works for the theatre, namely That Time (1976) and Ohio Impromptu (1981), where the author once again addresses the relationship between the body and memory. Unlike his earlier drama, however, in That Time and Ohio Impromptu Beckett creates a ‘distance’, as it were, between memory and the body on stage by presenting the former as a narrative and by reducing the latter to an isolated part or by restricting it to limited movements. Looking closely at this ‘distance’ in these late plays, the article underlines that the body does not lose its authority or remains passive in its re-experience of the past. Rather – the article argues – the body essentially plays a determining role in these stripped-down forms as is shown in its ability to ‘interrupt’ and somatically punctuate the fixity of the narrative form memory takes in these works.

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