Mere Reading: The Poetics of Wonder in Modern American Novels

Named a Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the Year Mere Reading argues for a return to the foundations of literary study established nearly a century ago. Following a recent period dominated by symptomatic analyses of fictional texts (new historicist, Marxist, feminist, identity-political), Lee Clark Mitchell joins a burgeoning neo-formalist movement in challenging readers to embrace a rationale for literary criticism that has too long been ignored—a neglect that corresponds, perhaps not coincidentally, to a flight from literature courses themselves. In close readings of six American novels spread over the past century—Willa Cather’s The Professor’s House, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping, Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and The Road, and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao—Mitchell traces a shifting strain of late modernist innovation that celebrates a species of magic and wonder, of aesthetic “bliss” (as Barthes and Nabokov both coincidentally described the experience) that dumbfounds the reader and compels a reassessment of interpretive assumptions. The novels included here aspire to being read slowly, so that sounds, rhythms, repetitions, rhymes, and other verbal features take on a heightened poetic status—in critic Barbara Johnson’s words, “the rigorous perversity and seductiveness of literary language”—thwarting pressures of plot that otherwise push us ineluctably forward. In each chapter, the return to “mere reading” becomes paradoxically a gesture that honors the intractability of fictional texts, their sheer irresolution, indeed the way in which their “literary” status rests on the play of irreconcilables that emerges from the verbal tensions we find ourselves first astonished by, then delighting in.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: Slowing Down 1. Possession in The Professor's House (1925) 2. Oscillation in Lolita (1955) 3. Hospitality in Housekeeping (1980) 4. Violence in Blood Meridian (1985) 5. Language in The Road (2006) 6. Belatedness in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007) Epilogue: Resisting Rules Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Lee Clark Mitchell is Holmes Professor of Belles-Lettres at Princeton University, USA. Among his previous publications are Witnesses to a Vanishing America: The Nineteenth-Century Response (1981), Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (1996), and Determined Fictions: American Literary Naturalism (1989).

Review :
Mitchell’s readings offer an accomplished and refreshing approach to literary works. In a career-long recoil from an early, maternally-induced, and short-lived brush with Evelyn Woods’ speed reading techniques, Lee Clark Mitchell has slackened the velocity, which is only to say tightened the grip, of his textual habits ever since—and the yield, as in two engrossing and indispensable chapters on Cormac McCarthy, is sampled here in readings that neither hydroplane across the surface of the literary page, nor approach it in programmatic slow-mo, but that let a deliberately wide variety of stylistic traction and density pace the ear of reading and test the very possibilities of attention. Unostentatiously termed 'mere' (as in 'simply') reading, the results are instead, in their deployment of seasoned gifts, an intense and exemplary case of sheer reading. Remember how it felt to read books when you were a child? The privacy, the concentration, the wonder? At a time when, given the challenges of new media, novels are called upon to be more merely useful than ever before, Lee Mitchell argues that prose ought to be read at least as closely as poetry—every turn of syntax or figure a source of inexhaustible revelation. Not by regressing but by pushing us forward into ever more gratifyingly attentive modes of reading, Mere Reading restores us to a more truly purposeful bliss. Mere Reading sparkles with quicksilver insights that wait around every bend of Lee Mitchell’s argument. He focuses less on what readers extract from literature and more on what they experience there. He is particularly attuned to the ways in which great stylists, from Willa Cather to Cormac McCarthy, make us, in Hemingway’s words, feel something more than we understand it. Mitchell continually reminds us that what we find in the best American fiction is far messier, fresher and more puzzling than most critics are willing to admit.