Spatial Reading
Evaluative Frameworks and the Making of Literary Authority
| dc.bibliographicCitation.firstPage | 150 | |
| dc.bibliographicCitation.issue | 2 | |
| dc.bibliographicCitation.lastPage | 176 | |
| dc.bibliographicCitation.volume | 9 | |
| dc.contributor.affiliation | Leypoldt, Günter; Heidelberg Center for American Studies, American Literature, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany | |
| dc.contributor.author | Leypoldt, Günter | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2023-07-27T15:58:23Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2023-07-27T15:58:23Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2020 | |
| dc.date.updated | 2023-05-16T04:31:01Z | |
| dc.description.abstract | Abstract 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). | en |
| dc.identifier.doi | 10.1057/s41290-020-00107-w | |
| dc.identifier.uri | http://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?fidaac-11858/2951 | |
| dc.language.iso | en | |
| dc.relation.issn | 2049-7113 | |
| dc.relation.journal | American Journal of Cultural Sociology | |
| dc.rights | L::CC BY 4.0 | |
| dc.rights.uri | https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ | |
| dc.subject.ddc | ddc:800 | |
| dc.subject.field | literarystudies | |
| dc.title | Spatial Reading | |
| dc.title.alternative | Evaluative Frameworks and the Making of Literary Authority | |
| dc.type | article | |
| dc.type.version | publishedVersion | |
| dspace.entity.type | Publication |