Spatial Reading

Evaluative Frameworks and the Making of Literary Authority
dc.bibliographicCitation.firstPage150
dc.bibliographicCitation.issue2
dc.bibliographicCitation.lastPage176
dc.bibliographicCitation.volume9
dc.contributor.affiliationLeypoldt, Günter; Heidelberg Center for American Studies, American Literature, University of Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
dc.contributor.authorLeypoldt, Günter
dc.date.accessioned2023-07-27T15:58:23Z
dc.date.available2023-07-27T15:58:23Z
dc.date.issued2020
dc.date.updated2023-05-16T04:31:01Z
dc.description.abstractAbstract 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.doi10.1057/s41290-020-00107-w
dc.identifier.urihttp://resolver.sub.uni-goettingen.de/purl?fidaac-11858/2951
dc.language.isoen
dc.relation.issn2049-7113
dc.relation.journalAmerican Journal of Cultural Sociology
dc.rightsL::CC BY 4.0
dc.rights.urihttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
dc.subject.ddcddc:800
dc.subject.fieldliterarystudies
dc.titleSpatial Reading
dc.title.alternativeEvaluative Frameworks and the Making of Literary Authority
dc.typearticle
dc.type.versionpublishedVersion
dspace.entity.typePublication
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