Spatial reading

• Verfasst von: Leypoldt, Günter [VerfasserIn]
• Titel: Spatial reading
• Titelzusatz: evaluative frameworks and the making of literary authority
• Verf.angabe: Günter Leypoldt
• Jahr: 2021
• Umfang: 27 S.
• Fussnoten: Published online: 28 July 2020 ; Gesehen am 04.10.2021
• Titel Quelle: Enthalten in: American journal of cultural sociology
• Ort Quelle: Basingstoke, Hampshire : Palgrave Macmillan, 2013
• Jahr Quelle: 2021
• Band/Heft Quelle: 9(2021), 2, Seite 150-176
• ISSN Quelle: 2049-7121
• DOI: doi:10.1057/s41290-020-00107-w
• Datenträger: Online-Ressource
• Sprache: eng
• K10plus-PPN: 1772275034
• K10plus-PPN:
  Universitätsbibliothek
• Lokale URL UB: Zum Volltext

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).