Intervention
Reception History as Surface Reading

I recently, albeit somewhat belatedly, read Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus's 2009 article "Surface Reading: An Introduction" which opens their special issue of Representations on "The Way We Read Now."

It may be that I am particularly susceptible to calls for new approaches in literary study in the aftermath of the MLA, but I find Best and Marcus's arguments provocative and compelling—and Marcus's 2007 book, Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England, makes a good case for the value of, as Best and Marcus put it, "modes of reading that attend to the surfaces of texts rather than plumb their depths" (1–2). Surface reading, for these scholars, is a counterpart to the symptomatic reading made popular by Jameson's The Political Unconscious; a counterpart in the sense that different modes of surface reading take different stances towards symptomatic reading's excavation of literature's repressed depths, which practioners of surface reading may critique or supplement (6).

Best and Marcus present a list of methodologies that they consider surface reading: "Surface as materiality" (e.g., history of the book); "Surface as the location of patterns that exist within and across texts" (e.g., narratology, genre criticism); "Surface as literal meaning." Reading through this list initially, I was surprised, and somewhat disappointed, not to find any mention of reception history—a mode of scholarship that I am at least trying to pursue in a new project on popular theological novels of the 1880s. And on further reflection, I feel convinced that the study of a text's reception really is a form of surface reading.

First of all, such study can privilege responses that antedate the development of symptomatic reading—including those that don't in any way anticipate it. Reception history of the kind that I hope to pursue seeks meaning not by digging into the depths of the text but in reconstructing the breadth of responses; as such, it makes possible the neutrality towards the literary object that Best and Marcus call for (18). Indeed, reception history might not even require that the scholar perform a "reading" of the text in question: James Secord's magisterial Victorian Sensation: The Extraordinary Publication, Reception, and Secret Authorship of Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), offers a comprehensive account of Victorian audiences who read, wrote about, and talked about the anonymously published Vestiges (which promulgated a theory of evolution from the origins of the cosmos to the development of human beings)—but Secord does not analyze the Vestiges independently of those responses.

Finally, I think that reception history has particular affinities with two of the surface-reading practices enumerated by Best and Marcus: genre criticism and book history, performed in Best and Marcus's issue ofRepresentations by, respectively, Margaret Cohen and Leah Price. In a later blog post, I plan to turn to Cohen's essay, and to reflect on the role that I think reception history can play in the method of genre criticism that she advocates.

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