Letting Ourselves Down

Understanding is the crux of the matter with Glyph by Percival Everett. Ralph, a mute infant who reads and writes with the appetite of a philosopher, can't be figured out by the adults who very much want to understand him, much as Glyph , both fluent in and critical of what our intake of twentieth-century French theory hath wrought, won't be figured out by those-critics-who've tasked ourselves with understanding the novel. Glyph therefore breeds a certain chagrin for how we read. This essay reads with Everett's novel to think about how to think about this problem of reading as a problem for reading that may require taking the baby at his words

Sociology · Contemporary Cultural and Social Studies · Sound Studies and Aurality · Thomas Hardy Literature Studies