Shimmering Description and Descriptive Criticism

Bibliographic Data

ID4271815
AuthorsHeather Houser (0000-0003-2840-3859, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume51
Issue1
Pages1-22
Publication date2020-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueNew Literary History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0028-6087 • E-ISSN: 1080-661X
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/nlh.2020.0000
OpenAlexW3015678534
LanguageEN
Citations received6

What can studying novelistic description teach us about the allure of modes of reading falling within the descriptive turn, specifically, surface reading, new materialist ecocriticism, and computational analysis? This article's analysis of the paradoxes of description—specifically, its ability to evoke while revoking—in McCarthy's Blood Meridian (1985), Sinha's Animal's People (2007), and Smith's White Teeth (2000) explains an apparent tension between data and materiality in these trending literary critical approaches. It details the evoke-revoke paradox of description and offers it as an analytic for understanding the ontological status of the reader and more-than-human things in methods captured by the descriptive turn. Ultimately, it shows how literary form and critical practices together give us traction on the demands fiction makes on readers and how the ascendancy of Web 2.0 mirrors those demands through its pull between materiality and data

Aesthetics · Art · Close reading · Criticism · Epistemology · Linguistics · Literary criticism · Literature · Materialism · Materiality (auditing) · Reading (process) · Sociology · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Gothic Literature and Media Analysis · Modern American Literature Studies · Philosophy

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