Response 31: "The New Modesty In Literary Criticism"

I really liked the relation of critical theory to real life situations, such as “scholars aimed to explode the foundations of Western metaphysics, foment a revolution of the sign, overturn gender hierarchies, and fight the class struggle” (1). I don’t know if I would agree that there has been “a decline in the social prestige of literary criticism” just because now there are different critical methods of looking at the text (2).  

There is an importance of close reading, as mentioned in page 3, I am in agreement with the statement that it can be “corrosive, similar to paranoia” where a critic is always looking for the hidden term or meaning instead of just enjoying reading the text (3).

I also am in favor of Moretti’s idea of “‘distant reading’” to “track the birth and trajectory of the novel around the world” instead of only reading a miniscule sample of literary texts from a relatively narrow part of the world” (4). This method also reminds me of deconstruction in a way because of this idea to defamiliarize oneself with the kind of literature they are used to reading.

I also liked Rorti’s goal “to not attain absolute truth, a false ideal, but better descriptions of the world”, partly because sometimes in literature, characters motives and actions are ambiguous and sometimes that may be frustrating but it also leads to the possibility of different interpretations (5). The idea of discovering the world through literature also complements Moretti’s idea of distant reading.