Reading Unruly: Interpretation and Its Ethical Demands

Creatively hesitating between incommensurable demands (to interpret but not to translate back into familiar terms), ethical readers are invited to cultivate an appreciation for the unruly, to curb the desire for hermeneutic mastery without simultaneously renouncing meaning or the interpretive endeavor as such. Examining French texts from Montaigneês sixteenth-century Essays to Diderotês fictional dialogue Rameauês Nephew and Baudelaireês prose poems The Spleen of Paris, to the more recent works of Jean-Paul Sartreês Nausea, Alain Robbe-Grilletês Jealousy, and Marguerite Durasês The Ravishing of Lol Stein, Reading Unruly demonstrates that in such an approach to literature and theory, reading itself becomes a desire for more, an ethical and aesthetic desire to prolong rather than to arrest the act of interpretation.

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