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Chinese Studies

2019

Issue in Focus: A Series of Theoretical Studies on Reading

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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

A Close-Up: On U, The Reader Inoutside, Lee Kyoo May 2019

A Close-Up: On U, The Reader Inoutside, Lee Kyoo

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

Where, or who, is the "close reader" today in the age of imMEDIAted information overflow? This essay introduces a new figure, the "inoutside reader," focusing on its interstitially interactive ambiguity, its selfie-like sobjectivity (simultaneously subjective and objective). Seen and seeing through the "window," the inoutside reader that often counter-reads as well is called and calling 'you' out there and in here; neither exactly an insider nor definitely an outsider but "openly" invited as one of or those of you (vous) freely generated and liberally generalized as such, "U" in the net-work, this data-point-like transistor-reader, acts like a butterfly on the …


Microreading/Microwriting, Perloff Marjorie May 2019

Microreading/Microwriting, Perloff Marjorie

Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art

This essay, following upon Kyoo Lee's case for "counterreading", argues for what I call "micropoetics": a close reading that takes into account every phoneme, morpheme, and word of a poetic text and reads that text "verbivocovisually", to use James Joyce's term. I take as my model Marcel Duchamp's concept of the infrathin — the smallest possible distinction, whether temporal or spatial, between A and B. Similarity and analogy, I argue, have been overstressed and produced the problematic political discourse of the present with its clichés and vapid generalizations. Infrathin reading, on the other hand, establishes difference and the uniqueness of …