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Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings - in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts - this volume proposes a criticalintervention into the practice of reading itself.
List of contents
1. Introduction - Kai Merten (Erfurt, Germany)
PART I: Diffractive Reading: Groundwork
2. On the Politics of Diffractive Reading - Birgit M. Kaiser
3. Heraclitus's speculative onto-story: Impossible appointments and the importance of the encounter - Max Walther
4. Decoherent Reading: On the Constitutive Exclusions of Diffractive Reading - Stacey Moran
5. Reading speculative horror readings diffractively - Peter Schuck
PART II: Diffracting Literature: Diffractions of the World-Text-Reader Entanglement
6. Poem, Epic, and Epoch: A Diffractive Reading of William Carlos Williams's Paterson and Georg Lukács's Theory of the Novel in the Age of New Materialism - Brendan Johnston
7. Sauron's Sliding Door: The Diffraction of Mythological and Intimate 'Evil' in Tolkien - Bo Kampmann Walther
8. Sensing I and Eyes in Ali Smith's How to Be Both - Daniela Keller
9. Practices of Entanglement: UnReading the Genre in China Miéville'sThe Scar - Agnieszka Kotwasi¿ska
10. The Entanglements of Harry Burden: A Diffractive Reading of Siri Hustvedt - Matthias Stephan
11. Surfacing: A diffractive reading experiment with books and houses in Walter Benjamin's Ich packe meine Bibliothek aus and Carlos María Domínguez' Casa de papel - Annina Klappert
PART III: Diffracting (in) Music, Visual and Digital Media
12. Diffractive Aesthetics & Holographic Literacies: Transcoding the Gigaton Volume Detector [A Diffracted Photo-Essay] - Jol Thoms
13. Diffracting Maternal and Female Midlife Sexual Assemblages in Postfeminist Popular Culture - Susan Yi Sencindiver
14. Ontoflecting Through U2 - Nathan D. Frank
15. Reprogramming Rhetoric: Toward a Diffractive Epistemology of Computer Composition - Sean McCullough
About the author
Kai Merten is professor of British literature at the University of Erfurt. His main research and teaching interests are British literature and culture from various medial, material and global perspectives. He is the founder of the Erfurt Network on New Materialism (ENNM) and has initiated cooperations in the field of New Materialist methodologies with similar research groups in Erfurt (Max-Weber-Kolleg), Weimar, Utrecht, Berlin, Aarhus, Odense, Kiel and Warsaw.
Summary
Putting the New Materialist figure of diffraction to use in a set of readings – in which cultural texts are materially read against their contents and their themes, against their readers or against other texts – this volume proposes a critical intervention into the practice of reading itself.
