Book | Chapter

In order to really know a literary text, or a loved person, one must risk a sustained raptnesss of attention that transgresses the boundaries of the moderate and seemly, of common sense. This chapter's principal aims, therefore, are twofold. The first is to rethink and rehabilitate two forms of intensive scrutiny that regularly draw skepticism and even scorn: what is called "overreading" in literary criticism, and what is termed "infatuation" in romantic and affectional life. In both spheres, I argue, a particular kind of attention, even hyperattentiveness, enables forms of knowing both valuable and legitimate (that is, objective). The sec- ond, related aim is to question traditional allegiance to the concepts of wholeness, unity, and generality in literary criticism — not in order to reject them, but to liberate the minute attention to parts that is inhibited by what Adorno calls "this passing-on and being unable to linger, this tacit assent to the primacy of the general over the particular."¹1 explore and advocate a conscious, New Formalist fetishizing of parts — of textual elements — to a point at which the whole they constitute recedes almost to vanishing, or is bracketed almost to the point of annihilation. Such an effort does not represent an ultimate denigration of textual or other artistic wholes, but it enables a realization of individual elements that would otherwise be impossible — a realization that can redeem both the charge of critical overreading and that of romantic infatuation.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137362599_5

Full citation: