| This dissertation is a theoretical essay on reading literature that is at the same time an exercise in reading. It does not seek to provide a theory of reading that describes and develops the different phases and parts of the reading process and the relative value and meaning of the different instances relevant for that process, that is, a theory of reading in the sense in which that theory was conceived from the 1960s to the 1980s or so. Rather, it approaches reading as a practice that already contains its own theory that can then be extracted from it and developed only by reading. As a consequence, the dissertation seeks both to say (theoretically) what kind of a relation reading is through particular readings and to show what reading is by providing one example of a singular itinerary of reading, which consists of the chapters that make up the dissertation. The main theoretical point the dissertation makes about reading is that reading is a porous and sedimented process based on figuration, which prevents it from ever reaching completion and thus necessitates a repetition of reading, a return (with a difference) to the site of reading. This figuration, the figural in the relation of reading, is what is called the third.;Each chapter of the dissertation performs such a return to the site of reading that in this itinerary is primarily concerned with the question of identity and otherness, which is also the identity and otherness of reading and of the reader. The introductory chapter describes the approach and the main concepts used in the study. The first chapter addresses the configuration of sexual identity in three different writers---Nietzsche, Strindberg, and Sodergran---from the late 19th and the early 20 th centuries and also gives two possible names for the third that characterizes both the sexual and the reading relation: the queer and the neuter. The second chapter addresses the writing of history and historical change particularly in relation to modernism and postmodernism by discussing the nature of objects in Baudrillard's theory of simulation and in poetry. The third chapter considers the interconnections between intertextuality, otherness, and repetition and the consequences of these concepts for the poetics and politics of reading through a reading of Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and Coetzee's Foe. The fourth chapter relates the question of otherness to the question of identity by considering the figure of the border in texts of Gloria Anzaldua and Lyn Hejinian. The fifth and final chapter then returns to the question of the politics of reading by considering the way in which Slavoj Zizek reads or uses other texts in constructing his theory of ideology. |
