| This is a work about the specific, technical means by which literary studies achieves its ideological and institutional purposes and complicities. As such, it is also about the theoretical knowledge that must be invented and continually revised for literary studies to maintain its status as a discipline. For in this way literary studies contributes to the automation of the modern interpellative process whereby subjects learn to invent themselves and their own subjection. My topic is the way the practitioners of literary studies discipline themselves and others.;Specifically, I propose critical reading as the main technology and means of production that marks the field of literary studies, and, increasingly, those social sciences which have turned to a study of the "social text." Literary studies, though, as the original institutionalization of reading, the most private bourgeois space, enacts a particularly powerful yet slippery modern technology of the self. And while many works discuss the methodology of social construction, the politics of academic disciplines, and the efficacy of poststructuralism, an extended inquiry into the means by which critical reading itself--as a methodology--engenders categories, subject positions, and institutions does not exist.;This work fills the gap through an extensive treatment of the social technology of reading. I trace the legacy of modern critical reading that inheres in 20th century cultural studies. While 20th century cultural studies claims a departure from the past in its examination of the social text, the critical legacy of reading that it inherited from an earlier modernity is responsible for both the mechanism of reformatory purchase and the means of revolutionary forgetting that mark current critical practice.;Yet the discipline--and by extension, the practicing literary intellectual--does not bear a necessary or singular relationship to the politics of the modern state. In fact, by specifying the technology by which literary studies performs its work and constitutes it subjects, I display the contingent and even fragile ways in which the alliances between the discipline and the state are constructed and maintained. My final interest is in the disarticulation of this ideological technology from literary studies. |
