Comparing Sedgwick's Paranoid Reading And Reparative Reading

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Reparative reading questions the practical imperative of historisation and contextualisation within the hermeneutics of suspicion, and points towards a less-stable, oscillating epistemology. Eve Sedgwick’s definition of reparative reading in Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading attempts to account for the oscillatory linguistic meanings and identities that transcend realistic temporality, relying on a self-reflexive mode of criticism as a means of tracing linguistic development. However, its strong argument against the influence of literary canon is also its weakness, as it appears to reject the paranoid influence of canonical, philosophical texts in modern literary practices, including her own. As such, Alexander Veselovsky’s strand of …show more content…

The ‘depressive state’ is a position that “inaugurates ethical possibility” (137) to epistemology. Paranoid reading relies on knowledge grounded by New Historicism in order to support its critical views on historical narrative, accepting that its ethical responsibility towards Lost Time is to always remain critical of present narratives. This reading blames its negative affect on history, and is not critical of the pessimism it perpetuates, while at the same time inflicting the temporally-imperative always onto the technique. Sedgwick remains critical of a reliance on historical fact in reading practices, but does not disavow them completely. She …show more content…

Her endorsement of both a self-critical and more holistic form of criticism on epistemology requires ethical imperatives that paranoid reading seems to either disregard or utilise in order to further its own cynical reading of texts. Even more so, Marx’s assumption on revolutionary movements against tradition materialises in reparative reading in “timidly conjur[ing] up the spirits of the past” (36). Reparative reading requires past trauma, as does paranoid reading, in identifying its positive affects, but it is ignorant in disavowing the other side of the good/bad dichotomy. This is particularly necessary when accounting for the various histories and traumas experienced on a global scale. While her argument on reparative reading indicates that it must be a weak and unstable theory, she inevitably reverts back to a strong argument that focuses on the negative, rather than the positive, affects of the hermeneutics of

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