As readers will have intuited, the articles which have gathered here—one poem, five essays, and one drabble1—share a common concern with non-normative ways of looking. They express this concern either by consciously practicing analysis conducted through alternative perspectives, or by considering what it means to view differently, or indeed by doing both. Issue 7’s articles, in other words, practice literary and cultural criticism predicated on acts of “re-vision”—and, yet, not just any act of re-vision but a specifically dialogical re-visioning. The idea so named elaborates Lune Loh’s interpretation, in this issue, of Adrienne Rich’s exposition upon “the act of looking back, of seeing with fresh eyes, of entering an old text from a new critical direction” (qtd. in Loh 8) for the purposes of challenging and even queering acts of (hetero)normative reading. For instance, Kevin Khoe’s “The Jew Does Have Eyes: A Modern Reading of the Discriminated Other in The Merchant of Venice” (pp. 2-6) performs an intelligently anachronistic re-reading of Shakespeare’s Merchant after the Jewish Holocaust (1941–1945). Meanwhile Viola Chee’s “The Abstract within the Concrete: Continuously Shifting Perspectives in Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Cézanne’s Ports’” (pp.16-21) presents a complex transmedial analysis, of Paul Cézanne’s The Gulf of Marseilles Seen from L’Estaque (1885), through Ginsberg’s (1950) ekphrastic poeticisation of the painting, and vice versa, before then re-viewing both works of art counterpoised against the actual town of L’Estaque such that all three “artefacts” constitute a coherent affective and geospatial text. In the first place, these and all other articles in Issue 7 foreground the perspectival alterity that in-forms criticism in general; they remind us that in constructing criticism we necessarily undertake one or, more likely, many acts of re-vision—and that we do so even if not in the “explicit” fashion of Loh, Khoe, Chee, or any of this issue’s other contributors.

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It is important to note that these critically productive acts of re-vision consistently abstain from or at least side-step, however comfortably or narrowly, becoming more nefarious acts of revision. The concepts are, after all, distinguished but by the few degrees of difference consisting in that single hyphen. Despite or perhaps even because criticism advocates for the gainful paradigmatic shift enjoined by re-vision, it risks succumbing to the seemingly human impulse to change and, moreover, to correct—to revise—a text in the course of reading and developing an understanding of it. Loh’s viewing of Sciamma’s film through theoretical lenses, Khoe’s anachronism, and Chee’s tripartite analysis could easily have committed the intellectually imperious readings-into, the imposition of meaning, risked by all criticism but especially by the sort which is founded in deliberate recontextualisation. Yet they do not, because their exercises in re-vision remain motivated by openness.

 

What these and Issue 7’s other articles do do is make apparent the razor-thin difference, between the sort of criticism which promotes a particular exegesis, and the sort rather driven by the desire to elucidate. Whereas the former seeks to extract meaning and guide interpretation, the latter seeks to arrive at clarity; whereas the former labours to take out of the text in order to make specific meaning of it, the latter makes the effort to read and see (and listen) more of the text and its potential meanings. Put otherwise and more concisely, the difference here is between interrogation and, as earlier mentioned, dialogue. 

 

In metacritical terms, Issue 7’s articles together embody the attempt to depart from what Rita Felski has termed a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (276) in “Suspicious Minds” (2011), a criticism of literary criticism. Felski argues the symmetry between the work of the critic and that of the criminal justice system by pointing out that the former’s approach to the text is comparable to the accusing gaze of the detective or criminal prosecutor, for which reason critical reading all too often behaves as if suspecting texts of perjury in particular. Within this framework, critics are consequently committed to “identifying acts of subterfuge for which texts are [to be] held accountable” and for which they must be brought to justice (224). Accordingly “[t]he critic, like the detective, refuses to take surface meanings at face value; the text, like the criminal suspect, must be scrutinized, interrogated, and made to yield its hidden secrets,” and “[w]hile ordinary readers . . . are easily deceived by the evidence of their eyes, the . . . critic or detective presses below distracting surfaces to the deeper meaning of signs” (224). Within this framework, then, re-vision is equivalent to revision, for the punitive drive behind criticism necessarily entails subsequent rehabilitation—that is, the criminally elusive text must be reformed, its deceitful nature corrected, for it to be of value to (normative) culture and society. Criticism which seeks to make meaning of texts, to make texts mean something, seeks in turn to discipline them.

 

In fact, Felski’s criticism of criticism, by analysing the sociocultural and psychological mechanics behind criticism’s innate suspiciousness, nuances and recalls the work of a whole range of scholars, especially from the later twentieth century, and especially following Barthesian and Derridean thought. Naturally, Susan Sontag’s polemical Against Interpretation (1966)—an undergraduate favourite—comes to mind. So does Wolfgang Iser’s similarly valenced denouncement, in The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (1978), of the “archaeological (‘digging for meaning’) approach” which had already been deemed commonplace but deficient at the time of his writing (5). Where Sontag urges against critical interpretation, “the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone” in its “capacity to make us nervous,” because “[b]y reducing the work of art to its content and then interpreting that, one tames the work of art . . . makes art manageable, conformable” (5), Iser denounces particular forms of interpretation that necessitate excavation:

If the critic’s revelation of the meaning is a loss to the author—as stated at the beginning of the book—then meaning must be a thing which can be subtracted from the work. And if this meaning, as the very heart of the work, can be lifted out of the text, then the work is used up—through interpretation, literature is turned into an item for consumption. This is fatal not only for the text but also for literary criticism, for what can be the function of interpretation if its sole achievement is to extract the meaning and leave behind an empty shell? (4-5)

To paraphrase both Sontag and Iser, then, criticism ought to avoid interrogative and thus disciplinary critical modes. The point that these and other scholars make is that criticism, to rephrase an idea from earlier in this essay, must avoid the sort of critical re-visioning that entails revision, whatsoever form the latter may take. From the perspective of principled scholarship, a text exists first and foremost as itself; texts are neither materials intended for injudicious re-shaping nor as mere commodities, as it were, to be evacuated of their contents, swallowed whole. 

 

But haunting every description of what one should not do is the often more difficult question of what one can do instead. Felski’s partial answer, in a later work, The Limits of Critique (2015), emphasises the conscious effort that critics ought to make to close the gap between themselves and the texts they study—a gap which is, in the first place, germane to the critical project. Felski advocates for a critical “neophenomenology—a sustained attention to the sheer range and complexity of aesthetic experience, including moments of recognition, enchantment, shock and knowledge”—intended to “decrease rather than . . . increase [critical] distance,” and thus encourage criticism that would “reflect on—rather than condescend to—the uses of literature in everyday life” (191-92). And this seems precisely to be the principle that Issue 7’s articles observe in performing their respective criticisms. Instead of interrogating, suspecting, reducing, taming, managing, excavating, extracting from, and/or consuming their cultural and literary texts, Issue 7’s articles, as mentioned, dialogue with them—and do so specifically by treating them as cultural and literary subjects.

 

What does it mean to dialogue with a text, whether a piece of literature—as we typically understand “text”—or a work (of art) in general? More importantly, how does one approach the text as a subject? In the first place, the heretofore mentioned term “dialogical re-visioning” and the concept of dialogue in general I derive from art historian Grant Kester’s (2005) exposition of dialogical aesthetics as an analytical framework to be applied in the criticism of art. This is to “conceive of the relationship between the viewer and the work of art . . . as a decentering, a movement outside self (and self-interest) through dialogue extended over time” (Kester 84-85). As an aesthetic philosophy, it is, in brief, to recognise that the artistic encounter is structured by a bi- or multi-directional intersubjective relationality between one or many human viewing/reading subject/s and the artwork regardless of its form.2 As opposed to a (conventional) human-first model of the artistic encounter, which privileges the viewing/reading subject’s ability to make sense of and “understand the work of art only as the product of a given cultural and historical context . . . and a specific discursive system that construct [sic] the category of ‘art’ as a repository for values” (89), a dialogical model of the artistic encounter suggests that such encounters are mutual—that is, the artwork encounters the viewing/reading subject at the same time the encounter in the opposite direction takes place. The viewing/reading of art, in this sense, might be understood as a conversation, wherein the artwork—as an object of, or at least codified with, potential knowledge—possesses what numerous postmodern scholars, including Donna Haraway (1988), have described as a semblance of agency (591-96). Such as between individuals, this conversation is shot through with “the sciences and politics of interpretation, translation, stuttering, and the partly understood” because either party enters into the encounter with their/its own “agenda” (589). In fact, we might go so far as to argue that this idea of a dialogical aesthetics does not merely suggest another way in which to understand the artistic encounter, but foregrounds the reality that artistic encounters are in themselves necessarily conversations.

 

If these are only the basics, as it were, the notion of dialogical re-visioning as a method of criticism still requires a little more elaboration. I borrow my vocabulary from Kester and parts of my premise from Haraway, but I wish to direct the reader to a different scholar, W. J. T. Mitchell, whose significant work on media, visual culture, and iconology has been collected in a volume the title of which is most pertinent to the present discussion: What do Pictures Want? (2005). In what is arguably his most recognisable essay, originally published in 1996 and which gives the 2005 collection its title, Mitchell invites readers to “[suspend] their disbelief in” the “bizarre, perhaps even objectionable question” (28), arguing 

pictures are things that have been marked with all the stigmata of personhood and animation: they exhibit both physical and virtual bodies; they speak to us, sometimes literally, sometimes figuratively; or they look back at us silently across ‘a gulf unabridged by language.’ They present not just a surface but a face that faces the beholder. (30, emphasis original)

Contra Marx and Freud, as Mitchell argues, who “treat the personified, subjectified, animated object with deep suspicion, subjective their respective fetishes to iconoclastic critique” (30), and following Levinas, as one might infer, who determines that the face and (presumably) any suggestion of it implies some degree of subjective agency, Mitchell’s premise short-circuits the clinically semiotic approach to interpreting pictures. Instead, we are “stuck with our magical, premodern attitudes toward objects, especially pictures, and our task is not to overcome these attitudes but to understand them, to work through their symptomatology” (30).

 

Little contortion is needed for Mitchell’s question and thus his approach to apply to literary texts; it could be but a simple matter of changing the wording of the question: “What do texts want?”—or, if one prefers, “What do texts want to mean?” Perhaps it may even be that this version of the question is easier to answer, or at least less perplexing, given the linguistic nature of the literary text. (Or does language complicate things even more?) Even if it is not quite simply a matter of redirecting the inquiry, texts are, at any rate, filled with personae and animate characters where pictures are “marked with . . . personhood and animation”; texts inhabit physical spaces and evoke virtual ones where pictures “exhibit both physical and virtual bodies”; texts most certainly “speak to us, sometimes literally, [usually] figuratively”; texts, like pictures, as wholly social and cultural artefacts “present not just a surface but [faces] that [face] the beholder” (30). Therefore, materialist and new materialist theories notwithstanding, to adopt a dialogical approach to literary criticism is to acknowledge and furthermore respect the agency, or agencies, embodied by each of the text at hand.

 

It is important to conclude by saying that no scholar or group of them—nor indeed any of Margins’s editors or contributors—can prescribe exactly how to put the dialogical approach into practice. But for an idea of it, however preliminary, the reader need only return to any one of the present issue’s seven articles. Each of these pieces of writing engages with their respective texts—whether it is the female body, a Shakespearan play, a period film, a town and a painting and an ekphrastic interpretation of them both, a metapoem about World War II and the war itself, two critical oeuvres which intersect in the concept of food, or self-awareness and one’s relative existence to the world—with methods that exceed exegesis and surpass the interpretation of meaning. They engage their respective texts in conversation by asking questions, not of their texts but directed to them; not merely about what their texts mean, but about what they want and what they might want to mean. This willingness to engage texts in conversation, the wherewithal to stop criticism short of reading-into, the egalitarian practice of dialogue, expound the same values that compelled Margins’s Issue 7 editorial team to eschew theme and title, and that prescribed my writing of an afterword rather than an introduction; this ethics of critical reading is that which consists in the hyphen that separates re-vision from revision. What more could criticism want?