Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading

[Dave Monroe]

>From Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, "Paranoid Reading and
Reparative Reading," Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in
Fiction, ed. E.K. Sedgwick (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1997)
...

"To recognize in paranoia a distinctively rigid
relation to temporality, at once anticipatory and
retroactive, averse above all to surprise, is also to
glimpse the lineaments of other possibilities....  To
read from a reparative position is to surrender the
knowing, anxious, paranoid determination that no
horror, however apparently unthinkable, shall ever
come to the reader as new....  Because there can be
terrible surprises, however, there can also be good
ones....  Because [the reparative reader] has room to
realize that the future may be different from the
present, it is also possible for her to enetrtain such
profoundly relieving, ethically crucial possibilities
as that the past, in turn, could have happened
differently from the way it actually did."

... as cited in Mary Baine Campbell, Wonder and
Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1999), p. 2 ...

http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornellpress/cup3_catalog.taf?_function=detail&Title_ID=3229&_UserReference=DC1CF35BE9347732C26E7857

Okay, now to catch up +/- 150 messages I haven't been
able to get to these past few days ...

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