Surface Reading Paper as Feminist Bibliography

Abstract

This article is forthcoming in a special issue of Criticism entitled 'Critical Bibliography and the Material Text', edited by Kate Ozment and Lisa Maruca]. Surface-Reading Paper as Feminist BibliographyHow can we read paper? What possibilities does such an activity afford? Are we to apply literary skills of analysis to interrogate a material surface, or to consider how paper's physical affordances shape rhetorical meaning? To "read" paper can mean both to consider the bibliographical evidence of its production, circulation, and use, and to analyze how paper is deployed as a rhetorical trope laden with "imaginative power." 1 Paper is a physical substance which, despite its generative capacity as a writing surface, exists in three dimensions. As Jonathan Senchyne notes, it is helpful to think of paper in layers. Senchyne categorizes these as the material (paper is made up of cellulose fibers meshed together), the representational (words and images on paper invite interpretation), and the "presence layer" (the traces of individuals who have contributed to its making). 2 I extend these categories to include the temporal palimpsest of paper's production (a sense that paper piles moments of its own biography upon one another), and the cumulative semiotics of that history (the hidden or less legible meanings which paper affords to text). Paper is layered in both a physical and a figurative sense; it demands both intellectual and haptic engagement from its readers. Those two modes of attending to paper collide when we attend to "material texts" in their richest sense. 3 In this article I read paper's layers both materially and metaphorically. Specifically, I take up metaphors of dimensionality: metaphors which traditionally operate in critical theory, yet which are realized and inflected by paper's material forms. The materiality of paper pulls G Wilson Writing Sample 2 towards a theoretical model of reading structured by depths and surfaces, and this article explores what happens when we bring the theoretical and the material together. The theoretical model of surfaces and depths has a history which stretches back to the 1970s, when "symptomatic reading" dominated English faculties in the United Kingdom and Northern America. Symptomatic reading is a Freudian inheritance which sees repression everywhere: its practitioners assumed that the "real" meaning of texts was hidden deep within. The proper work of a literary critic, therefore, was to plumb the depths of a text to triumphantly reveal what it was reluctant to give up. While a Freudian patient was assumed to be hiding past trauma, a text instead represses "the political conditions or forces bearing down at the moment of its making." 4 The critic, peering suspiciously past these conditions, restored to the surface what had previously been pushed beneath. Depths, in this scholarly mode, were a metaphorical environment for plucking out latent meanings which otherwise scuttled into the shadows, and for hauling into view the prior causes of a text's agenda. This model...