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Leger(e)demain: Reading and the Restless Hand

  • Adam Zachary Newton EMAIL logo
Published/Copyright: May 22, 2015
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Abstract

The essay’s title puns interlinguistically on English “legerdemain” (which comes from the French “légèreté des mains,” or “lightness/sleight of hand”), to capture a model for the ethics of reading grounded in the hard material facts of “hand” and “book.” Keeping the lightness or sleight in the background, this model thus retains the element of “hand” and foregrounds a conjunction with the Latin verb “to read.” Accordingly, “reading” and “the restless hand” represent the organizing categories for a set of examples, each of which models some version of “the book-in-hand” as a trope for the reciprocal ethical pressure that each exerts on the other during the reading event. These include a rabbinic formula about the category-status of the material text, which (among other things) demarcates religious from secular. In adapting the phrase, rather than maintaining the opposition it denotes in its original context, I use it to place modalities of reading—“pure” and “impure”—in diacritical relation across the boundary separating secular criticism (pace Edward Said) from its religious counterpart. Additional examples are drawn from Charles Dickens, Walter Benjamin, Helen Keller, and Emmanuel Levinas; other examples include Rembrandt’s 1632 painting “The Anatomy Lesson,” Christopher Nolan’s film The Prestige, and the National September 11 Memorial Reflecting Absence. The essay distills an argument from a larger project, To Make the Hands Impure: Art and Ethical Adventure, the Difficult and the Holy (Fordham UP, 2015), which considers the question of how reading may be said to possess a certain ritual sensibility embodied by the ethical situation of the book lying in the hands of its readers.

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Published Online: 2015-5-22
Published in Print: 2015-6-1

© 2015 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Frontmatter
  3. Contributions
  4. General introduction
  5. Ethical Literary Criticism: East and West
  6. From Homer’s Odyssey to Joyce’s Ulysses: Theory and Practice of an Ethical Narratology
  7. The Ethics of (Fictional) Form: Persuasiveness and Perspective Taking from the Point of View of Cognitive Literary Studies
  8. Leger(e)demain: Reading and the Restless Hand
  9. Towards an Ethical Literary Criticism
  10. The Unbearable Lightness of Growth: Ethical Consciousness and Ethical Selection in Ian McEwan’s The Cement Garden
  11. Visions of the End of Culture: Civilization, Barbarism, and the Realm beyond Forgiveness
  12. Wie deutsch ist es?
  13. The Danse Macabre and Shakespeare’s Battle of Shrewsbury
  14. Die pfadabhängige Matrix des Labyrinths
  15. Reviews
  16. Francesco Bono, Luigi Cimmino, Giorgio Pangaro (Hgg.):Morte a Venezia. Thomas Mann / Luchino Visconti: un confronto. Soveria Mannelli, Rubbettino Editore, 2013 (Cinema. Passaggi di confine. Collana diretta da Christian Uva), 238 S., ISBN 978-88-498-3937-1, € 14,00.
  17. Philosopher en langues. Les intraduisibles en traduction. Sous la direction de Barbara Cassin. Paris: Éditions Rue d’Ulm / Presses de l’École Normale Supérieure 2014, Zweite Auflage, 218 Seiten. Evelyn Dueck:L’Étranger intime. Les traductions françaises de l’œuvre de Paul Celan (1971–2010). Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter 2014 [Communicatio. Studien zur europäischen Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte], 466 Seiten.
  18. Elke Sturm-Trigonakis:Comparative Cultural Studies and the New Weltliteratur. Translated from the German by Athanasia Margoni and Maria Kaisar. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2013.
  19. Kushner, Eva (ed.).L’époque de la Renaissance. Tome III. Maturations et mutations (1520–1560). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2011. 636 pp. (A Comparative History of Literatures in European Languages XXVI)
  20. Claudia Hillebrandt/Elisabeth Kampmann (Hrsg.):Sympathie und Literatur. Zur Relevanz des Sympathiekonzeptes für die Literaturwissenschaft. Berlin: Erich Schmidt, 2014 (= Allgemeine Literaturwissenschaft; 19), 308 Seiten.
  21. Loescher, Jens:Schreiben. Literarische und wissenschaftliche Innovationen bei Lichtenberg, Jean Paul, Goethe. Berlin/Boston: de Gruyter 2014. 454 S.
  22. Ernst van Alphen:Staging the Archive. Art and Photography in the Age of New Media. London: Reaktion Books, 2014.
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