Drawing on the ordinary language philosophy of Toril Moi and Stanley Cavell, Dan Dixon argues that the act of reading shares emotional ground with our social lives. It prompts us to attend to the kinds of affective attachments that frequently resist description, as well as the attachments that encourage debate among scholars of literature.
Dixon posits that the interpretation of a text is significantly shaped by our impression of the writer. Through the lens of persona, this book examines the work of influential and iconic post-1945 American essayists, such as Joan Didion, Maggie Nelson, James Baldwin, Janet Malcolm, Teju Cole, David Foster Wallace, and Ben Lerner. The attachments we form might facilitate insight, consolation, distrust, or vanity. But whatever their effects, they can鈥檛 be ignored.
鈥淒ixon makes an important methodological contribution to the field of literary studies. . . . A theoretically fortified but impractical mode of inquiry has caused critics and scholars to doubt any possibility of gaining intimacy with authors via their written works. If we put aside such methodological reservations and the impossible Olympian truth criteria upon which they rely, we can recognize that we do in fact get to know authors in an everyday sense, and that a belief in reading as a way of achieving friendship with the author can be a source of great satisfaction and insight.鈥濃擳imothy Aubry, author, Guilty Aesthetic Pleasures
鈥淒an Dixon鈥檚 book is a breath of fresh air: well written, lively, and consistently interesting. What would happen, Dixon asks, if we try to think of reading a literary text as entering into a conversation with a friend? Is it possible to think of reading as a kind of social relation? In his investigations, Dixon turns to American essays and autofiction. Drawing on Stanley Cavell鈥檚 philosophy, he brings out what it might mean to think of a text as a voice placing claims on us. Reading Relations is an important contribution to the ongoing reading debates in literary studies.鈥濃擳oril Moi, Duke University