Reading as Method

Reading as Method provides a concise and systematic account of how readers engage with texts, exploring the most paradigmatic techniques taught in the past and today and guiding readers on developing their own critical approach to literature. Oliver Simons argues that behind the dizzying variety of reading methods—deep interpretation, surface reading, symptomatic or scattered reading, close textual analysis—are three distinctions: depth versus surface, text versus context, and close versus distant. By tracing these recurring distinctions, Simons offers students and instructors alike a lucid map for getting through the landscape of literary analysis.

Throughout the book, Simons returns to Franz Kafka's unsettling 1920 story, "A Country Doctor," in which a wound glimpsed from afar becomes a tangle of imagination and fact upon closer scrutiny. The analysis of this wound is a lesson in reading itself: The more precisely we look, the more our own assumptions shape what we find. Reading as Method equips its readers to see how critics think, question the blind spots in every technique, and reclaim reading as an active, even subversive, pleasure.