This month’s presentation of the Penn Humanities Forum, Humanities-At-Large, features a discussion with Stephen Best, Heather Love, and Sharon Marcus on surface reading.

In “New Ways of Reading: Histories of Surface Reading,” Stephen Best, Heather Love, and Sharon Marcus make the case for valorizing descriptive practices in literary criticism. The presentation takes as its starting point the concept of “surface reading” that Best and Marcus coined in their 2009 special issue of the journalRepresentations, “The Way We Read Now.” Best, Love, and Marcus will survey a range of recent departures in literary studies from what Paul Ricoeur once described as the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” from material histories of the book to the sociology of reading, data mining to world systems analysis, genre criticism to new formalism. They will go on to trace some unexpected genealogies of surface reading in literary studies, art history, and the social sciences. Showing the long history of practices such as summary, paraphrase, coding, stylistic analysis, pattern recognition, bibliography, and textual editing in literary scholarship, that critics can develop ways of describing works that correct for interpretive biases even if they can never eliminate those biases.