SubStance

SubStance 32.2 (2003) 121-125

Edson, Laurie. Reading Relationally: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature and Art. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001. Pp. 187.

Convinced that perception has been conditioned to a large extent by the cultural separation between the domains of art and literature and that poststructuralist criticism affords a way to loosen the binds of that separation, Laurie Edson yokes together visual and verbal texts in an effort to bring to light details that will challenge conventional readings and foster fresh interactions with texts. She intends Reading Relationally to demonstrate two distinct yet related projects: first, the advocacy of a strategy of reading that refocuses readers' attention from the text (visual or verbal) to an awareness of the mediating practice inherent in reading; and second, what she calls the "staging" of a practice of reading across the fields of literature and visual art that succeeds in "unsettling" the boundaries between them that we have come to expect. Invoking poststructuralist critics as theoretical touchstones, [End Page 121] the author inscribes her study in a postmodernist epistemological framework that is particularly amenable to hermeneutical contingencies. She draws upon Foucault's investigations of the relations between the knowing subject, the object of knowledge, and discourses of power to explain his assumption that epistemological categories and assumptions are contingent upon cultural ideologies, reading conventions, and representation. In this framework the subject (reader) actively produces knowledge and shapes its appearance.

The neatness of this theoretical approach is that it permits individual readings within a wide variety of historical moments and artistic expressions while supporting the book's complementary projects of articulating strategies of reading and illustrating (or "staging") such practices. The two parts of the book reflect respectively these complementary projects. Although in the introduction the author takes care to introduce the element of eclecticism in both compositional matter of her study and in procedural strategy for discussion, and although she defends that eclecticism as a productive way of avoiding a theoretical bind, the choice of texts remains largely those from the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries. Most of these texts derive from moments in French literature and art (Lautréamont, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Apollinaire, Ponge, Duras, Matisse, Duchamp), although it is when these texts are paired with ones from other traditions, genres, moments, and registers (Cindy Sherman, Roy Lichtenstein, Dalí, Magritte, Calvino) that Edson succeeds most impressively.

The first part of the study introduces the notion of relational reading and lays the groundwork by which the subsequent readings are conducted. The two opening chapters illustrate lenses through which subjects (readers) have learned to view objects (texts). In chapter one, Edson draws on feminist theorists Luce Irigaray and Hélène Cixous who, she argues, advocate critiquing male-based epistemological models by mimicry—that is, by staging the place of exploitation without being reduced by it, for the purpose of exposing those operations of objectification. The author reads in Duras's The Ravishing of Lol Stein a dynamics of gendered mediation embedded in the novel through a strategy of mimicry. The story that the fictional Jacques Hold tells about Lol Stein focuses on Lol's exclusion, the loss she purportedly feels when seeing herself replaced by another woman at the ball. The originality of Edson's reading lies in the assertion that the loss experienced is Jacques's, not Lol's. In fact, what the author demonstrates is that Duras stages the relationship not between Jacques and Lol but between the narrative gaze and the object of that gaze. Such a staging underscores an additional mediation: the one that operates between Lol and the reader, thereby creating its own fiction. [End Page 122]

Likewise she reads Cindy Sherman's photographs as enacting a form of mimicry that both exposes and undermines strategies of male desire that objectify women. In playing the roles she photographs, Sherman parodies the conventions of Hollywood movies and enacts her own feminist agenda. She shows that images of women propagated by the film industry are nothing more than constructs, like the images she herself simulates through her role-playing. Not...