Resistant reading
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A resistant reading, a concept partly formulated by Judith Fetterley, is a reading of a text which moves beyond the dominant cultural beliefs to challenge prevailing views. It means to read a text as it was not meant to be read; in fact reading the text against itself.
A resistant reading, a concept partly formulated by Judith Fetterley, is a reading of a text which moves beyond the dominant cultural beliefs to challenge prevailing views. It means to read a text as it was not meant to be read; in fact reading the text against itself.
Historical Approaches
Theories of resistant reading have been identified in a number of historic approaches to the question of interpretation. Michel de Certeau describes reading as wayward act that refuses to follow the prescriptive protocols of others. Readers 'move across lands belonging to someone else,' writes de Certeau, 'like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write, despoiling the wealth of Egypt to enjoy it themselves'. Roger Chartier has argued that reading is something that 'only rarely leaves traces, that is scattered in an infinity of singular acts, and that easily shakes off all constraints.' A number of historians of reading have elaborated on the idea to interpret readers of the past. Bill Bell, for example, has discovered a range of resistant hermeneutic strategies across nineteenth-century communities, from emigrants and convicts to polar explorers and troops in the First World War. Cultural theorist Islam Issa has expanded the idea through his theory 'resistant reception', stating that 'the human struggle for interpretation ... extend[s] beyond reading'. In the context of Shakespeare, Issa's theory 'connects Shakespeare's work to wider issues outside of the text itself'.
Importance
Resistant reading is an element of some current critical and interpretive repertoire. It is worth considering whether diegetic border crossing always strengthens the potential for resistant reading (as might seem intuitively likely, given that readers are moving in and out of the story), or whether on some occasions it might trigger the reverse effect.
See also
Judith Fetterley The Resisting Reader (1977), by Judith Fetterley Robert Belton, Sights of Resistance: Approaches to Canadian Visual Culture (Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2001). Postcritique
References
Text derived from https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1362796649 under CC BY-SA 4.0; modifications have been made.