(Rereading) Observations on Rereading

Notes from

Galef, David. “Observations on Rereading.” In Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading. Ed. David Galef. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1998. 17-33.*

 

 

 

Literary analysis as rereading (17).

 

“How does our perspective change after the initial experience? What distortions emerge through repetition?” (17).

 

“Rereading has many joys, but suspense is not one of them” (18).

 

(JAGL: But why not? Not the same kind of suspense, but a subtler one perhaps, a suspense proper to rereading—what shall I see that escaped me before, or which did not exist in my reading before.  A stronger versions: Who have I become, and who shall I become as I reread?).

 

Galef, rereading as distortion (19). (This is necessary to make the text available for other kinds of communicative use, apart from the originally intended one. Cf. my paper on the hermeneuticspiral).

 

“rereading heightens certain aspects of the text and blunts others” (21).

 

“reading is an experience, not merely an act of retrieval, and repetition does more than deepen experience” (23)

 

“one reaches an absurdity: rereading is impossible, at least in the sense of the same reader picking up the text for the second time” (24).

 

Attali: repetition “makes the stockpiling of time possible” (25).

 

Two poles of rereading: 

 

1) Children’s will to repeat text literally, or 

 

2) rereading for mastery, teaching 

 

(cf. rereading for identity vs rereading for difference).

 

“rereading is rethinking, and we lose this facility at our peril” (Galef  30).

 

 —oOo—