Reading Relationally: Postmodern Perspectives on Literature and Art (review)

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.