ABSTRACT
Educated readers naturally feel entitled to know what they’re reading, to know it, often, with the conspiratorial intimacy of a potential partner. Even when we remember that literature participates in the asymmetries of power, it rarely occurs to us that readers, friendly and eager as we are to please, may be the targets of a text, not its coconspirators. My advice is to be careful. Otherwise we’ll continue to mistake the incompetence that distinguishes us as particular readers for a challenging horizon that we can and should overcome. Some texts mean to sting readers, to stop those of us bent on intimacy and to direct us toward a different engagement, one that makes respectful distance a reading requirement. The slap of refusal from unyielding books can slow readers down, detain them at the boundary between contact and conquest, before they press particularist writing to surrender cultural difference for the sake of universal meaning. The very familiarity of universalism as measure of literary worth, while its codependent term particularism still sounds strange to contemporary criticism, 1 shows how one-sided interpretation has been, even when we read “minority” texts. If learning makes the distance between writers and readers seem superficial or circumstantial, mere interference on the way to understanding, particularist writing puts circumstance to work, resurfacing the stretch with fresh stop signs.
