Abstract
This essay, following upon Kyoo Lee's case for "counterreading", argues for what I call "micropoetics": a close reading that takes into account every phoneme, morpheme, and word of a poetic text and reads that text "verbivocovisually", to use James Joyce's term. I take as my model Marcel Duchamp's concept of the infrathin — the smallest possible distinction, whether temporal or spatial, between A and B. Similarity and analogy, I argue, have been overstressed and produced the problematic political discourse of the present with its clichés and vapid generalizations. Infrathin reading, on the other hand, establishes difference and the uniqueness of a given text, as I show in the case of Gertrude Stein's "Miss Furr and Miss Skeene", where the seeming repetition of phrasing is actually a form of elaborate word play.
First Page
169
Recommended Citation
Marjorie, Perloff. 2019. "Microreading/Microwriting." Theoretical Studies in Literature and Art 39, (3): pp.169. https://tsla.researchcommons.org/journal/vol39/iss3/7
