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This chapter considers the construction of Smith's public persona in her relation to her critical reception. It notes the defensive and protective critical stances often taken on Smith's work, examines the notion of misreading with reference to the marketing and reception of Smith's work in the 1930s, and traces this through to contemporary responses by feminist and poststructuralist critics. The chapter explores Smith's correspondence with agents, readers, and reviewers throughout her career, notes that her self-written blurbs deliberately worked to offset the current critical consensus, and focuses on Smith's self-construction in interviews and public appearances.

This chapter proposes that when dealing with the errors, slips, and misprisions in reading that we so often encounter in A la recherche, rather than talking of ‘misreading’, we might more fruitfully think of ‘le délire de la lecture’. Close readings of a number of passages (among them the primary focus is on Albertine disparue) highlight how frequently Proust depicts reading—our only means of interpreting his novel—as unreliable, riven with errors, and influenced by desire, anticipation, or preconception. The fragility of traditional distinctions between the intellectual and the empirical, between the real and the imaginary, are highlighted, and the sensory, somatic effects of reading are considered in detail; the textures of Proust's prose are shown repeatedly to offer its readers the very stimuli it seeks to describe.

The chapter reveals that the view of “Bontsye Shvayg” presented in the previous chapters is not the popular view of the story after all. A big factor in the popular misreading of Bontsye Shvayg is the “Ozymandias effect” from the well-known sonnet, “Ozymandias” by Percy Shelley. The sonnet portrays a king in a manner that surpasses reality, showing the king’s features in colossal, superhuman terms similar to what Perets did in portraying Bontsye as Super-Job. The “Ozymandias effect” aids in the transformation of a story in an exemplary tale of piety akin to what the original legend of Job was. The chapter also explains how the historical circumstance of Perets’ time and the 19th century until the early 20th century in Eastern Europe have lead Perets’ audience to misread willfully the intent of the author. By filtering reality through the super-reality of Bontsye, Jews see themselves as people singled out to suffer silently and piously in the model of Abraham. A couple of absurdities in the interpretation of Bontsye are also presented in this chapter. It points out that one should not endure punishment without protest, one should not greedily seize the smallest favor offered by an authority but rather insist on the essential rights of all humanity.

This chapter examines the relationship between loose and tight audiovisual synchronization in two recent instances, both of which speak to an aesthetic of repurposing in new audiovisual expression. The case studies discuss Philip Glass's cinematic opera La Belle et la Bête, an operatic adaptation of Jean Cocteau's original film, and “syncing” practices, represented here by the synchronization of Wizard of Oz with Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. Both forms are seen in the light of an avant-garde lineage that destabilizes the binary opposition of art and life. Both in different ways draw attention to new forms of technological estrangement in advanced modernity. Both examples can both be understood as forms of reading against the grain, or misreading. As such they resemble other phenomena in contemporary media culture, such as audiovisual mashups, which are discussed in the opening section.

This chapter extends the narrative of stages in post-Kantian philosophy by noting elements in Kant's own aesthetic theory that anticipate the growing contemporary rejuvenation of the post-Kantian conception of philosophy as a basically historical, interpretative, and broadly aesthetic enterprise. An especially useful model for understanding philosophy as an activity of this kind can be found in the third Critique's discussion of the role of the aesthetic genius as an ‘exemplar’. This passage is then linked to proposals by Rorty and Bloom that ‘strong’ writers show their genius by ‘misreading’ their great predecessors and creating new rules for future geniuses. It is proposed that late modern philosophy, which is neither pure science nor art, can be understood best in these terms, as a creative and progressive interpretative endeavor.

This chapter takes protagonist Claire Pitt’s speculative imagination, walking and misreading to read Undue Influence through the figure of the flâneur. Tracing the walking journeys undertaken by Claire Pitt and Martin Gibson, it presents a literal and literary map of the novel. It argues against Michel de Certeau’s assertion that maps constitute procedures for forgetting by demonstrating how Brookner’s women’s walking texts have been largely unrecognised. Drawing on Charles Baudelaire’s theories of Romantic imagination and walking, Harold Bloom’s narrative of intertextual influence and the rhetorical figure of peripeteia (reversal), this chapter recasts the relationship between Claire and Martin as the relationship between ephebe and precursor poet. In staging the performance of the flâneur, it rereads Undue Influence through the ‘revisionary ratios’ of Bloom’s narrative of influence—clinamen, tessera, kenosis, daemonisation, askesis, apophrades. It argues against the heterocentric presumption of Brookner’s reception in which personal and romantic failure is the dominant narrative to tell about the novel. By freighting emphasis on women’s creativity, imagination, artistry and subversion and finding new ways to read intersubjective relationships, this chapter underscores value and industry of the woman writer and women’s writing.

This chapter is a historical and critical overview of the distinctive phases and categories of postcolonial rewriting. It examines in particular the departures from the nationalist focus of the earlier phases of postcolonial canon revision. The chapter elaborates on reconstitutions of European genres in postcolonial literature and their redeployment in charged contexts of gender, race, and class.

Flaubert chose to have his characters fail, often because of their limitations and ignorance rather than tragic flaws in their personalities. With this, the two interrelated issues are addressed in this chapter, the concept of failure and the concept of misreading. While Flaubert is expressing his own personal pessimism, he is at loggerheads with a realist vision in which, arguably, some characters do succeed, against all odds. The specific example, which might be considered a singular case of failure, is Emma Bovary's singular capacity for misreading. By inventing a scientific approach to his analyses, Zola might seemingly have avoided the same pitfalls as other authors before or since. Yet in a number of striking cases — the symphonie en blanc in Au Bonheur des dames, as well as Le Ventre de Paris and Germinal — the system implodes upon itself.

Though Georges Bataille's initial reading of Friedrich Nietzsche in 1923 leaves him feeling “overcome”, he goes on to produce a body of work that, if bearing the marks of Nietzsche, nonetheless diverges from Nietzsche in crucial respects. This chapter argues that, far from representing a simple continuation of Nietzsche's thought, Bataille's writings dramatically enact a rupture with Nietzsche—a denial of Nietzsche that paradoxically deepens, rather than mitigates, Bataille's intimacy with this man he calls friend. This binding break, at once faithful and renunciatory, is effected through Bataille's strategic misreading and rewriting of Nietzsche. The chapter shows that Bataille's misprision of Nietzsche amounts to a refusal of recognition of his friend, instead marking an act of extreme identification. Denis Hollier has suggested that Bataille engages in a misreading of Nietzsche through which he repeats Nietzsche's experience of madness as a sacrifice of identity. This chapter shows how Bataille's misprision proceeds as a kind of rewriting of Nietzsche, but a rewriting that is specifically an inversion of him.

This chapter examines the process of revisionism, as it is found in music. Strong composers have been defined musicologically as the protagonists of technical innovation. However, other people have influenced even the best composers. According to Harold Bloom if similarity is evidence of influence, dissimilarity can be evidence of a stronger influence. If a poet's direct allusion can be evidence of his susceptibility, the absence of an allusion and his denial can be evidence of a stronger susceptibility. Proving this theory involves connoisseurship, “a purely personal activity”. A “map of misprision” was first sketched out in The Anxiety of Influence and given fullest form in the more lucid, less lyrical sequel, A Map of Misreading. This handy tabular summary of complex deductions has been widely appropriated as a tool to guide application. The focus of study becomes the revisionary relationship between works and their precursors rather than the autonomy of individual compositions.

This chapter draws on Jacques Derrida's concept of destinerrance, the sense in which meaning is ‘destined to err and to wander’, as a way of understanding the unstable and ultimately horrific process of misreading sign and symbol in Don't Look Now (1973). John Baxter's misreading of the murderous woman as his lost daughter, but also his misreading of colour and image, of his wife, of the strange psychic women they meet, of himself and his place in the world, of the dangerous spaces he inhabits, and even of time itself, all contribute to the film's uncanny sense of his environment as simultaneously loaded with and empty of meaning. John might ‘feel’ that he is ‘a detective’, but ultimately, he is a failed one, since his misreading of the ‘clues’ he perceives lead to the perpetuation rather than the prevention of crime and trauma. It is in the space of these misreadings, of failing to see in time, that the film's horror, its capacity to scare, resides, since it insists on the suspension rather than the resolution of trauma. The film's misreadings, then, are ultimately instructive or didactic, but in moving away from the conservative restoration of order which is typical of the Gothic narrative, Don't Look Now's iteration of horror remains open.

In the introduction Dufallo lays out the volume’s main arguments, briefly summarizes its contents, explains its relation to recent work in classical reception studies, and advances its theoretical claim in response to the poststructuralist view of classical reception advanced especially by Charles Martindale. All reception could be considered “error” insofar as it involves “misreading” in the sense elaborated by Harold Bloom. But the essays in this volume reveal specific ways in which reception’s transgressive content may relate to its transgressive form or style because of the investments of receivers in a future that will view that content differently: the particular social, cultural, or political projects in which authors, artists, etc. participate as they set in motion the infinite malleability of signs. This foregrounds a pair of issues that have figured centrally in recent debates over classical reception: its relation to collective, as opposed to individual, receivers and to the future.

Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), one of the twentieth century’s most extraordinary writers, repeatedly questions the (im)possibility of telling stories, of writing poetry, after Homer. Focusing upon a relatively neglected aspect of H.D.’s classicism, this chapter investigates the ways in which H.D.’s poetry engages directly, and sometimes playfully, with Homeric epic. After analysing a selection of her earlier works (‘A Dead Priestess Speaks’, ‘Calypso’, ‘At Ithaca’, ‘Circe’, ‘Odyssey’) for insights into H.D.’s witty, quasi-counterfactual classicism, it offers a close reading of the Homeric features of H.D.’s final poem, the 1961 epic Helen in Egypt. The analysis offered here argues that H.D.’s responses to Homer demonstrate a ‘releasing’ of pre-existing narrative emphases rather than a ‘resistant’ reading against the grain of the Homeric tradition, in a more sympathetic and less antagonistic engagement with the Homeric source texts than received readings tend to acknowledge.

The idea, the possibility of reading the mind, from the outside, or indeed even from the inside, has exercised humanity from the earliest times. Recent advances in neuroscience have offered some, probably remote, prospect of improved access, but a different branch of technology seems to offer the most promising and the most daunting prospect for both mind reading and mind misreading. You can’t have the possibility of the one without the possibility of the other. This chapter tells some of this story. If, and to the extent that we could, read other minds this would be a powerful tool in moral enhancement not least because it might enable the criminal law to anticipate crimes in advance of their commission and resolve vexed problems of intent.

Emma Woodhouse misreads the intentions, and the significance of the actions, of those around her in ways that reflect both her projects and her own acknowledged or unacknowledged desires. Moreover, Emma is innovative in its wide use of “free indirect style”: readers view the fictional events largely through a third-person narrative inflected by Emma’s consciousness of these events. A consequence, for most critics, is that the first-time receiver will have difficulty detecting Emma’s misreadings. Contrary to this view, this chapter argues that, far from deliberately obscuring details of the narrative in this way, Austen’s particular use of the free indirect style allows her to furnish the receiver with the clues necessary to see Emma as the misreader that she is. The first-time receiver is intended to register Emma’s misreadings, and one who fails to do so is themselves misreading Emma. Emma, so understood, bears on debates about the cognitive values of literature.

This chapter examines a rather embarrassing error in the closing section of Robert Browning's Pippa Passes (1841), where he casually uses a slang word for female genitalia when meaning to refer to part of a nun's clothing. Like Wordsworth, Browning comes by his mistake honestly, having drawn his definition for the word from his memory of it in a seventeenth-century satirical ballad. Browning's error turns out to be a case of misreading: his source poem actually uses the word correctly—but Browning misses the joke. By exploring his mistake in context, the chapter raises the question of how interpretive mistakes relate to broader questions of meaning and its duplicity, not least in poems that are dramatic. Browning's mistake in reading thus serves as a proxy for the kinds of misinterpretations to which all readers of poetry are susceptible, especially when treating mistakes like his.

The publication of Quine’s essay “Epistemology Naturalized” in 1972 was disastrous for the world’s understanding of his epistemology. The deep misunderstanding it gave rise to is nearly universal, and has inspired something called naturalized epistemology, which is completely antithetical to his view. The misunderstanding is that in this essay he abandoned his earlier conception of our evidence as consisting of our sensory experiences, and adopted a conception of it as consisting of the stimulations of our sensory organs. In fact, the allegedly new view was his oldest, first proposed in 1952, and the allegedly abandoned view was still front and center in Pursuit of Truth (1992). The centrality of this misreading to most philosophers’ views of Quine’s epistemology warrants devoting an entire chapter to correcting it.