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COPYRIGHT 2002 Boston University
New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. 186. $49.95.
Every now and then a book comes along which persuades us that somehow the theoretical problematic of reading need no longer be a concern. Our fretting is at an end, and our anxieties about how we construct, legitimate and defend readings sink steadily down and out of sight into the abyss of what now seems to be a murk born of unnecessary confusion. We can see clearly once more; a liberation has been effected which allows us to teach and study with a wholly logical and joyful purpose. Every now and then this happens, but our gladness never lasts for very long. Further scrutiny brings that despondency forever lurking in the sceptical and destructive interrogation that is now the literary critic's second nature. This reflex will not leave us alone; it insists on returning to examine, challenge and negate the apparent rectitude of the newly discovered method until we are convinced that this was but a false moment of enlightenment, incapable of withstanding rigorous questioning.
Jack Stillinger's Reading "The Eve of St Agnes": The Multiples of Complex Literary Transaction is a book of this kind: an extraordinarily sustained and energetic argument for a fully liberalized notion of reading that admits simultaneously of the drive for single meanings alongside their denial in the recognition of multiplicity, equal status, and countless types of ambiguity. This is not just an argument for critical pluralism, for Stillinger goes much further than this: for him, meanings are produced, reinforced and defended by multiple readers reading multiple texts, in highly complex conditions of inter-relation. None are right, none are wrong; no reading, essentially, can claim higher status than another since...
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