How to Read Now

by Elaine Castillo

the school of literary interpretation that says our readerly focus should be trained on important men and their fine sentences, and not the women-shaped detritus left in their great wake. It was the tepid school of literary interpretation that valued things like silence and mystery and especially indeterminacy (that golden calf of contemporary, sometimes protofascist, sometimes neolibertarian, philosophy) when it came to selectively reading and protecting the work of certain authors, by not interrogating their self-servingly indeterminate descriptions (and tacit defenses) of sexual assault—yet would not think to ask students to engage with the complicated, devastating (and in many ways unresolvable) silences and mysteries and indeterminacies that a book like The Turn of the Screw asks us to bear witness to. It was the school of literary interpretation that, by its deliberate omissions, teaches us how not to read, what not to read—what we ought to let perish in silence.