“There is much more to literature than what initially meets the eye.”
If we think about the meanings, reading is the sensory process where we engage with the content through tasks like looking at a text, listening to things, etc. On the other hand, interpretation involves analysis. Reading in the interpretative sense is a reading to form arguments (argumentative reading). Literary interpretation is more of a subjectivist idea of analysis wherein a text can have many meanings. We can say that in this domain, truth is not a matter of discovery; rather, it can be said to be more of an invention!
Talking about critique, it is an ideological mode of reading literary texts. It is a political vector of analysis and this idea can be posed alongside an interventionist notion of reading. Basically, reading is about strategy. While reading, we need to foreground some aspects and background others. Isn’t it fascinating?
There are various types of reading. In deconstructive reading, we try to read a text against its intentionality. For example: reading a manifesto for peace as a war text – we go against the intentional grain of any particular content. Another type is the parallel (contrapuntal) reading, wherein we read a literary text alongside a theoretical or philosophical tradition. It is comparatist in nature. Close readings imply that every detail in a text is necessary and nothing is superfluous. Meanwhile, distant reading is not just structurally, but also culturally distant. It is one of the interventionist points where distance becomes a condition of knowledge. There are two levels of reading. We can understand it better with the following questions. The text we are reading – is it just a microelement in the text? Or, is it a larger question, which is a macro-unit outside the content?
An interesting article providing a glimpse into the different ideas of reading and various paradigms of interpretation in literary studies, and how they have evolved over the years, can be found here. It is based on one of the sessions (delivered by Arka Chattopadhyay, faculty in the Humanities and Social Sciences discipline) of the Virtual Seminar Series by IIT Gandhinagar.