• • • low end theory

For literature, it is to teach in fact how one can learn without regard to verification, to work in the interest of justice. It is an extremely difficult thing to learn. It is also training in suspending oneself in the text, which is of course in turn training in accessing the Other. Thus is what I mean by training the imagination. We get to this by learning how to attend to the rhetorical signals in the text. This is of course close reading—a literary training is not necessarily devoted to close reading. And everybody who teaches close reading doesn’t necessarily give up the idea of verifying it and presenting it in a legalist framework… I’m urging literary studies not to ignore what is specific about the literary—learning to learn from the singular and the unverifiable. I believe I could make a case for this characteristic even in most ancient traditions, where myth and history are imbricated. And today this is certainly the defining characteristic of the literary. It is this skill, this craft, that we teach when we teach literature as such. And this, I believe, is what takes, by way of rhetoric and figure, the accountability of consistency as reason outside of its own merely logical outlines.

Gayatri Chaktravorty Spivak, “Speaking for the Humanities.”