In its emphasis on reading as bound up with agency, Red Moon repudiates not only the domestic near fiction but also the reading practices commonly labelled ‘surface reading’, as they would seek to reinstate a divide between aesthetics and politics. Although the novel registers the pull of the body, it makes it codependent on a social totality that is itself reconceptualised in the wake of ecological emergency. The collective vessel for this body is the superpower state, which not only wields power enough to change the course of the Anthropocene but is also accessible to a narrative that leads out from the present without heading straight into apocalypse. The chapter ends by considering Red Moon as an instance of the historical novel set in the future, in which the utopian nation state, and the collectivity that underpins it, only exists as a dialectical relationship between part and whole, space and time.

James Baldwin’s account of “looking away” in “Nobody Knows My Name,” points to the prevailing habit of ignoring the history and facts of blackness that continues to be replicated in American culture. “Looking away” is, however, only partial since it simultaneously demands and denies black existence, a paradoxical strategy designed to facilitate the work of whiteness and the cultural formation it engenders. One can be resistant to the facts of race while being preoccupied with the idea of race as advanced within a critique of modernity. This chapter argues that these complex and pervasive strategies inform a mental practice, a white epistemology that is the product of historical formation, from which the reader and reading are not immune. By contrast, the chapter’s review of early modern and current theories of reading indicates the continuing trend of racial avoidance. Building on Michel de Certeau’s class-inflected analysis that “the text has a meaning only through its readers,” this chapter argues, however, that whiteness exercises an elite racial function in reading that, following Charles W. Mills’ critique, produces distortion and misinterpretation.

Chapter 2 connects histories of the English Bible to histories of the English novel. When culture is understood to be a kind of secular scripture, the intellectual problems involved in telling the origins of the English novel – that is, the change that occurs in English prose fiction during the eighteenth century – do not get resolved so much as displaced by other problems, such as the rise of the middle class (Ian Watt) or the twin crises of truth and virtue (Michael McKeon) or the advent of the print-media entertainment industry (William Warner). This chapter discusses a recent exhibit at the Folger Shakespeare Library commemorating the 400th anniversary of the King James Bible, two passages from Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative (1789), and Bruno Latour’s actor–network theory to suggest how we might approach culture differently in literary studies and how we might thereby reassemble the secular at the origins of the English novel in a way that opens up new questions about novelistic realism. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of why it matters to think through the postsecular and the postcritical together.

This chapter thinks about the risks of becoming enchanted by Whitman’s writing. Under crisis neoliberalism, “risk” has become sutured to a phobia of being exposed as naïve; it is often risky to not have some explanatory framework or incisive critique at the ready. Of increasing resonance at this political juncture is what this chapter thinks of in terms of Whitman’s “grammar of risk.” To read Whitman’s poetry now is to feel the jolt of a form that momentarily suspends a language of looking through or beyond what is in front of us. This is not to advocate a “surface reading” that necessarily cancels political depth, but rather to think in terms of a surface consciousness that always imbues a moment of contact with the dignity it might deserve. This is an attitude towards others that continually risks disappointment, but it might also be the only nonviolent way forward we have.