Drawing on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Raymond Williams, Jason Baskin argues that the perceived divide between “surface” and “depth” models of reading ignores the phenomenological relationship between the surface of objects and their forms. Readers should therefore approach texts with “soft eyes,” a way of reading that approximates the object in relation to the social totality.

Davis Smith-Brecheisen reviews Annie McClanahan’s Dead Pledges: Debt, Crisis, and Twenty-First-Century Culture.

Paul Stasi reviews Thompson’s edited collection Georg Lukács Reconsidered: Critical Essays in Politics, Philosophy, and Aesthetics.