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.

Dana Ward’s 2013 poem Crisis of Infinite Worlds opens up a confrontation between recent critical articulations of infinity as it appears in, on one hand, eco-criticism, speculative realist philosophy, and object-oriented ontology and, on the other, totality as it appears in Marxian thought and, on Christopher Nealon’s account, in Ward’s poem. Infinity discourse is fundamentally anti-hermeneutic and anti-humanist, while Crisis of Infinite Worldsdemonstrates that there is no necessary division between interpretation, human experience, and the infinite.