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Robert Oventile, Impossible Reading: Idolatry and
Diversity in Literature
Impossible
Reading
compares polemics against idols in both the Hebrew Bible and
the Apostle Paul to argue that to welcome diversity requires
shunning idolatry. Oventile explores how these polemics inform
the approach to diversity in works by Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz, Herman Melville, and Alfredo Véa.
Drawing on the work
of Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man,
Impossible
Reading
begins with
chapters exploring the Hebrew Bible's and the Apostle Paul's
divergent understandings of idolatry. Exodus's polemic
against idols emerges as friendly to diversity and as
resonant with the event of spacing that Plato names khōra.
However, Paul's denunciations of idolatry presage the
diversity ideology contemporary institutions embrace to gain
legitimacy and to dissipate struggles for justice.
Additional
chapters examine how the Hebrew Bible's and Paul's divergent
notions of idolatry impact the treatment of diversity in Sor
Juana Ines de la Cruz's play
El Divino
Narciso
and in two
novels: Herman Melville's
Moby-Dick
and
Alfredo Vea's
gods go
begging,
and a
final chapter details the workings of diversity ideology in
the debate over removing the Christian cross from Los
Angeles County's official seal.
Suggesting
that the Decalogue's prohibition of idolatry may actually
help believers and nonbelievers alike to lessen the
violence undertaken in the names of Judaism, Christianity,
and Islam,
Impossible
Reading
seeks to
contest diversity ideology and to open new paths for the
study of diversity in literature.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Chapter One Impossible Reading: The
Second Commandment and Moses’s Delay
Chapter Two An Etiolating Light: Plato’s
One, Paul’s One
Chapter Three
Idolatry’s Allegorical Overcoming: Sor Juana Inés de la
Cruz’s
El Divino
Narciso
Chapter Four
Idolatry and Sovereignty in Herman Melville’s
Moby-Dick
Chapter Five
An Impossible
Milagro:
Alfredo Véa’s
gods go
begging
Chapter Six Cross Out: The Los
Angeles County Seal Debate
Notes
Index
Reviews
"This wonderful book is strikingly original, learned, and
perceptive. Appropriating insights from Derrida and de Man
about figurative language and about the otherness of the
other, Professor Oventile brilliantly argues that
present-day diversity pedagogy, in its homogenizing of the
ethnic “other,” is an ideological form of idolatry. For
Oventile, following Derrida, every individual other person
is “wholly other,” including other to other individuals in
his or her own “ethnic group.” Reading the other is
therefore “impossible,” but at the same time urgently
necessary. Beginning with readings of the golden calf
episode in Exodus, and of notions of idolatry contrary to
the […] ones in Plato and Paul, Oventile then goes
on to present admirably original readings of works by Sor
Juana Inés de la Cruz, Herman Melville, and Alfredo Véa, as
they grapple with the opposition between the understanding
of idolatry in the Hebrew Bible and those in St. Paul’s
writings. Impossible Reading ends with a striking
application of the book’s insights about idolatry and
diversity to a recent conflict over revisions of the Los
Angeles County Seal. A major theoretical and critical
achievement."
—J. Hillis Miller, UCI Distinguished Research Professor of
Comparative Literature and English, University of
California, Irvine
"Oventile’s
book is a remarkable contribution to the question of how
reading, itself, remains a battleground in the cognitive
politics in the 21st century. Invoking the preoriginary
logics of what Derrida calls khora—that is, a non-site where
inscriptions and memory programs are set—Impossible
Reading explores how such programs influence the circular
spells and hermeneutic plagues of the contemporary scene.
Its unique innovation is to target what he calls the motif
of “idolatry” and one unexpected contemporary avatar,
“diversity ideology,” and to link these to the spell of
inefficacy that today engulfs high criticism and post-9/11
humanities. In another sense, by departing from the Mosaic Decalog, and tracing its path from Plato to contemporary
institutional politics, Oventile probes the “impossible”
possibility of altering the archival flux and primary
inscriptions out of which the world is constructed, and this
by way of surgical reading."
—Tom Cohen, University at Albany
Author
Robert Savino Oventile is Assistant Professor of English at
Pasadena City College. He completed his Ph.D. in English
literature at the University of California's Irvine campus.
His publications include reviews and essays written for the
journals
Crossings,
American@,
Culture Machine,
Postmodern Culture,
Comitatus,
The
Review of Communication,
inside english,
and
Stirrings Still.
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