---
title: 'Reading with the Grain'
date: '2014-05-10T18:07:25-04:00'
permalink: /reading-with-the-grain/
tags:
    - reading
---

> The most difficult implication of this idea is the need to outgrow our supposedly Benjaminian habits of reading against the grain — the phrase the functioned as a byword for theoretically informed criticism in the second half of the twentieth century. In its place would appear a reading that suspends judgment, that commits itself, rather, to *the most generous reading possible*.
> 
> <cite>Timothy Bewes, “Reading with the Grain”</cite>