Theoretical Illiteracy Dept: "Reading Against the Grain"?

August 13, 2015 2:46 PM

I think I know what reading against the grain means and it seems like a common phrase and practice in academic arenas, but who said it first?

Anyone here know when the phrase was first used and by whom in cultural and literary theory?
Don't need THE citation but aspire to some specificity, not just general deconstruction 1970s, y'know. Extra points if it was French then what was the original term before translation?

posted by xaryts to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

this is an interesting search. there's a hit in 1905, and some of the results seem to be mis-dated. terry eagleton in 1981 looks interesting, and has the right date (pdf).
posted by andrewcooke at 3:02 PM on August 13, 2015

I wonder if the phrase has anything to do with the book, which was a bit infamous: http://www.amazon.com/Against-Grain-J-K-Huysmans/dp/1490972676

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/À_rebours
posted by wooh at 3:17 PM on August 13, 2015 [1 favorite]

Poking around on Google Scholar, I found this 1969 essay from Cahiers du Cinema talking about film criticism working in some "against the grain" context--it's on p. 26, and just at a glance, I'm not certain, but it seems to be saying that some seemingly apolitical films can be read as political either because criticism reveals that they go against the grain of the prevailing ideology or because that criticism goes against the grain of the film to make it work that way.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 4:16 PM on August 13, 2015

Response by poster: Thanks, colleagues! Three winners here: tip on Terry Eagleton leading to the plain English award in the Guardian, "It meant reading against the grain of supposedly self-evident truths, rather than taking them for granted." His essays collected as Against the Grain, 1975-1985.

wooh's Huysman's got us the French term À rebours, which ricochets to...Monsieur Caution's Jean Louis Comolli's article, A rebours? in Cahiers du Cinema in 1965.
posted by xaryts at 6:23 PM on August 13, 2015

i guess it's obvious, but grain has an attractive double meaning with film (grain being a technical term for the structure in fine detail), which would lend credence to it starting in film studies (or maybe my stereotype of pun-obsessed pomos is showing).
posted by andrewcooke at 6:26 PM on August 13, 2015

Oh, hey, maybe this was apparent to others, but these really old citations? They probably stem from Shakespeare. It looks like 'against the grain' later pops up in Butler's Hudibras (twice--once as 'gainst the grain), Dryden's Juvenal translations, Tristram Shandy, etc., etc., but it's generally with the sense of being against your own personal inclinations or preferences, so here and here, "reading 'against the grain'" seems to mean plunging on and reading books you don't really like. I must be having a bad day, because I couldn't quite make that out from context until I read the Shakespeare citation--I kept trying to square it all with the idea of finding unintended meanings or countermodels whatnot, which does appear to be more modern.
posted by Monsieur Caution at 8:04 PM on August 13, 2015

Best answer: In response to Monsieur Caution's second comment, the older uses draw on the metaphor of grain in wood or meat. It's much harder to cut either of them against (or across) the grain than with the grain, so the metaphor of doing something against the grain is to deliberately choose to take the harder course.

I don't think that the expression is particularly associated with film studies. Historians (my academic tribe) tend to use the phrase in the sense of reading a historical source while resisting the point of view of its author—for example, reading inquisitors' reports to try to understand the worldview of the heretics they were questioning.

Google ngrams shows the frequency of "reading against the grain" trending up in the 1970s, skyrocketing after 1980, peaking c. 1995, and then declining somewhat since then, which squares with the hypothesis that Eagleton had a large role in popularizing it.
posted by brianogilvie at 8:26 PM on August 13, 2015