Cultural Analysis as Reading for the Object

In this chapter, I present cultural analysis as a reading for the object: a reading that looks for and establishes some thing existing in culture as the object of analysis, and a reading in support of or on the side of the object, taking care that it, in its thingness that makes it more than the object of this analysis, is given the last word and not stifled by concepts and theories being thrown at it. This reading for the object is seen as involving a practice of close reading distinct from, on the one hand, surface or descriptive reading and, on the other, overreading.