| abstract |
This project explores the phenomenon of literary and readerly resonance: what is meant when a reader says, "this resonates with me." It begins from a phrase in Pearl S. Buck's The Good Earth—"this perfect sympathy of movement"—which serves as both seed and guiding metaphor for my argument. I propose a genealogy of resonance that unfolds in four stages. It begins with betweenness, marked by interior agitation and receptivity, where the reader becomes unsettled and open. From there emerges attunement, the process of alignment and listening, which gives rise to embrace, an initial trusting participation that moves beyond recognition. Finally, resonance itself is understood as a dynamic movement in perfect sympathy, where reader and text exist in synchronous interconnection.
Resonance, in this account, is more than metaphorical; it is a lived experience of transformation in the space between creator and text and reader. It arises through ambiguity, attention, affect, and intention, producing new meaning across time, culture, and genre. The project is interdisciplinary in method, drawing from literary studies, theology, cognitive poetics, aesthetics, and philosophy to trace the texture of resonance.
Importantly, the project itself is an instance of resonance. My interpretations are shaped by my own encounter with authors, texts, art, ideas, experiences that have called to me. The writing enacts the very phenomenon it seeks to understand: a movement of response and participation, where scholarship becomes an embodied act of resonance.
At its end I suggest that resonance can be a method for reading and for teaching to read. I suggest that what "comes to pass" between the lives of the text and our own constitutes "the art of art" (Steiner 178). To attempt to share these personal, phenomenological introspective clarities with others risks embarrassment and maybe even rebuke, but these "hooked atoms" — these "sympathies" — these immediacies, though difficult to put into words, are still somehow worth our words.
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