Scenes and Their Senses Close Reading as Theory and Method

Makes the case for close readings of small scenes appearing in works of literature, scholarship, film, and visual art, showing how close attention to details can reveal the meaningful sociological action that often occurs on the margins.

Why do certain images, stories, and scenes impress upon us so strongly, inviting us to linger over the nuances of their meaning? In Scenes and Their Senses, sociologist Robin Wagner-Pacifici seeks to uncover the deeper meaning behind twenty "scenes" that have captured her theoretical imagination over her lifetime. Some of these come from classics of sociological theory or literature--Geertz, Habermas, Lévi-Strauss, Zola--and some are more contemporary, including the films Good Will Hunting and Luis Buñuel's The Phantom ofLiberty. She seeks here to understand each scene less as examples of a given condition or conundrum and more as worlds in themselves.

As Wagner-Pacifici shows, close attention to the forms and flows of these minor, often quiet scenes reveals how meaningful action occurs in what might appear to be the margins or interstices of the bigger, noisier story being told. Providing an entry point to larger social conditions, relations, and change, the scenes analyzed here evoke sociological themes of belonging and exile, strength and weakness, cleanliness and pollution, reality and fantasy, courage and cowardice, and vision and obscurity, among others. As an ethnography of texts recalled from previous readings and revisited by the author, the scenes highlight the role of memory in sense-making. Furthermore, the activation of the scenes as a focused point of sustained contemplation functions as a remarkable bridge between method and theory.