Reading Against Culture

Reading against Culture starts from the problem that a concept of "culture" is both destructive and necessary. Culture constitutes the environment within which self develops and interacts with other; as a closed environment of self-identity, however, culture inevitably implies alterity and exclusion. David Pollack proposes that only by reading "against" culture—both by understanding how our involvement in it conditions our writing and reading, and by understanding how its inclusion of self entails the exclusion of other—can we begin to resist the hegemonic impulse inherent in reading across cultures.