How to Live and How to Read

Abstract

Abstract This chapter presents Sedgwick’s reparative reading as a way of living. It begins with Settembrini’s legacies. First, his scholarship: the reason why he recognized the significance of Lucian and the Greek novel, identifying in them a popular form of Platonism long before this became recognized in mainstream scholarship, reflects his egalitarian stance in matters political and sexual. His stance also aligns with contemporary insights into the many ways revolutions fail women and ethnic minorities. Settembrini’s view that, in love, ‘those who are strong … are almost always unjust’ also aligns with bell hooks’s ‘without justice there can be no love’. Shame, Sedgwick argues, stems from ‘the incomplete reduction of interest or joy’. It can happen, then, that as readers we are ashamed of our own curiosity and pleasures. Capra and Graziosi expose their own pleasures in discovering Settembrini and show how Settembrini in turn chose to reveal himself.