In the Introduction, I aligned the Associationists and the twenty-firstcentury turn to surface reading. But I also argued that we cannot separate Associationism's linguistics, science or ethical mandate from one another. Surface reading and the loose collection of scholars engaged in that exploration, on the other hand, often find empathy is no longer a sufficient motivator, and reading no longer a promise of social improvement. Best and Marcus write:

Regardless of where one stands on this particular question, the rejection of empathy or social change as the purpose of reading is a crucial departure from the Victorian schema. Surface reading eschews the authority of the scholarly interpreter, but it also often rejects the ethical project of the populist Victorian novelists. This is because its scholars have become sceptical of the paranoid reading that sees political ghosts beneath the surface.

The authors that I examine, however, would not see politics as a hermeneutic domain; rather, they would see it as feeling, as surface. The Associationist understanding of affect and literary authority had explicitly political implications for the Victorians. Because language is a physical process, characters’ bodies and emotions can effect changes in readers’ bodies. The point of literature according to these writers was to create embodied connection on a personal level, and thereby to cultivate the feelings required for social reform.

For this to be true, readers needed to connect to characters emotionally and physically so that they might hone their compassion for bodies in the lived world. To fulfil this project, these authors understood language as fundamentally embodied, and condemned hermeneutic reading because it reduced fictional bodies to mere representations or metaphors. Because scholarly reading understood language as a merely logical system, these authors suggest, it evacuates fictional bodies of their emotive power.

The scholars of the last chapter performed disembodiment and assumed it granted them a kind of academic disinteres.