1. Veering is kinetic and dynamic. At once literal and figurative, it offers a mobile arsenal of images and ideas for thinking differently about literature – about genre, plot and narration, character and point of view, voice, tone and music, authorial intention and desire. It opens up new possibilities for responding to what is on the move and uncertain in the very moment of reading, to what is slippery, unpredictable and chancy in the experience of literature.

2. Veering impels us towards new questions about aesthetics. A literary text is composed of forces. It is a work of veering. The literary work may veer well or beautifully, in a shift or turn that pleases, surprises, thrills, fascinates. Or it can veer poorly, ineffectually, clumsily. The ‘twist in the tale’, for example, is hardly ever a veering worthy of the name. The manner in which a literary work veers is closely related to what might be called the signature or signature-effect of the writer. Analysis here promises something like a perverse science of literature: the art of veering.

3. Veering involves an economy of desire. Everybody veers in his or her own fashion. But this is never simply a matter of choice, volition or ‘personal preferences’. There is always something other about veering. Veering offers fresh slants on the classical notion of clinamen (‘leaning’, ‘inclination’) as a basis for thinking about the strangeness of life, the singularity of being in the world, as well as about that peculiar thing we call literature.

4. Veering is not human, or not only human. Other animals veer. So do objects, such as stars. The theory of veering is non-anthropocentric. It gets away from the supposition that we human animals are at the centre of ‘our’ environment. As we will see, the word ‘environment’ has veering – the French verb, virer, ‘to turn’ – inscribed within it. Veering orients us towards a new understanding of ‘the environment’.

5. This study is deeply interested in words, in where they come from, how they work, and what they can do. It is about the love of language (philology). But it is also about what is non-verbal, beyond words, other than language. There is something irreducibly, stubbornly physical and phenomenal about veering. Mostly it seems – like reading itself – to be something that happens in silence.