Reading Now: Practices, Pedagogy, Profession

 

Mounting anxiety about declining enrollment in the humanities is often entangled with anxiety about the future of books and reading in a digital age. Reading is an elusive object of inquiry but as Robert Darnton declared thirty years ago, it has a history. This workshop will enable scholars of reading history, literary reception, and critical theory to reflect upon the past, present, and future of reading, both academic and popular. Over the last twenty years an expanding archive of texts – pulp fiction, personal letters, library records, schoolroom exercises, advice books and more -- has enriched our understanding of literacy's multiple uses; theoretical approaches to the materiality of texts and the affect that reading produces have added depth and nuance to our understanding of reading as both a social practice and a private experience. In addition, literary scholars have begun to scrutinize the history of professionalized, academic reading. Seeking alternatives to "suspicious" reading and what Rita Felski has influentially called "critique," key journals such as New Literary History and Publications of the Modern Language Association (PMLA) are proliferating forums for interrogating the dominant reading strategies of the profession; a regular column in the Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists (J19) features personal accounts of "pleasure reading." Bringing together diverse approaches to the dynamic field of reading study, this workshop will interrogate reading as an ongoing source of pleasure, anxiety, education, and ethical engagement as well as an index of cultural change.