Theories of Reading Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania

by Littau, Karin

• ISBN13: 9780745616599
• ISBN10: 0745616593
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-12-04
• Publisher: Polity

Summary

Why do literary theorists see reading as an act of dispassionate textual analysis and meaning production, when historical evidence shows that readers have often read excessively, obsessively, and for sensory stimulation? Posing these and other questions, this is the first major work to bring insights from book history to bear on literary history and theory. In so doing, the book charts a compelling and innovative history of theories of reading.While literary theorists have greatly contributed to our understanding of the text-reader relation, they have rarely taken into account that the relation between a book and a reader is also a relation between two bodies: one made of paper and ink, the other flesh and blood. This is why, Karin Littau argues, we need to look beyond the words on the page, and pay attention to the technical innovations in the physical format of the book. Only then is it possible to understand more fully how media technology has changed our experience of reading, and why media history presents a challenge to our conceptions of what reading is.Each chapter places the reader in specific disciplinary and historical contexts: literature, criticism, philosophy, cultural history, bibliography, film, new media. Overall, the history recounted in this book points to a split between modern literary study which regards reading as a reducibly mental activity, and a tradition reaching back to antiquity which assumed that reading was not only about sense-making but also about sensation.Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies and Bibliomania will be essential reading for all students and scholars of literary theory and history as well as of great interest to students of the history of the book and new media.

Author Biography

Karin Littau, Lecturer in Comparative Literature and Film, University of Essex

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. ix
Acknowledgements	p. x
Introduction: Anatomy of Reading	p. 1
Books	p. 3
Bibliomania	p. 4
Bodies	p. 8
A History of Reading	p. 13
From reading aloud to reading silently	p. 14
From monastic to scholastic reading	p. 15
Reading in solitude	p. 17
From intensive to extensive reading	p. 19
The Material Conditions of Reading	p. 23
Expressive function of print	p. 25
Instability of the textual object	p. 27
Histories of textual transmission	p. 29
From manuscript to typographic culture	p. 32
From print to hypermedia culture	p. 33
The Physiology of Consumption	p. 36
Side-effects of reading	p. 37
Reading-fever	p. 39
Reading addiction	p. 42
Modernity and the assault on the senses	p. 45
Eye-strain and eye-hunger	p. 49
Film-fever	p. 50
Dazzling the audience	p. 52
Dizzy in hyperspace	p. 53
(Dis)embodied in cyberspace	p. 57
Passive consumers	p. 58
The Reader in Fiction	p. 62
Dangers of reading	p. 63
The tearful reader	p. 65
The frightened reader	p. 69
The passionate reader	p. 72
Pathology of reading	p. 74
Reading games	p. 76
The danger of a future without books	p. 77
Multisensory media	p. 79
The Role o'f Affect in Literary Criticism	p. 83
Reading with/without pathos	p. 84
Docere-delectare-movere	p. 86
From reader to author to text	p. 90
Disinterested and contemplative reading	p. 92
Close reading	p. 96
Reading for sense rather than sensation	p. 98
The Reader in Theory	p. 103
(Un)readability	p. 105
A priori conditions of reading	p. 107
Controlling readers' responses	p. 108
Reading expectations	p. 109
Conventions of reading	p. 111
Interpretive communities	p. 113
Failure of reading	p. 116
Misreading	p. 119
The reader as writer	p. 120
The politics of difference	p. 122
Sexual Politics of Reading	p. 125
The resisting reader	p. 127
Black women readers	p. 128
Empirical audiences	p. 131
Active consumers	p. 134
'Low-/middle-/highbrow' reading	p. 137
Embodied reading	p. 142
Reading as/like a woman	p. 148
The feminization of the reader	p. 151
Conclusion: Materialist Readings	p. 154
Notes	p. 158
References and Bibliography	p. 168
Index	p. 186
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