Reading After Reading
"Reading" is a complex and politically contested word: important to everyone, it means different things to different groups. I've been collaborating with psychology colleagues in my institution's Teenage Reading Network, led by psychologist Jessie Ricketts and, while I share some of the concerns about the end of print reading and the institutional and technological crises of Higher Education, this work has given me a wider way to think about the meanings of reading and possible futures of literacy. What I want to suggest is that people will continue to participate in discussions about meaning and interpretation even if functional literacy declines. For instance, the many intense debates about Christoper Nolan's The Odyssey - based on a text many haven't read - suggests that less literacy will not necessarily lead to a future with less interpretation. In the end, engagement with what we think of as a literary or cultural debates are debates about forms of life. I want to begin by unpicking some different senses of "reading."
There seem to me to be (at least) three kinds of meaning clustered around the word "reading," each used by different groups.
The first meaning of "reading" is that used mainly by educational psychologists: mastering the basic move from graphemes to spoken language. The study of this aspect of how people learn to read is located in psychology and in education departments and it is, unsurprisingly, an enormous and contentious academic field. In the USA there is an acrimonious public debate over the science of reading. In the UK, the parallel debate is known as the Reading Wars or the Phonics Wars.1 In short, what's known (somewhat misleadingly) as the "Simple View of Reading" argues that this basic move combines two capabilities. The first is word recognition, sometimes called "decoding": this is where phonics is used, learning to decode symbols into speech. The second capability what's called language comprehension, understanding the meaning of words and sentences once they are decoded.
The second "reading" is sometimes called "functional literacy": the ability to read prescriptions, to use a common example. This is crucial in knowledge transmission, and understanding different forms, contexts, and speakers. This is the reading that most often concerns politicians and policy makers.
Finally, there is the third sort of "reading," which is what we in literary studies mean when we say that we "make" a reading: we make an interpretation, whether simply making inferences from texts or something more formal. Andrew Elfenbein rightly comments that literary scholars "should hesitate more than they do to make 'reading' synonymous with 'interpretation'" but let it serve here as a kind of placeholder.2 Interpretation is clearly at the core of the discipline of literary studies.
These three meanings of reading are clearly interrelated but it is not clear how. One UK government body, the Office for Standards in Education, Children's Services and Skills, who inspect services providing education and skills, reduces the third sense of reading just to the second, arguing that literary texts exist to give "pupils opportunities to encounter ... complex vocabulary and structures," that is, to give practice in functional literacy. Another recent major UK government report, the Curriculum and Assessment Review, recognizing that this is a confused territory, more sensibly recommended that "the distinction between English and literacy" be clarified.3
My psychologist colleagues Kathy Rastle and Maria Korochkina argue the eminently commonsense view that English as a discipline is "mostly concerned with [the] third meaning of the word" reading, but that one "cannot have functional literacy without acquiring decoding skill; and one cannot offer a critical analysis of literature without functional literacy": for them, these three meanings of "reading" are teleological stages.4 This is presaged in Margaret Meek's classic study, On Being Literate: to
pass from reading a novel to interpreting it, saying what it means, is a significant move for all literates, and one which depends a great deal on the teacher's understanding of how to encourage a young reader or would be writer to possess a text and not simply to read it.5
Meek's description seems to illustrate this movement through the three senses of reading, from decoding/language comprehension to functional literacy to interpretation: as it were, from basic literacy to the discipline of English.
However, I want to contest, as it were, the linear nature of this relationship. I think my psychologist friends are interestingly wrong because they have a fuzzy, or perhaps, rather, over-specialized, disciplinary and particular idea of what it is to be, in the ontological sense. Roughly speaking, we're people, not robots. We first inhabit and interpret the world, we make meaning. We hear a motorbike backfiring: we do not, as if we were a sound measuring instrument with pointy robot ears, register a noise at a certain decibel count and movement, then compare it to all the other noises we could hear, and then decide on some kind of mental drop-down menu that it is a motorbike backfiring. Indeed, even being mistaken about the noise relies on it always-already being interpreted ("oh, so it wasn't a motorbike?"). That is to say, our location in the world is fundamentally and first hermeneutic, interpretative, which is what Martin Heidegger means when he writes that "statement and its structure, the apophantical "as," are based on interpretation and its structure, the hermeneutical "as," and furthermore on understanding."6
The kind of cognition that comes from decoding and word comprehension (i.e., learning to read) relies for humans upon this basic hermeneutic grounding in the world. Meek writes that, "Reading is the process of turning written language"—or any text—"into meaning."7 But to do this, however, you need already to have meaning. This is the absolutely fundamental meaning-making or interpretative aspect of our being which underlies reading. We don't come to a world or a form of life through reading words or learning to read words: we come to words through and from a world, from a form of life. Of course, there is a simultaneous feedback loop here. What we read can change our form of life, too, but not from a blank slate: we move from one form to another. This is one reason why literature is so important. But in any case, both decoding/language comprehension and functional literacy only make sense in a world to which interpretation has already given meaning. This is why, for example, schools try to create a "literacy culture" to support the teaching of reading, and why, too, why some people find phonics counterintuitive: it's "reading" without "meaning."
These distinctions of the word "reading" and my re-orientation of the more commonsense sequence of decoding/comprehension, functional literacy and interpretation, has, I think three broad consequences.
First, and most obviously, in wider debates about reading and literacy and what we mean by these, we need to have finer and clearer distinctions. Trying to clarify what "reading" means is important, then, because when we talk about, say, a post-literate world, or posit intentions towards de-literacy, it's useful to be clear about what we mean and why. For example, the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment for England suggests functional literacy among school age children in England is slightly increasing, while other surveys suggest that reading of literary and non-literary texts is decreasing. Our debates need to be able to reflect these nuances. This is essential especially when we in literary studies are making our case to policy makers, for whom reading is mostly functional literacy. We need to be able to make our case that literacy is not just functional but "all the way down": how, in the end, reading is more than just reading.
Second, issues of pedagogy have already begun to return to our (more literary) discussions of these matters: witness Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan's The Teaching Archive: A New History for Literary Study and Ben Knight's Pedagogic Criticism: Reconfiguring University English Studies. But perhaps these conversations could be made even wider: Alexander Manshel's recent work argues while there is work "on the pedagogy of secondary school English... that classroom—the place where more people read and discuss and write about more literature more often than anywhere else—is nearly invisible"8 and two more fascinating and brilliant books also engage with reading in these wider senses, Andrew Elfenbein's The Gist of Reading and Matthew Rubery's Reader's Block. Discussions of literary and literacy matters might work fruitfully together.
Finally, it is now possible to imagine a world in which functional literacy is reduced or, in complex ways, gets outsourced to machines: in which, say, medical students have textbooks read to them, and patients engage with AI summaries describing their own conditions. But it does not follow from this possibility that the grounding stories about illness and wellbeing must become redundant. These stories and the developing and shared meanings we draw from them were never downstream of functional literacy: instead, those stories and the other kinds of reading they elicit were there first and may well be there last - and without them, no other literacy makes sense. Debates over literary matters are really debates over interpretation and forms of life: this is why they are so important and so intractable.
Robert Eaglestone (@bobeaglestone.bsky.social) is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of eight books, including Truth and Wonder: A Literary Introduction to Plato and Aristotle (2022), The Broken Voice: Reading Post-Holocaust Literature (2017), The Holocaust and the Postmodern (2004) and the textbook Doing English (4th edition 2017), as well as the pamphlet 'Powerful knowledge', 'cultural literacy' and the study of literature in schools (2021). He's the editor or co-editor of ten more books and his work has been translated into eight languages. He co-founded The British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies in 2017. He is the Education Policy Lead for the English Association (the MLA's UK sibling) and has advised the UK government on literary education matters and on Holocaust memory. He writes regularly in the educational and literary press, and occasionally for the national and international media.
References
- A powerful and accessible summary is Castles, Rastle, Nation, 2018; another view is offered in Wyse, Hacking, 2024. ↩︎
- Elfenbein, Andrew, The Gist of Reading (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2018), 58. ↩︎
- United Kingdom Department of Education, Curriculum and Assessment Review Final Report, 78. www.gov.uk/government/publications/curriculum-and-assessment-review-final-report ↩︎
- Korochkina, Maria, and Kathy Rastle, "The vocabulary barrier in the General Certificate of Secondary Education (GCSE) in English Literature," The Use of English 76 (2), 23. ↩︎
- Meek, Margaret, On Being Literate (London: The Bodley Head, 1991), 181. ↩︎
- Heidegger, Martin, Being and Time, trans. Joan Stambaugh and Dennis J. Schmidt (SUNY Press: 2010), 214. ↩︎
- Meek, On Being Literate, 38. ↩︎
- Manshel, Alexander, "High School English and the Making of American Readers," American Literary History 37 (4), 1033-34. ↩︎
