Reading After Reading

Introduction

"Reading after reading" suggests that something is passing away and something new is coming into being. The sense that reading might be a pivot for this exchange is something most of us share: it explains the changes in our fingertips and research practices, our bedtimes, our addictions, our working habits, our ways of keeping up with the news, and conducting a romantic correspondence. Slight adjustments in how we engage with writing as well as more dramatic transformations in how digital text is produced and trawled for us at a sublime scale register a reshaping of human behavior that may prove more significant than any changes to content or genre or discipline happening in our lifetime. What, after all, is AI but a seismic shift in reading - and writing - practices? AI might displace some forms of reading, especially in the drawn out reading of novels. Its proponents present it as a massive, timesaving shortcut. Fewer people, then, might read fewer long books, and they might miss out on all the phenomenological richness that type of reading affords. But AI also ushers in and requires other forms of reading - the ability, for instance, to read and analyze summaries and interpretations that are produced from an amalgamation of other texts.

But the literary text hasn't gone away entirely. AI tools, social media, even the seemingly ubiquitous appearance of books in video games and film provide the means for more people to have more basic knowledge about literature and the ability to engage in more literary discussions, even at a rudimentary level. So human reading has not disappeared. Seen in the round, our engagement with text has become more compelling, more consuming, and more widespread than at the highpoint of the print revolution in the seventeenth century, or of literacy's spread in the nineteenth. So how are we - without getting stuck on the shoals of remorse - to explain what remains?

The authors in this cluster agree that we should not count on the reading of literary fiction in its traditional and analogue forms to endure. Yet they anticipate this displacement differently. For Charlie Tyson, a world without reading is one without the ability to mark the end of the working day - how are we to reconcile ourselves to work if not through reading practices that limn it? For Lindsay Thomas, it's the loss of the future that's at stake in the forever quest for a more efficient present. Even recent programs of speed reading, she stresses, imagined a future that was bulked up with knowledge acquired by the ideal human reader. For Sophie Corser, the loss of reading involves the de-centering of the university as a place of lived experience and employment: the new world that readers negotiate online and beyond the classroom context is haunted by the decline of that institution. The idea of reading as a path forwards is still available, but how, Corser asks, might that trajectory continue to make a difference in our destination?

Thinking back to the nineteenth century, Leah Price reminds us that reading has always been an occupation, an engagement of the body and the mind more complex than any endpoint. In these terms, it's a complex process that falls out of the picture once we enter a world of reading without the bodily occupations in view. Looking at a different type of process, Robert Eaglestone takes issue with educational models that posit a developmental trajectory whereby people learn to read by progressing from “decoding” to “functional literacy” to interpretation. To help foster future readers and therefore the future of reading itself, he argues that we must loosen our grip on such linear models and nurture, instead, children's desire to speculate, reason, and decode all at once - to get back to the “holism” of reading. For Matthew Rubery, who stays cautiously optimistic about reading's capaciousness, the one-thing-at-a-time quality of print reading has already given way to the kinds of multi-tasking opened-up by listening to narrative while doing something else.

In concert, these pieces are thoughtful without being mournful. They are not about the loss of literature, which continues to matter in all the ways one expects it must for literary critics. Rather, they register the deep history of the rhythms that analogue reading gave us; the ways of spending and freeing up time, moving through space, sequestering ourselves and being with others, reading with our hands before the promise that hands might be free of books. The cluster also points to new temporal possibilities, once or if print reading dries up. While many see AI as the major threat to reading in our time, it is clear that ongoing technological developments could open up new times, spaces, and conditions for more reading. Robot mowers and vacuum cleaners and personal AI agents could, possibly, reverse the multi-tasking audiobooks have both responded to and enabled, for example, by making that kind of reading just another short-lived moment in textual consumption's long history.

These pieces dare us, too, to think about human reading as something that must continue even if reading is outsourced to machines, as well as about the state of disorientation and unemployment risked as we move in this direction. What does it mean to look forward to a world potentially without books? Or to look backward to literary memories that were never embodied? Or to wrap literature into a day of work rather than placing it outside it? Or to exercise literary skills in a landscape where these make no difference to the plot?

Perhaps unsurprisingly, this cluster doesn't offer any hard or easy answers to such questions. Rather, it opens up the promise and potential of different ways of reading, whilst not shying away from the many concerns about reading's futures. Whether you read it on your phone or in print, whether you skip sections or read every word, or ask AI for a summary of the cluster, you will be partaking in - and possibly creating - the modes and conditions in which reading continues to happen.

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Ben Davies (@bendavies.bsky.social) is DIAS Professor of Literature in the Department of Culture and Language and Chair of Humanities at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study at the University of Southern Denmark. His most recent book is the coauthored Reading Novels during the Covid-19 Pandemic (Oxford UP, 2022), which received the 2022 British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies Monograph Prize. He is currently working on a book project about university reading practices.

Christina Lupton (@RutgersEnglish) is Bewley Professor in the English Department at Rutgers University, and author of several books about the history and experience of reading. Her new book, When Writing Wasn't Work (under contract with Columbia University Press) offers an alternative history of life-writing since the eighteenth-century as a non-professional, working-class practice that has held space open for institutions and experiences distinct from those of labor.

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Banner image courtesy of Thilo Folkerts. Jardin de la Connassaince. 2010. Books, cultivated mushrooms, wooden boards. Grand-Métis, Québec, Canada. Divisare. https://divisare.com/projects/198199-100landschaftsarchitektur-jardin-de-la-connaissance

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