I’ve been doing some groundwork for a half-baked intellectual project to scratch an itch I’ve had for a long time.
I want to understand and articulate what it’s like to read something: what happens physically, psychologically, phenomenologically, materially, socially, ontologically, hermeneutically, cognitively, emotionally, metaphysically — name an adverb, I want to try to figure out.
I want to have a philosophy of reading that’s flexible enough to cover everything from literature to street signs to sexting, and that treats reading and writing as a first-order encounter comparable to our experience of spoken language. Because for everything post-structuralism promised to break down the speech/writing binary and stop thinking of writing as a second-order sign of signs, we never really got there.
Part of this is motivated by the antipathy I have to the idea that reading teaches students how to empathize with the other, and that this above all else is the political value of reading and literature.
A kind of empathy might, occasionally, be part of what’s going on when we read, but I don’t think that really explains or exhausts what’s happening, and I don’t think the political value of empathy itself is very high. There’s a lot that’s happening when we read, and to short-circuit our way to empathy cuts off a lot of actual and imagined possibilities.
And if I can, I do not want to have to write this account of reading myself. At least not completely. I’d rather update and interpret it than make it out of whole cloth. I want to read my way into reading, not think my way there.
I don’t really have a lot to report just yet, except that most of the reading I’ve been doing has been very unsatisfying! There are a lot of thoughtful people thinking about meaning, but they’re not doing quite what I need them to. At least, not yet.
Anyways, here is a short bibliography of the books I’ve read recently, to give you an idea of some of the directions I’ve been taking this. This is sadly incomplete, just what I can gather from my recent online orders and read ebooks and my own memory. It also doesn’t include many, many books I read years ago, whether as part of my doctoral research or to satisfy my own curiosity. Still, I would be happy to have other readers point me in useful alternative directions. (I’m especially disappointed that there isn’t more analytic philosophy about reading, which has pushed me almost completely into the continental/hermeneutic/poststructuralist tradition.)
Walter Ong, An Ong Reader; Orality and Literacy
Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text; Image Music Text
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading
Keith Rayner, The Psychology of Reading
Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain
Martin Heidegger, Being and Time; Basic Problems of Phenomenology; Basic Writings
Soren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments
GWF Hegel, The Phenomenology of Spirit; Lectures on Aesthetics; The Encyclopedia
Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference; On Grammatology; Dissemination; Paper Machine
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus, Philosophical Investigations
John Dewey, Democracy and Education; How We Think
Jorge Luis Borges, Selected Nonfictions
Eric Havelock; Preface to Plato
Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious
Gyorgy Lukacs, History and Class Consciousness
Karl Marx, Capital; The Marx-Engels Reader
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities
Frantz Fanon, Black Skins, White Masks; The Wretched of the Earth; Alienation and Freedom
Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X
James Baldwin, Collected Essays
Jade Davis, The Other Side of Empathy
Paolo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed
Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics
Maurice Blanchot, A Maurice Blanchot Reader
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life
Stephane Mallarmé, The Book; Divagations
Noam Chomsky, On Language
St Augustine, On Christian Doctrine
Plus so many novels, short stories, poetry, etc.
What am I missing, friends? What should I read next? Who should I talk to? Am I chasing myself up a tree, or is there something to this that’s worth exploring further?