Reading Studies

It is not a secret that today web technologies suggest us more and more ways of replicating any content. One can not only copy and paste a text or any other media material but also create a video or an image based on a text, a movie that consists of images, a musical composition based on a painting, we may create maps, graphs, dictionaries, questionnaires and tests, annotations, adaptations of different genres but all around the same story. It seems that the list of ways how to give a new form to the old content could be limited only by your imagination.  Eugène Delacroix,  Hamlet with Horatio , 1839 Recently I was thinking about works of literary art that provoke an incredible number of replications. For example, once the Shakespeare's Hamlet was written at the beginning of 17th century, it obviously had a lot of theatrical interpretations. The play was translated in more than 75 languages. We have the masterpieces of Eugène Delacroix and John Millais (...

Some reading could be qualified as a guilty pleasure. Anyway, the "guilty" aspect of this practice may seem quite irritating as it is a judgemental perspective that we automatically associate ourselves with. As I see it, this self-accusation effect comes from the ideology of enlightenment, namely from the concept that books may determine our personality. It seems that Michel de Certeau suggested a very liberating opposing argument to this theory: the consumption of a cultural product can not fully describe who we are, probably the way we perceive it or use it is more appropriate for this purpose.  Recently I was reading a dissertation with the following title "Norms and Practices of Sexual Behavior among Russian Nobility Women, the end of 18th - beginning of 19the century" (Olga Lisitsina, 2015). In this research the author dedicates some pages to the reading aspect, highlighting that there was a broad range of forbidden books for women at that time. The m...

Carlo Ginzburg The Cheese and the Worms  is an incisive study of popular culture in the sixteenth century as seen through the eyes of the miller Menocchio, who was accused of heresy during the Inquisition and sentenced to death. Carlo Ginzburg uses the trial records to illustrate the religious and social conflicts of the society Menocchio lived in. For a common miller, Menocchio was surprisingly literate. In his trial testimony he made references to more than a dozen books, including the Bible, Boccaccio's  Decameron , Mandeville's  Travels , and a "mysterious" book that may have been the Koran. And what he read he recast in terms familiar to him, as in his own version of the creation: "All was chaos, that is earth, air, water, and fire were mixed together; and of that bulk a mass formed—just as cheese is made out of milk—and worms appeared in it, and these were the angels."

Roger Chartier The works of Roger Chartier are described by Dorothea Kraus as follows: "Authors, texts, books, and readers are four poles linked by Roger Chartier's work on the history of written culture; poles between which he attempts to draw connections through a cultural history of social life.  The concept of 'appropriation' makes it possible for this perspective not only to give rise to these research topics, but also put them in touch with reading practices that determine appropriation, and which, in turn, depend on the reading skills of a community of readers, author strategies, and text formats."

Michel de Certeau Reading as poaching is a concept developed by a French scholar, Michel de Certeau, and described in his prominent work  The Practice of Everyday Life  originally published in French in 1980. Certeau argues that everyday life works as a process of poaching on the territory of others, using the rules and products that already exist in culture in a way that is influenced, but never wholly determined, by those rules and products. Reading as an everyday practice also becomes a field for poaching. In this context the reader is perceived as an active and creative participant of the reading process. Those who create some meaning can never be aware that it would be decoded in one possible way.