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...