Department of English

Are you worried about not being able to read a long text? About how to concentrate? About when to read online and when to move to paper? About whether audiobooks count and what format to read the news in? This is a course to soothe your nerves, hone your practice, and help you think about reading’s long history as an activity -- something that has been taught and wrestled with for as long as there have been texts. We’ll be reading history and media theory by Leah Price, Matthew Rubery, Richard Grusin, Katherine Hayles, Michel de Certeau, Richard Hoggart, Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Rancière, Janice Radway, Nicholas Dames, and Alexander Galloway – all of whom offer historical perspectives on reading and its formats. But we’ll also be reading a literary text ourselves: Charles Dicken’s Bleak House. This will allow us to experiment in reading aloud, recording, illustrating, digitizing, summarising, and AI as aids and impediments to what we often too readily think of as ‘good reading.’