Toward the end of her consideration of the National Endowment of the Arts’ study of Americans’ reading practices (“You Are What You Read,” The New York Times, 2007), Leah Price goes out of her way to dispel any fears that reading as we know it is significantly imperiled: “The one hypothesis that neither Fahrenheit 451 nor ‘To Read or Not to Read’ supports,” she assures us, “is that reading itself stands in any danger. Although Bradbury equates totalitarianism with book burning, his novel never explains how a surveillance state could function without record-keeping.” Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood frame the issue in similarly conciliatory terms in their afterword to the Fall 2009 issue of the journal Representations (ed. Stephen Best & Sharon Marcus), which inaugurated the era of surface reading. “The scandal is perhaps not that people don’t read;” they claim,

it is rather that our discussions of literature do not require, or sometimes even invite, literal literacy. Or maybe the scandal is simply that we do not admit that our literary culture does not depend, and has perhaps never depended, on a thorough and literal literacy. Don’t the browsing and abridging, skimming and snoozing we do as we read anything from the Times to the Tempest, from street signs to semiotic ones, get happily arranged by us, retrospectively, under the large umbrella of “reading”?... To define literacy narrowly as the ability to write and read a particular script is now seen by many who study literacy as hopelessly narrow and punitively ethnocentric.

If one detects an evasion in these formulations, it inheres in the refusal to consider ‘not reading’ in sufficiently literal terms. Rather, Price accepts bureaucratic record-keeping as a stand-in for reading, while Apter and Freedgood enumerate several other compensatory practices.

This panel seeks to revisit the problem of nonreading by, first, avoiding the temptation to simply widen our definition of reading to encompass reading-adjacent practices that might ameliorate the perceived loss felt by intransigent readers. While surface reading might be seen as the apotheosis of literary-critical trends that had been brewing since the advent of ‘distant reading’ and the computational analysis of scholars like Franco Moretti, this session aims to think through the ramifications of a disappearance of reading qua reading.

In her case study of the censorship and popular reception of Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar’s book of short stories The Adivasi Will Not Dance (2015), Shalmi Barman examines how calls to not read the book were buttressed on social media by a consciousness of the current social justice movements led by India’s Dalit-Bahujan-Adivasi (DBA) activists. Noting that Shekhar’s supporters cited his would-be censors’ non-reading or erroneous reading as disqualifying conditions for critical judgment, Barman reveals how reading and non-reading have become sites of contested definitions of liberalism within the fraught political climate of the modern Indian state.

Picking up on the importance of nonreading as an increasingly central trope in cases of censorship and decanonization, Brendan Beirne illustrates how technological changes wrought by the hegemony of social media have lead many readers to view their attention as a monetized commodity that holds imputed exchange value. Under these auspices, reading comes to be viewed as a de facto endorsement. Turning to Amy Hungerford’s dual rationales (one published in The Guardian, the other in Making Literature Now) for “Not Reading [David Foster Wallace]”) Beirne uncovers the logic that motivates public endorsements of author boycotts, coerced and voluntary retractions, and the like.

Lucy Biederman illustrates how the neurological condition congenital aphantasia functions as a literal version of nonreading. She weighs the implications for how reading is understood by literary theorists, giving particular attention to the emerging field of cognitive literary studies. Given that most cognitive literary scholarship operates with a definition of reading that involves making mental imagery (e.g., Brann, Scarry, Richardson), Biederman asks how one theorizes encounters with texts that take place outside the production of such mental imagery. Taking her own aphantasia as a starting point, Biederman draws on diverse theoretical approaches, from Stanley Fish’s reader response theoretics to recent work in neuroaesthetics by Elaine Scarry, Ellen J. Esrock, and Kay Young. Through such a reading, she models ways of not-seeing that can be used to generate new and productively divergent readings and not-readings.

Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s essays “Unpacking My Library” (1931) and “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1936), Leisha Jones considers the aura of the book in the age of the digital native. In post-fact societies, Jones avers, the re-enchantment of the book as contemporary totem depends in some part on its vestigial function as knowledge repository, purveyor of cultural capital, and semiotic gateway to imagined and ‘real’ worlds, invoking nostalgia for a time when words on the page were supposed to ‘mean’ something. For a generation of cell-phone cyborgs, the book’s totemic status also depends upon our attraction to the quaint thingyness of older mass-produced technologies and products. The book, now freed from our need to read it, takes on new life as interior design, clutter to be purged when no longer ‘sparking joy’ or wallpaper arranged by like-colored spines. Nowhere is this more in evidence than in the digital communities of book fetishists who have posted over 29 million Instagram images of and about books, known as #bookstagrams. Does the digital rendering of the analog book-object maintain its real-life aura? The presentation concludes with an examination and categorization of #bookstagrams in light of these concerns.

In traversing a wide swath of discursive territory, we have decided to include four presentations on this panel. Given the speculative nature of the topic, we wish to allow time for audience input that may help the panelists flesh out their ideas. To this end, we have agreed to restrict each paper to 12-15 minutes, while the presider is committed to running a tight ship!