Beth Blum sets the stage by embracing the instability of reading, now shrouded in contradiction. Reading has a long history of being understood as complicit, along with the rest of intellectual life, in estranging the individual from the pure presence of natural, active being. In a striking reversal, thanks to today's spread of technology and the “attention economy,” reading has been enlisted as a “slow technology” that helps the individual achieve “presence”; that is, the ability to thicken and slow down the moment. Blum locates the celebration in literature-as-presence in the rise of consumer mindfulness culture in which “being present” is the “holy grail,” as Ronald Purser observes. Blum asks how to reconcile these contrasting forms of reading, in which it is both a source of estrangement from the immediate present and a vehicle of heightened presence, as essentially analogous to meditation.
If mindfulness culture is a product of the algorithm, influencers are their most avid practitioners. Next, Tanja Grubnic shows how the “It Girl” adopts “bibliotherapy” as a self-fashioning device. Historically, bibliotherapy has been “absurdly cost-effective” compared to professional help (Price). Today, it has arguably never been cheaper to access mental health "services" online. In the era of self-branding, bibliotherapy is defined by a bookish aesthetic mobilized for persona creation. Grubnic conducts a close reading of Sheena Patel’s I’m a Fan. The novel chronicles a user’s obsession with an Instagram author who embodies today’s “It Girl,” a woman engaged in mindfulness activities like reading and avoiding the internet. Reading has morphed into an offline status symbol, casting reading for self-care in a classist light that glamourizes its inaccessibility compared to low-cost or free tools like five-minute meditations, virtual therapists, and even AI chatbots.
Digital overwhelm may prevent barriers to reading, but this has not stopped the algorithm from pushing bookish content as an antidote to itself. Hannah Jorgensen considers how ambient reading—for comfort as popularized by the breakout success of the “cozy” genre—is resonant mostly as an aesthetic. Using the video game Tiny Bookshop as a case study, Jorgensen explores how the game invites players to “leave everything behind” and run a second-hand bookshop. The pleasure of books is not just in the abstract. A key mechanic relies on players giving recommendations to customers: populated with a mix of real and fabricated titles, players get to draw on their knowledge of books to guess what their customers want. The “cozy” game, then, offers the promise of comfort, care, and sociality related to books, without needing to log off technology, and without needing to read a book at all.
While one might wince at the thought of swapping books for video games, the aestheticization of endless books finds relevance in the history of novelistic length. Lindsay Thomas concludes by asking about reading not considered good for you, but bad for you. Novels like Ulysses are considered masterpieces because they are long; thus reading them makes one an accomplished reader. Thomas turns to the distastefulness, perhaps “trashiness” of excessive prose generated by AI known as slop. The current era’s careening production of text, supercharged by the AI people use to write everything from social media posts to novels, throws the valuation of quantity into question. Slop is bad not only because it is written by machines but because it is excessive. Novels, in their competition with media for readers’ attention, threaten us with too much text. Slop is not the opposite of the novel, or the human-authored text, but rather its evil twin.
To prioritize perspectives across career stage (tenured professors, new assistant professor, postdoc), the panel includes four papers averaging around thirteen minutes, leaving over twenty minutes for discussion.