Foreword
Around the turn of the century, as it was becoming increasingly clear that the postmodern paradigm could no longer offer an adequate discursivization of contemporary experience, a number of influential thinkers – Ihab Hassan, Catherine Belsey, Thomas Docherty, to name but a few – started pleading for a return to reading. What they advocated is a kind of reading that learns the lessons of late-20th century ‘Theory’ but moves beyond its confines and particularly beyond its skepticisms to promote a probing and comparative interrogation of our humanity. In a 2003 article titled “Beyond Postmodernism,” for instance, Hassan recommends a rereading of the great world literature with an eye to the ways in which it foregrounds the values of trust, responsibility, truth, and humility (6). In an essay “On Reading” of the same year, Docherty proposes that reading is not only “a condition of the very possibility of subjectivity” but also a “determinant of our possibility of becoming citizens” (7). When such high stakes are attached to so simple an activity, which we learn early and do daily, it becomes clear why scholars, and language and literature specialists in particular, feel compelled to revisit the definitions, functions and practices of reading at regular intervals. In recent years, the Modern Language Association of America has proposed a special section of the PMLA titled “Learning to Read,” which came to be included in the May 2015 issue, and another, titled “Cultures of Reading,” forthcoming in 2017.
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