Read Carefully!
Conceptualizing Reading as Care in The Book of Form & Emptiness and My Salinger Year
“That’s what books are for, after all, to tell your stories, to hold them and keep them safe between our covers for as long as we’re able. […] We…
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Doing Seminar Reading
Ways and Detours of Reading/Not-Reading Seminar Texts and Papers as Actors
Letting the scene end in disaster: that was the task set by a trainer in a forum theater experiment, as part of a performance seminar in Cultural Anthropology at the Universi-ty of Basel. Students in this seminar had to pick and perform a commonly known, problematic scene from their everyday academic lives. In the first round, they were to stage this scene very dramatically, with the intent of getting the audience’s emotions running high. They were then instructed to perform the same scene a second time, but this time the audience of other students and lecturers,…
Reading for Distance
Form, Memory, and Space in Contemporary Novels of Migration
Migration is one of the most defining issues of the 21st century. Indeed, mobility scholar Thomas Nail has defined the twenty-first century “the century of the migrant.” Contemporary fiction is also greatly invested in the exploration of the phenomenon, and when we read fictions of migration, we expect certain patterns and themes: from hybridization and ambivalence, first-person and past-tense narratives, and a certain degree of autofiction, to the inclusion of magical…
Political Reading Artifacts
A Conceptual Approach on Characterizing a Certain Way of Reading
In 2021, the German Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz (domestic intelligence services) classified the political magazine Compact—an unofficial organ of the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) political party—as a right-wing, extremist publication that spreads conspiracy theories, as well as anti-Semitic, and Islamophobic content. The implication that reading Compact contributes to its readers refusing democratic principles, discriminating against minorities, and exhibiting racist nationalism reveals strongly incorporated norms regarding the necessity and influence of political reading in Western democracies.
“There Is No Alternative!”
The Case for a Co(n)temporary English Fiction: Ian McEwan’s Machines Like Me and Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein
The year is 2019. Amongst heated discussions in the UK Parliament about how to ad-minister a fair deal between the UK and the EU after the Brexit referendum vote in 2016, two of the largest literary voices of our times, Ian McEwan and Jeanette Winter-son, publish their novels about post-human dreams and Other times, namely Machines Like Me and Frankissstein: A Love Story.
