000			a
999			_c34694 _d34694
008			251010b xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9781942130963 _c(hbk)
082			_a306.48801 _bSZE
100			_aSzendy, Peter
245			_aPowers of reading : from Plato to audiobooks
260			_bZone Books, _c2025 _aNew York :
300			_a207 p. ; _bill., _c24 cm
365			_b29.95 _c$ _d89.70
504			_aIncludes translation. Translated from the French. Includes bibliographical references.
520			_aPeter Szendy offers a subtle, persuasive, and unprecedented account of the time of reading and its scene of address, one that is as archaic as it is contemporary. When we read, are we listening to a voice or being read to? If it is not a private and monologic exercise, how do we understand the populated scene of reading? What reads when we read, and how does reading push and pull between temporalities and voices? Why do we keep leaving the text when we seek to obey the injunction to stay within its terms? Questions such as these produce a fresh, even startling, consideration of a wide range of literary and popular texts, including Hobbes’ Leviathan, Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Kant’s moral injunctions, Sade, Valéry, Blanchot, and de Certeau, but also modern fiction, film, audiobooks, and hypertext. The power of reading turns out to belong to its surprising engagement with time and direction: the deliberate reader stays close but strays, tries to fill in the gaps but gets pushed back by a countercurrent. The key to the text is sought ‘outside’ only to be led back to the text and its failure to deliver a final answer. Equally at odds with older versions of literary formalism that insist on the self-referentiality of the text as well as contextualists who scour an external social order to discover the truth of the text, Szendy approaches that very conflict as an oscillation constitutive of reading itself. Paradoxically, reading is sustained precisely by what interrupts its teleological flow.The result is a comic, profound, and timely reconceptualization of reading which rushes forward only to find itself pushed back into the heart of the text, which discovers that this incessant breaking from the text, this headlong rushing ahead to the world outside the text is a sequence of overreach, delay, and return that forms the ragged rhythm of reading itself. Powers of Reading is a patient, brilliant, and illuminating inquiry into the crosscurrents of voice and address, one that speaks to the speed and complexity of our time, how we are upended by our forward propulsions, to consider how multiple voice, action, and passivity are all rearranged in the scene of reading.”—Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor in the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley.
650			_aArts
650			_aPolitical aspects
650			_aEurope History 21st century
650			_aHarmony
650			_aAesthetics
650			_aReading Philosophy
942			_2ddc _cBK