Open Book

The 15 essays gathered in this volume attempt to ask questions about reading, and more especially about the minimal preliminary gesture of opening a book in order to read. What makes reading possible and impossible, and how are that possibility and impossibility figured in the texts we read? The concern here is not with 'how to read', nor with the 'fate of reading', but with a much more modest, but perhaps also more nagging, question: what does reading demand if it is to be reading?...
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The 15 essays gathered in this volume attempt to ask questions about reading, and more especially about the minimal preliminary gesture of opening a book in order to read. What makes reading possible and impossible, and how are that possibility and impossibility figured in the texts we read? The concern here is not with 'how to read', nor with the 'fate of reading', but with a much more modest, but perhaps also more nagging, question: what does reading demand if it is to be reading? What is reading, reading itself? One constant thread here is this: reading entails the unreadable. The unreadable, rather than the merely readable, is the 'object' of reading. And once what is read is the unreadable, then the supposed unit of the book must be opened, certainly, but must also remain open beyond any normal calculation of reading time or interpretative outcomes. The open book is just what cannot be read like an open book, is not entirely open, cannot ever quite be read.