Soon I begin teaching a course in the Book and Media Studies Program at Saint Michael’s College in Toronto called The History of Reading: Readers, Readerships, Reception. I am pumped. Here’s the course description – for your reading pleasure.
Reading has never been only one thing. Consider some of the ways you read on any given day. You likely scan your social media feeds a number of times. You might immerse yourself in a fantasy novel on the bus to class. You probably track storefront signs in your peripheral vision as you walk down University Avenue. In the evening you have to sweat through a tough academic article for tomorrow’s class. That’s a lot of ways of reading & we’re still in the present day!
Now widen your depth of field to reach back to 8000 BC. You watch a merchant seal a token inside a clay ball to track a trade of sheep for grain. Now you watch as an embalmer in Ptolemaic Egypt wraps a mummy in strips of papyrus that preserve the songs of Sappho. Now woodblock-printed copies of the Diamond Sutra spread the doctrine of Mahayana Buddhism across Tang Dynasty China. Now a Saxon monk in England glosses a medieval Latin text with Old English translations. Now printed broadsides of a ballad pass from hand to hand in a village market. Now a “like” button nudges an algorithm to display social media posts to new readers. All these acts belong to the history of reading, & taken together, they’re the subject of this course.
I’ve arranged it around foundational shifts in the practice of reading – for instance, from the scroll to the codex, from reading aloud to silent reading, from manuscript to printed text. Each week we will ask how reading & readers, readerships & reception, changed as the transition unfolded. And while the course has no single thesis, it will offer a few postulates we can test as we go. ¶ The history of reading is, among other things, a history of the human body. ¶ Even solitary silent reading is public & collaborative. ¶ Reading & writing are so mutually implicated that they may be two sides of one leaf. ¶ As you read these words, you contribute to the history you’re here to study. There’s no way to step outside our subject to study it from a remove.
The image atop: a detail of the frontispiece of the world’s first dated printed book, a copy of the Diamond Sutra printed in 868 in China. The colophon reads in part: “On the 15th day of the 4th month of the 9th year of the Xiantong reign period, Wang Jie had this made for universal distribution on behalf of his two parents.” More from its present holder, the British Library, here.
The Art of Compost 