Writing as a practice has traditionally been both taught and theorized with far greater care than the practice of reading. Yet, more so than writing, reading is the mainstay of our life as scholars. Indeed, if we conceive of reading broadly as a process of making sense of systems of signs, we might be said to spend nearly all of our waking time ‘reading:’ reading written texts, visual texts, oral texts and social texts. As such, reading may be said to lie at the heart of our life not only as scholars, but as human beings. Yet seldom do we turn our critical gaze to this central activity of reading. This conference is conceived as an attempt to do just that, asking scholars from a number of disciplines to address the apparently simple question: “What are people doing when they read?”
The objective of this conference is to draw attention to the complex practices that surround and constitute acts of reading, and to begin to suggest ways to better theorize reading as well as to ways to read more reflexively.
To create a forum for wide-ranging inquiry, we are including keynote presentations by Peter K. Bol (Harvard), Vidya Dehejia (Columbia), and John Dagenais (UCLA). Peter K. Bol is the Charles H. Carswell Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University. His research is focused on intellectual, social, and cultural change in China since the seventh century. He is co-editor of Ways with Words: Writing about Reading Texts from Early China (2000) and his most recent work focuses on the creation and interpretation of space in Chinese garden design. John Dagenais is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese at UCLA, and author of The Ethics of Reading in a Manuscript Culture: Glossing the Libro de buen amor (1994). In this work, Dagenais addresses the theory and practices of reading in medieval Spain, exploring interventions by readers and scribes that effectively re-shape the texts. Vidya Dehejia is the Barbara Stoler Miller Professor of Indian and South Asian Art at Columbia University, and author and curator of numerous books and catalogues including Discourse in Early Buddhist Art: Visual Narratives of India (1997) and Devi, The Great Goddess: Female Divinity in South Asian Art (1999). Much of her recent scholarship examines the use of the human body as a recurring theme in India's artistic tradition and explores the manner in which the sensuous and the sacred coexist within the same boundaries.
These speakers and other panelists, including both Jill Casid and Preeti Chopra, and participants will be asked to address and think about the broad range of fundamental Hermeneutic, ethical and political issues raised by acts of reading, such as: To what degree are reading practices shaped and/or determined by a given culture and in what ways are they determined or suggested by the medium that is read? Does a given culture develop distinctive ways of reading that cut across different media? Do different media generate possibilities for reading that challenge or go beyond cultural constraints? And, finally, does a focus on reading reveal limitations to the metaphor of ‘text’ as a means of understanding social or other non-verbal sign systems?