Reading Body

This work examines the physicality of reading. Scholarship in fields such as reader-response criticism and book history often neglect the body and the physicality of the processes they study - examining reading as a disembodied act. However, reading relates reflexively to our texts, our cultures, and our bodies. By examining these relationships, I study how reading inhabits our bodies both through how we read and through how we are read. Since bodies are specific and personal, and knowing that I cannot claim objectivity about the process, I include a personal narrative as well as images of other readers. The physical experience of reading changes us and our perceptions. In light of new media developments, which are already changing reading practices, we must try to gain a more thorough, rounded understanding of what reading is in order to have some stake in what it is to become.