Writing reading. Poetologies of knowledge about reading

• Applicant: Dr. Elias Kreuzmair
• Subject Area: German Literary and Cultural Studies (Modern German Literature)
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544700717

The project inquires into the devices of representation in regard to the knowledge about reading. In doing so, it responds to a fundamental desideratum of reading research: the question of the constitution of reading as an object of knowledge has not yet been systematically investigated. Previous approaches to the study of reading and its history tend to assume the stability of its object. What reading is always seems to have been clarified. The project, by contrast, starts from the thesis that what is understood by the term 'reading' is produced by each text about reading in a specific way. It is precisely at the level of writing procedures that one can observe how texts about reading work to produce the stability of their object. In examining the procedures, the often-implicit presuppositions of the texts and the specific constrictions of their view of reading can be made visible. In this sense, metaphors and scenes in writing about reading form a central object of the project. The project also takes a look at the genre and media format of texts about reading and their participation in the formation of various "distributions of the sensible" (Rancière) for the first time. In its choice of objects, the project makes a new start in the historiography of reading. Up to now, this has concentrated on the social, cultural, and media-historical reconstruction of reading as a cultural technique on the one hand and on the history of the humanities on the other. The hitherto largely unconnected fields will be addressed together in the analysis of the forms of representation in order to systematically open up transitions and overlaps as well as differences. In order to examine the imparting, circulation, and production of knowledge about reading and the associated poetological processes, the discourse- and media-analytically informed study focuses on three main areas: 1. reading primers in the early modern period, 2. public and popular debates about reading (reading mania/addiction around 1800, bibliophilia around 1900, digitization around 2000), and 3. theories of professional reading from hermeneutics to deconstruction to distant reading and post critique. By focusing on three groups of texts, which are situated in different historical and systematic formations of knowledge, essential lines of reading as an object of knowledge are explored. With its results, the project can make a significant contribution to reading research and provide new impulses with regard to a topic that is also much debated beyond academia.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants