“The reading,” referred to as such a hallowed theoretical practice, was well-prepared for by traditional hermeneutical protocols, modeled on Biblical exegesis. It took shape as an autonomous field of literary studies and poststructuralism in the 1960s. Techniques of reading became objects of study in their own right. Meanwhile in art, the poetry reading became recognized as a performative crossover genre, at once interpretive praxis and staging of voicings and experimental modes of address. This audience-centered reading found its academic correlative in Germany in reader reception theory, presided over by Hans Georg Gadamer, Hans Robert Jauss, and Wolfgang Iser. Textual infrastructures were assigned a distinct agency (often flush with the persona of “the implied reader” or text’s “transparent mind”). This led to texts being examined for their cognitive programming function, their power to orient, direct and distract reader response (though still a far cry from determinism or the predictive processing in computational intelligence familiar today). From the early 1960s on, linguistics (the Prague School, Chomsky, Saussurean semiotics) also left its strong mark on “the reading.” The focus here was on discursive structures as signifying systems that produced effects that could be tracked to specific figures of speech and formalist paradigms. Literary semiologists tested semiotic models on literary texts (as in the quintessential example of Roland Barthes’ S/Z, a reading of Balzac’s novella Sarrasine). But by the mid-1970s, “the reading” shifted in disposition and affect. Inflected by the writings of Jacques Derrida, Paul de Man, and Barbara Johnson (among others), deconstructive analytics laid trip-wires, foiling synthetic argument, spurring a kind of ontology of reading that reveled in the open work of tropology, in nexes of “symptoms.” Deconstruction prompted lectiocentric approaches to all manner of text, cultural object, effet de réel, aesthetic principle, philosophical problem, media, and technics. Taking their cue, cultural studies, queer theory, and postcolonial criticism extended these approaches into a politics of contrapuntal reading that was reparatively “for” the cause of excluded, marginalized, colonized subjects. Edward Said, Henry Louis Gates, D.A. Miller, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Hortense Spillers, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Homi Bhabha, Jacqueline Rose — all repurposed the genre of “the reading” even as they subjected many of its basic moves to thoroughgoing critique. In the current era of autofiction, social media and siloed audiences, “the reading” as a self-justifying critical project shored up by institutional practices has lost its position as stable anchor of interpretation. This story has been told most recently by John Guillory in Professing Criticism. At the current pass, the question of address — the “to whom” the reading is for (or fore, in the sense of pre-prepared for, as in Barthes’ préparation du roman) — has become increasingly complex. Drawing on a number of contemporary reference points, including Sianne Ngai’s “gimmicky” reading, Peter Szendy’s “sovereign reading,” Michel Chaouli’s Something Speaks to Me (with its antifoundationalism towards “the reading” in critical pedagogy), and Fredric Jameson’s The Years of Theory (the sections on Derrida titled “How to Avoid Meaning” and “Linguistic Politics of the Third Way”), I will consider some of the ways in which reading is destined “for” and “fore.”

Emily Apter is Julius Silver Professor of French Literature Thought and Culture and Comparative Literature at New York University.

I want to understand reading in its most expansive sense, which would include but not be limited to reading a written text. Listening to music would be a form of reading, as would viewing a work of visual art; writing and translating would also, as others have said before me, be understood as forms of reading. I’ll describe reading, in each of these scenes, as an acti-passive task that creates the conditions of possibility for, or instantiates, the experience of exposure. Exposure (an ethical concept I borrow from the work of Emmanuel Levinas) refers not only to an opening to the other (the other person, or the work of art as other), but also the other within the same. I read for — in honor of or dedicated to, but also oriented towards — that which is foreign to me in me, as well as the other within the other, that which haunts and drives the work of art, but which might be foreign or illegible within that work or text.

Erin Graff Zivin is Professor of Spanish and Portuguese and Comparative Literature and Director of the Experimental Humanities Lab at the University of Southern California, Dornsife. In addition to her three books — Anarchaeologies: Reading as Misreading (Fordham University Press, 2020), Figurative Inquisitions: Conversion, Torture, and Truth in the Luso-Hispanic Atlantic (Northwestern University Press, 2014), and The Wandering Signifier: Rhetoric of Jewishness in the Latin American Imaginary (Duke University Press, 2008) — she has edited or coedited two dossiers and three books and authored 50 articles and book chapters on Latin American literature and media, deconstruction, ethics, and politics. She currently serves on the executive council of the Modern Language Association, oversees the digitization of the filmic work of Narcisa Hirsch (a collaboration between USC Digital Library and the Filmoteca Narcisa Hirsch), and is completing a fourth book, “Transmedial Exposure: The Ethics and Politics of Formal Experimentation.”

When Readers were colonial tools, a reader was a colonial subject in the making. This paper will analyze the paradoxical influence of the Reader on the formation of queer, Black Caribbean women writers as readers and their theories of reading as an ethical act. Thinking with James Phelan’s idea of “the rhetorical reader” and Kevin Quashie’s theorization of the address to the black reader as “one,” this paper will analyze ways in which queer, black, feminist writers have negotiated the relationship between rhetorical reading and sovereign reading in the context of what Dionne Brand has described as “the full-on violence of narrative.” I will concentrate on Michelle Cliff, Dionne Brand, and Marlene NourbeSe Philip, in dialogue with Black women writers in other traditions.

Emily Greenwood is James F. Rothenberg Professor of Classics and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She has a Ph.D. in classics from Cambridge University and has taught at the universities of St. Andrews, Yale, and Princeton. Her books include Thucydides and the Shaping of History (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2006) and Afro-Greeks: Dialogues Between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics in the Twentieth Century (Oxford University Press, 2010). In 2022, she guest-edited a two-volume special issue of the American Journal of Philology (issues 143.2 and 143.4) titled “Diversifying Classical Philology.” She is currently at work on two book projects: “The Recovery of Loss: Classics and the Erasure of American Experiences” and “Conjugating Black Classicisms.” Her most recent publication is an article on Harryette Mullen’s rewriting of Sappho in the volume Her Silver-Tongued Companion: Reading Poems by Harryette Mullen, edited by Georgina Colby (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).

Starting with a few remarks on some of Benjamin’s ideas about reading from his work on the “mimetic faculty,” the presentation will turn to some cases of oracular hearing and reading (“kledonomancy”): Augustine, Descartes, and Leibniz.

Daniel Heller-Roazen is the Arthur W. Marks 1919 Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, where he is an associated member of the Departments of Classics, French and Italian, German, and Philosophy. He is the author of Absentees: On Variously Missing Persons (Princeton University Press, 2021), No One’s Ways: An Essay on Infinite Naming (Princeton University Press, 2017), Dark Tongues: The Art of Rogues and Riddlers (Princeton University Press, 2013), The Fifth Hammer: Pythagoras and the Disharmony of the World (Zone Books, 2011), The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations (Princeton University Press, 2009), The Inner Touch: Archaeology of a Sensation (Princeton University Press, 2007), Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language (Zone Books, 2005), and Fortune’s Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). He has also edited the Norton Critical Edition of The Arabian Nights (W.W. Norton, 2010) and Giorgio Agamben’s Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford University Press, 1999). In 2010, he was awarded the Medal of the Collège de France. In 2018, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

I will try to show how Bakhtin’s concept of the superaddressee is useful, indeed perhaps more useful for thinking about a kind of self-conscious impersonal address that black fiction writing calls for either out of an actual or as a residual need to bear witness for a readership that is absented or interdicted by the history of anti-black violence, including the history of exclusionary and derogatory rhetoric in literature itself. In particular, I am interested in the ways in which the black superaddressee creates the condition for an ethical interpellation of the black reader who is often forced to decide to what extent the ethics of reading will or will not supervene on the pleasure of the text, or in Barthes’ terms between the black readerly priority for the text to be lisible and the black writer’s interest in the possibilities of the scriptible for the same work.

Jesse McCarthy is Associate Professor of English and of African and African American Studies at Harvard University. He is the author of The Blue Period: Black Writing in the Early Cold War (University of Chicago Press, 2024); a collection of essays Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul? (W.W. Norton, 2021), awarded the 2022 Whiting Award for Nonfiction; and a novel, The Fugitivities (Melville House, 2021). He is editor of The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. Du Bois for the Norton Library and co-editor of the African American poetry anthology Minor Notes, Volume 1 (Penguin Classics, 2023). His articles and reviews have appeared in journals like Novel, Transposition, and African American Review, as well as The New York Times Book Review, The Nation, n+1, and Dissent. He is literary fiction editor at Public Books and a contributing editor at The Point.

What is the difference between reading and giving a reading? This is the question with which a literary critic might begin to respond to the call of this conference, “For Whom do We Read?” In either case, the privileged if unsignified figure of the question-text is the reader, whether as solitary consumer of literature, or as orator. The out-loudness of the reading that is given by an orator, including the poet as orator, is the definitive element in the recoding of reading as active rather than passive, and social rather than private. But if one comes to the question of reading from elsewhere than the Euro-American academy’s fields of literary study, the urtext likely being read is not the “work” but the “letter,” ranging from the letters home from migrant and indentured laborers, to the letter to the editor of the vernacular newspaper. A vast historiographical literature on extractivist colonialism and migrancy concerns the writing and reading of letters for those who lacked alphabetic literacy. In southern Africa, these scenes of reading aloud, and the humiliation of having to have another read one’s “private business” in public, have themselves been incorporated into the poetry and orature of migrant laborers. Their accounting of the psycho- and social dynamics of the public reading of an intimate epistle might be thought as a matter of generic transgression. Or we might recall Lacan’s account of the signifier’s dominance in his reading of Poe’s short story about the purloined letter to consider it as a moment in the mimetic relay that inducts people into a symbolic order where literacy is precisely the mark of access to, or exclusion from, (bureaucratized) power. And as Lacan has shown us, this would mean recognizing that such a scene is also the locus for a certain displacement of reading as a hermeneutical exercise. But is it? Where does the reading end? Does the commentary, reflection, debate and disputation, or remediation of the reported letter constitute part of its reading? Or, to put the matter differently, how and when does the text acquire its status as an object that can be called “enclosed”? What or who makes the envelope of the letter? And in what sensory domain does it exist? Is overhearing also a reading over the shoulder? In this essay, which shall take the epistolary tradition of southern African migrant laborers as its primary archive, I shall argue that it can be a reading but only if it generates a secondary text, a commentary. It is the envelope — broadly construed — that generates the letter as the object of a reading.

Rosalind C. Morris is Professor of Anthropology at Columbia University. Her recent and forthcoming books include Accounts and Drawings from Underground, with William Kentridge (revised edition, Seagull Books, 2021), Unstable Ground: The Lives, Deaths, and Afterlives of Gold in South Africa (forthcoming with Columbia University Press, 2024), and the poetry collection For Lack of a Dictionary (forthcoming with Fordham University Press, 2025). In addition, she is the editor of the forthcoming memoir by Rafael Sánchez, Reconocimientos: A Memoir of Becoming (Fordham University Press, 2025). She is the recipient of numerous awards and honors, including a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her films have received widespread recognition, including official selection by the Berlinale Forum Expanded.

When we read Capital, who are we reading for: our individual, present selves, a historical situation that is long closed, or a future group free of capitalism? In this particular project, the “for” of reading is tied directly to the “for” of critique. The critique is overtly presented “for” one specific group. In volume 1 of Capital, Marx writes that the critique of political economy can “only represent that class whose vocation in history is the overthrow of the capitalist mode of production and the final abolition of all classes — the proletariat.” How does a critique “represent”? We must explore how the critique of capital can only be carried out “for” workers — and what it means for anyone to read “for” them. It might mean from the standpoint of, on behalf of, representing, ventriloquizing, or inventing and even reifying them.

Paul North is Maurice Natanson Professor of German at Yale University. He teaches and writes critical theory. His books include The Problem of Distraction (Stanford University Press, 2011), The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford University Press, 2015), Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness (Princeton University Press, 2021), and a new translation and critical reading edition of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 (Princeton University Press, 2024).

For almost two centuries, middle-class adults have equated reading-for with reading-to. A model that makes reading aloud the only exception to the norm of textual autonomy fails, however, to account for scenarios that disjoin the voiced from the interpersonal. Think, on the one hand, of reading aloud to oneself — whether the “one” in question happens to be a newly-literate person sounding out syllables, a worshipper praying from a page, or a professor timing a conference paper in front of a mirror. Think, conversely, of silent reading on someone else’s behalf. (An obscenity judge or a Mom for Liberty skims to predict or prevent other people’s reading; a humanist scholar’s secretary reads to prepare or replace the reading that will be, or would have been, undertaken by his master.) The distinction between voiced and silent reading, in short, overlaps only occasionally with the less salient opposition between the agent who reads and the beneficiary — or victim — for whose sake that reading happens. The talk that I’ll read aloud, to you, asks how shifting ideas about the power relation between reader and readee — from Victorian etiquette advice to the marketing of LLMs — reflect changing norms about whether to count textual experience as labor or as leisure.

Leah Price is Henry Rutgers Distinguished Professor of English at Rutgers University, where she founded and directs the Rutgers Initiative for the Book. Her books include What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (Basic Books, 2019), winner of the Christian Gauss Award; How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton University Press, 2012), winner of the Robert Lowry Patten Award and the Channing Prize; and The Anthology and the Rise of the Novel (Cambridge University Press, 2000). She edited Further Reading with Matthew Rubery (Oxford University Press, 2020), Unpacking my Library (Yale University Press, 2011), and Literary Secretaries/Secretarial Culture with Pam Thurschwell (Routledge, 2005). She writes for The New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Times Literary Supplement, Public Books, and The New York Review of Books and is a section editor for Public Books. She is spending 2024–25 as Lyell Reader in Bibliography and a visiting fellow at Balliol College, Oxford.

Thomas Schestag is Professor of German Studies at Brown University. He has studied comparative literature and philosophy in Berlin, Paris, Strasbourg and Zurich. His research interests include the relation between literature and philology; theories of names and naming; the intersection of poetry, philosophy, and political theory; the theory and practice of translation; and the question of a sense for language that precedes the preconceptual notion of a linguistic common sense. His most recent books are Namenlose (Matthes & Seitz, 2019), erlaubt, entlaubt (Engeler Verlag, 2021), and philía (Matthes & Seitz 2024), as well as Le Soleil / Die Sonne by Francis Ponge (Matthes & Seitz, 2020), which he edited and translated.