Reading and Its Discontents

This essay ponders over the dismissal of reading practices and theories that were linked to the modernist shift from ‘literature’ to ‘writing’ ( écriture) in the second half of the twentieth century. It provides an intellectual genealogy of the rise and fall of the writing/reading couple, before going on to consider the cultural effects – as well as the educational and institutional consequences in academia – of the challenge to literature’s ‘cultural difference’ mounted by both cognitivist and culturalist approaches to literature, in their turn away from or against ‘language’.