David Kurnick has argued that recent methodological debates in literary studies offer us “not new ways to interpret texts but… powerful images of what kind of people we are when we interpret.” This seminar extends Kurnick’s insight beyond the contemporary moment, asking what happens if we treat reading method and readerly subjectivity as linked from literary study’s modern theoretical beginnings. We invite participants to test, complicate, and historicize this proposition by examining how reading practices function as accounts of what a reader is, what a mind can do, and how literary experience might shape selfhood.

This question is crucial because it assumes that asking “how we read” is also asking “who we are.” To foreground the models of personhood embedded in literary-critical methods is to reconsider what conceptions of the self we adopt or disavow when we take up a method. If the discipline’s critical history has always been organized, at least in part, around the question of what kind of reader counts as aesthetically discerning, ethically responsive, or politically adequate, then we may need to tell that history differently: as a history of implicit philosophies of mind.

Even at the discipline’s formative moments, method was never merely an instrument to be applied to texts. I. A. Richards’s “practical criticism” does not only diagnose stock responses ; it also trains introspection and attention, a project that has often been placed in dialogue with South and East Asian traditions of self-cultivation. Russian Formalism, similarly, understands the deadening of perception as a historical condition, produced by modernity, and the cultural-political pressures of late-imperial Russia, and imagines literary language as a stimulus capable of altering the reader’s cognition. Even New Criticism, so often characterized by its indifference to the reader’s psychological responses, was invested in cultivating a reader capable of suspending personal reaction to become available to the formal life of the text.

This approach also requires attending to the linguistic, cultural, and geopolitical conditions under which methods travel, carrying assumptions about interiority, citizenship, and relationality that are translated and reshaped by local theories of mind and personhood.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

• reading as a technique of the self: self-discipline, self-suspension, self-cultivation, and cultures of self-betterment;
• the reader-subjects imagined by philology, close reading, formalism, historicism, critique, postcritique, surface/distant/reparative reading;
• attention,  perception, listening, embodiment, cognition, and psychoanalytic, Buddhist, therapeutic, cognitive, mystical, or religious models of reading;
• the translation of methods across languages, cultures, institutions, and geopolitical contexts, including race, gender, sexuality, disability, class, coloniality, religion, AI, media, and nonhuman or augmented reading.