How do we study reading practices of the modernist era? After the development of what Richard Altick (1957) famously called the “democracy of print” in the nineteenth century, and the move toward mass literacy in the Anglophone world, how did  the act of reading and readership get transformed? Virginia Woolf’s 1926 essay, “How Should One Read a Book?” called reading the “most arduous and exhausting of occupations” and made the case for a discerning reader who would give the writer the “benefit of every doubt.” While the modernist era championed close reading with the evolution of New Criticism and I.A. Richards’ Practical Criticism, as scholars like Sue Currell (2007) and Lyndsay Thomas (2025) have shown the era also saw the emergence of speed-reading techniques and schools that sought to address reading in the era of print and mass media.

Thus while we see the valorization of close analysis of a poem in a university classroom, we also note the investment on new reading technologies popularized by Samuel Renshaw (the tachistoscope), Evelyn Wood (“Reading Dynamics”), and others. Similarly, while we see influential figures like T.S. Eliot try to dictate public taste by writing “prefaces” to push writers from their own coterie (Aaron Jaffe, 2005), we also notice how workers’ libraries, reading groups, and book clubs help shape reading habits of the general public and autodidacts (Jonathan Rose, 2001). In other contexts, scholars like Elizabeth McHenry and Kim Gallon have alerted us to the role of literary salons and societies like the Saturday Nighters (Washington D.C.), and newspapers like the Baltimore Afro-American, Chicago Defender in shaping an early twentieth-century African American reading public that remains understudied even today. 

In  this seminar we would like to analyze what it might mean to read modernist texts through frameworks that examine and extend frameworks of close reading, philology, or practical criticism. What assumptions about class, gender, race, or nation still shape how we imagine the “typical” modernist reader? And what can archival, quantitative, or institutional histories of specific reading sites, a single library’s borrowing records, a book club’s correspondence, a speed-reading school’s curriculum, tell us that broader theoretical claims cannot? We seek seminar papers that will interrogate topics related to the following but not restricted to:

• Readers and reading habits in the modernist era
• Acts of reading, the figure of the reader in modernism
• Role of institutions e.g. university/class rooms, libraries, book clubs, settlement-house reading circles, etc. in shaping reading practice
• The “common reader” and reading taste
• Readers,  media, technologies of reading
• Reading methodologies: reading for pleasure, close reading, speed-reading,  etc.
• Gendered reading practice; gender, class, race, of the reader
• Retrieving forgotten archives