Reading Today

Edited by Heta Pyrhönen and Janna Kantola

£15.00

ISBN: 9781787351967

Publication: January 15, 2018

Series: Comparative Literature and Culture

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New technologies are changing our reading habits. Laptops, e-readers, tablets and other handheld devices supply new platforms for reading, and we must learn to manage them by scrolling, clicking or tapping. Reading Today places reading in current literary and cultural contexts in order to analyse how these contexts challenge our conceptions of who reads, what reading is, how we read, where we read, and for what purposes – and then responds to the questions this analysis raises. Is our reading experience becoming a ‘flat’ one? And does reading in a media environment favour quick reading?

Alongside these questions, the contributors unpack emerging strategies of reading.They consider, for example, how paying attention to readers’ emotional reactions as an indispensable component of reading affects our conception of the reading process. Other chapters consider how reading can be explored through such topics as experimental literature, the contemporary encyclopedic novel and the healing power of books.

Praise for Reading Today

‘An interesting volume for its contributions on various forms of reading and, above all, for placing some of the most relevant works of Finnish culture in the focus of philological and technological interpretation that characterizes Comparative Literature and Digital Humanities’
Blog de l'Escola de Llibreria

Heta Pyrhönen is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki. She has published two monographs and numerous articles on detective fiction, a book about the “Bluebeard” tale in British women’s literature, and a book on Jane Austen.

Janna Kantola is Lecturer of Comparative Literature at the University of Helsinki. Her specialist area is modern and postmodern poetry, and she has written extensively on Pentti Saarikoski’s poetry. More recently, she has undertaken research on animal studies as well as imagology.

New perspectives on reading: an introduction
Heta Pyrhönen

Part I Reading challenges
1 Reading experimental literature: unreadability, discomfort and reading strategies
Natalya Bekhta
2 Information and the illusion of totality: reading the contemporary encyclopedic novel
Vesa Kyllönen
3 The brain in our hands: the materiality of reading Neuromaani
Laura Piippo
4 Explorative exposure: media in and of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves
Juha-Pekka Kilpiö

Part II New strategies of reading
5 New reading strategies in the twenty-first century: transmedia storytelling via app in Marisha Pessl’s Night Film
Anna Weigel
6 New reading strategies in print and on digital platforms: Stephanie Strickland’s V
Matti Kangaskoski

Part III Reading affectively
7 Rethinking reading through the novelistic discourses of Don Quixote and Madame Bovary
Stefano Rossoni
8 ‘Emily equals childhood and youth and first love’: Finnish readers and L. M. Montgomery’s Anne and Emily books
Vappu Kannas
9 ‘The miraculous secret of a good book’: representations of the reading experience in Dutch middlebrow criticism
Ryanne Keltjens
10 The healing power of books: The Novel Cure as a culturally tailored literary experiment
Serena Cacchioli

Part IV Reading in context
11 Context in film adaptations
Marjo Vallittu

Notes
Works cited and additional reading
Index