Reading literature in/against the digital age: Shallow assumptions, deep problems, expectant pedagogies

Abstract

Following the popular theme of Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010), various commentators observe the erosion of what used to be called ‘reading’, but is now increasingly referred to as ‘deep’ reading. University English departments offer ‘close reading’ of literary texts as a corrective to the digital shallows, while worrying about a general decline in reading, and reading ‘for pleasure’, attributed to the digital. However this decline is created equally by the procedures of the discipline, including its core practice of ‘close reading’ which emerged similarly from entangled anxieties about technology, mass media and low/high culture. It makes sense that literary reading would be eroded in educational contexts (which overdetermine reading), and not just because of the erosion of deep reading and ‘deep attention’. Training in literature may lead, ironically, to a loss in the ability to read and understand literary texts and to draw on multimodal narrative literacies. This paper proposes a practice of expectant reading that, supported by social annotation, can re-centre reading and restore narrative and frameworks of expectation constitutive of literary meaning, while embodying the contract between reader(s) and text, and facilitate socially distributed reading.

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