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The Pathos of Reading

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 October 2020

Mary A. Favret
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Abstract

To understand what it feels like to read, we might consider what it feels like to have difficulty reading. Those who find it hard to read reveal the demands posed by a modern world that requires literacy even as it raises obstacles to reading. In this situation, the attempt to read can become pathetic: a site of suffering and reflexivity. Beginning with moments in the works of Walter Benjamin and his follower W. G. Sebald, we learn about the pains of reading as they open onto the pains of history in the cities of twentieth-century Europe. But Benjamin's and Sebald's insights on vision, pain, and history are anticipated in a series of sonnets by John Keats, written in metropolitan London in the opening decades of the nineteenth century.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 130 , Issue 5: Special Topic: Emotions , October 2015 , pp. 1318 - 1331
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 2015

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