Reading pictures means first digesting the words that inhabit or surround them: words in pictures, words framing pictures by way of titles or wall captions, and words of the texts to which pictures allude. But while pictures almost always come to us embedded in language, they are not the same as texts. Even though many elements of pictures may be construed as signs, a pictorial sign is not the same as a verbal sign or a textualized image, nor is it anything like a noun or verb, as Louis Marin proposed. To read pictures, we must reckon with these differences as well as with their subsemiotic attributes—their marks. We must be willing to read whatever remains illegible in a textual sense, whatever in a painting resists being verbalized or turned into a sign. In so doing, we challenge and stretch our conception of what it means to read anything at all.

This article argues that Machiavelli's description of reading Dante and Ovid, in his letter to Francesco Vettori of 10 December 1513, illuminates some of the most surprising and scandalous sections of The Prince. Beginning with Machiavelli's quotation of Paradiso 5 in the letter to Vettori, this study investigates how Machiavelli uses the literary works of Dante and Ovid to craft several of his most distinctive arguments on the problem of vows, value of violence, and legitimacy of deception. It argues that the reading of these literary works constitutes a crucial, but often overlooked, component of intellectual history.

By giving a brief history of emotivism in close reading, this article offers a new context for understanding the contemporary uneasiness about close reading and about the proliferating array of alternative kinds of reading it has prompted. Emotivism refers to the subcurrent of linguistic thought that shaped the institutional formation of New Critical closeness by distinguishing propositional from emotive meaning. Instead of amending our closeness to texts by dispensing with critique, or focusing on surfaces and description to the exclusion of textual depth, either of which might inadvertently encourage new kinds of emotivism, this article suggests we bear in mind—as the conversation goes on—the mid-century counteremotivist critics, such as Kenneth Burke, who advocated a kind of reading attuned to the interactive processes held in apparent stasis by literary form.

This essay approaches the cultures of reading anthropologically, drawing on my ethnographic research with the Henry Williamson Society to excavate the ways readers enthusiastically commit to the minor characters of Williamson's novels. It places Alex Woloch's literary analysis of minor characterization in dialogue with the anthropological theory of “distributed agency” developed by Alfred Gell in order to examine the idea of the reader as someone who “gives” and may in turn “receive” attention. The essay asks whether it might be more helpful to conceive of readers’ activities as a form of reading without “culture”—whether plurality, if it must be invoked, might better be located in the dynamism of the reading person.

Drawing first on an annotated copy of the poetry of Felicia Hemans that my students discovered in the stacks of the University of Virginia's library, this essay goes on to examine the marks made by female readers in three nineteenth-century copies of Hemans's poetry to reveal the dynamics of sentiment in author-reader networks of Romantic and Victorian poetry. Seeing Hemans through the eyes of individual female readers surfaces a lost world in which poetry was valued as a collaborative, intimate language of the heart. Specific historical copies allow us best to apprehend this world, but, in the wake of wide-scale digitization, nineteenth-century books are simultaneously newly visible and newly at risk. This essay makes the case for retaining them and for integrating them into our accounts of nineteenth-century literary history.

Entering Howard University's Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, one still passes through the “catalog room,” an antechamber filled with rows of card drawers. Inaugurated in 1930 by the librarian Dorothy Porter, this catalog of the “Negro Collection” served for much of the twentieth century as one of the only portals to African American print culture. This article reconstructs the creation of that catalog in order to chart the relation between infrastructure and racial imaginaries of reading. Porter contravened the routine misfiling of blackness in prevailing information systems by rewriting Dewey decimals, creating new taxonomies for black print, and fielding research inquiries from across the African diaspora. She built public access to books “by and about the Negro” at a moment when most black readers were barred from libraries. In so doing, she fueled a broader sense of what a black archive—or what Porter called a “literary museum”—might afford.

The idea of writing for the future often seems like a selfish act: a claim for personal immortality. Yet writing with future readers in mind also requires imagining the needs of a world radically different from our own. This paper examines Future Library, an artwork in which authors contribute writing that will not be read until 2114, and the fiction of David Mitchell, one of the contributing authors. In these works, writing for the future is political, not because it represents the future but because it simultaneously demands intervention in the present and opens itself to the new and to unexpected future uses.

“You only have to know one thing: You can learn anything. For free. For everyone. Forever” (Khan Academy). Utopias of learning abound in our contemporary media landscape. Take, for instance, the above motto of Khan Academy (#YouCanLearnAnything), one of the earliest providers of open online education. With lessons in over twenty-four languages on topics from algebra to art history, Khan Academy aspires to reach an unprecedented global audience—not only children from the United States who are stuck in “a corrupt or broken [school] system” but also the “young girl in an African village” and the “fisherman's son in New Guinea” (Khan 4). In this sense, Khan Academy enjoys a paradoxical kinship to the diverse geographies studied in this cluster of essays. By promising the global provision of education, it seeks to conquer geography itself.

In 2016, in the midst of the en masse arrival of refugees in europe, the austrian library association brought out a welcome poster, a Willkommensplakat. At the center of the poster is a human figure with his back toward the viewer, standing upright on a stack of books. The figure bears an uncanny resemblance to the man in Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (circa 1817), the famous painting by the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich. In the welcome poster, however, Friedrich's willful, romantic wanderer, standing on the solid ground of rocks, is replaced by a migrant, forced to leave his nation of residence, seeking refuge, perched on precarious grounds. Instead of a sea of fog, the figure in the poster faces a vast screen, on which the word “welcome” is spelled out in twenty-nine world languages from Arabic to Yoruba, including sign language.

How do you read jewish? The question sounds odd. Why is it that reading jewish is catachrestic in a way that reading German is not? The obvious answer is that German is a language while Jewish is not. Yet there are Jewish languages. Hebrew is one, of course, and linguists describe many more, from Ladino (the language of the Iberian Jewish diaspora) to Krymchak (the ethnolect of a group of Crimean Jews). There is also Yiddish, the language of most European Jews for roughly the millennium preceding the Holocaust; now it lives on primarily in Hasidic communities around the world. Yiddish means Jewish; and in a sense, knowing how to read the former (i.e., decipher the Yiddish language) can imply knowing how to read the latter (i.e., decipher Jewish identity). This has been the belief of many Jews from the late nineteenth century to the present who accept the idea that language is central to national identity. Strangely, in this period the reverse notion has also been active: that knowing Jewish implies knowing Yiddish. his paradox—that you can read a language without knowing it—was catalyzed by a modernist approach to the intersection of Jewish language with Jewish identity. But it was also grounded in facets of the history and philology of Yiddish reading that opened a path to literacy through illiteracy.

Between November 1879 and January 1880, the argentine author Eduardo Gutierrez published a serialized narrative of the life of Juan Moreira in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Patria Argentina. Titled simply Juan Moreira, the heroic tale of the real-life outlaw went like this: Moreira was a good gaucho gone bad, who fought to preserve his honor against the backdrop of modernizing forces that were transforming life in this part of South America. His string of crimes and ultimate downfall resulted from his unjust persecution by corrupt state officials. The success of the serial surpassed all expectations. The paper's sales skyrocketed, and the melodramatic narrative soon appeared in book form. Enterprising printers produced tens of thousands of authorized and pirated editions to sell in the Rio de la Plata (Argentina and Uruguay), making Juan Moreira a leading example of everyday reading for the region's rapidly growing literate population and one of Latin America's pre-twentieth-century bestsellers (Acree, Everyday Reading; Gutiérrez, The Gaucho Juan Moreira).

ON THE TWENTY-FIFTH DAY OF THE FIFTH MONTH OF 1903, SUN BAOXUAN—A SCHOLAR-OFFICIAL IN LATE QING DYNASTY CHINA—documented in his diary that he had acquired a copy of the periodical 新小說 (Xin xiaoshuo; “he New Novel”), founded by Liang Qichao in 1902 to propagate translated fiction and new Chinese fiction. Immediately drawn to the stories and novels it carried, Sun soon concluded that Western fiction had the unique strength of imparting knowledge and expanding rational capacity: 「觀西人政治 小說，可以悟政治原理；觀科學小說，可以通種種格物原理；觀包 探小說，可以覘西國人情土俗及其居心之險詐詭變，有非我國所 能及者」 (“Political novels teach us principles of politics; scientific novels teach us theories of things; detective novels show us Western customs and treachery, which often surpass ours”; 690). Immersed in a culture where vernacular novels had been suppressed by official censorship and prejudice among the elites, Sun ardently embraced translated fiction. By contrast, vernacular Chinese novels, with few exceptions, seemed to him routinely 「陳腐」 (“decadent”), providing no more than 「排遣」 (“diversion and entertainment”; 677, 690) The perceived rationality of Western fiction gave him a sudden license to seriously engage with a genre that the literary culture in China continued to exclude well into the twentieth century. Sun's encounter with foreign fiction marked the early stage of a somewhat bumpy adventure. In later sections of the diary, Sun documents reading sentimental strains of translated fiction and the more ambiguous responses they incited in him.

In 1931, S.R. Ranganathan, an unknown literary scholar and statistician from India, published a curious manifesto: The Five Laws of Library Science. The manifesto, written shortly after Ranganathan's return to India from London—where he learned to despise, among other things, the Dewey decimal system and British bureaucracy—argues for reorganizing Indian libraries. Ranganathan believed that India's libraries, many of which had been established by the British, could promote radically egalitarian ideals if they followed five fundamental laws.

The end of the cold war brought countless changes and challenges to everyone east of the Berlin Wall. Words—both printed and spoken—changed their meanings virtually overnight, and texts from the indices librorum prohibitorum (“lists of prohibited books”) carefully compiled by Communist authorities began to flood the newly commercialized book market in print runs of hundreds of thousands. “Living in truth” (Havel), and reading in it, suddenly appeared feasible.

In 1959, in the midst of the liberation struggle in Algeria, Frantz Fanon published L'an v de la révolution algérienne (A Dying Colonialism), which contained a chapter dedicated to the role of radio in anticolonial resistance. The chapter, “Ici la voix de l'Algérie” (“This Is the Voice of Algeria”), describes how the radio changed from mouthpiece of the French occupation to voice of the Algerian resistance, primarily between 1954 and 1956. Before the liberation struggle, Fanon tells us, over ninety-five percent of radio receivers belonged to Europeans, for whom the radio was a link to Radio-Alger—or, simply, “Des Français parlent aux Français” (“Frenchmen speaking to Frenchmen” [“Ici” 309; Dying Colonialism 74]). The station was a “réédition ou écho de la Radiodiffusion française nationale installée á Paris” (“re-edition or an echo of the French National Broadcasting System operating from Paris”) and “exprime avant tout la société coloniale et ses valeurs” (“is essentially the instrument of colonial society and its values” [305; 69]).

When erich auerbach was living in Turkey, exiled from Germany and helping Kemal Ataturk set up a humanities curriculum at the University of Istanbul, he wrote a much-discussed letter to Walter Benjamin on 12 December 1936 in which he alluded to his dislocation as a European humanist trying to orient himself in relation to a Turkish-language politics that radically estranged prior print cultures: