Published online by Cambridge University Press: 20 November 2018
This is an Essay About Reading. Though my central texts are visual ones, with what we might now regard as journalistic or anthropologic aims, the thrust of my argument extends beyond any one medium of communication, specific subject, or genre of inquiry. My framing concern here is to examine a historically specific structure, one that Tony Bennett has called a "reading formation": "a set of discursive and intertextual determinations that organize and animate the practice of reading, connecting texts and readers in specific relations to one another by constituting readers and reading subjects of particular types and texts as objects-to-be read in particular ways.