Beth Driscoll 
Reader-Centred Networks: A Methodology for Shifting and Dynamic Practices

This presentation outlines and demonstrates a methodology for studying contemporary recreational reading, drawing predominantly from the traditions of literary studies and book history and mobilising them in an approach influenced by actor-network theory. As articulated in What Readers Do, I propose starting with readers and observing the books they are reading. This centring of the reader constitutes a shift in attention by allowing readers rather than researchers to choose books that become objects of study, and thereby broadens the range of literary genres and forms examined in scholarship. The methodology asks researchers to read these books, and then to follow and map readers’ diverse practices in order to assemble networks of organisations, objects and people who co-constitute what reading means and does. Following reader practices requires gathering data, which can involve multiple qualitative, ethnographic and computational methods. The methodology thus creates pathways and points of connection amongst different scholarly traditions.

I will demonstrate the use of this reader-centred methodology through a number of detailed examples, each of which highlights the dynamism and instability of particular reading networks. Reader practices respond and adapt to changing economic, technological and institutional conditions. When someone chooses to read a book, they deliberately shift their attention towards it, but they also interact with digital platforms, bookshops, libraries, media outlets, and groups such as families or book clubs, all of which are in flux. This research approach reveals the diverse, evolving uses of reading and the many ways of being a reader.

Inge van de Ven 
“Bad” Readers: Too Close, Not Close Enough?

Close reading remains one of the most influential ideals of “good reading”: sustained, disciplined attention to textual particulars. Emerging from practical criticism and New Criticism, often conflated with “deep reading,” this ideal continues to inform anxieties about what, how much, how, why, and whether people read. Young people are said not to read enough, yet when they do, they are judged to attend to the wrong texts, in the wrong ways, or with the wrong degree of involvement.

I examine two contemporary figures of the “bad reader.” The first is the Dark Romance reader, criticized for attending to devalued texts and becoming too immersed in narratives of coercion and gendered violence. Drawing on reader responses, I examine how these readers negotiate attraction to coercive fantasies alongside awareness of their gender politics, testing the opposition between immersion and critical distance. The second figure comprises the reader who delegates interpretation to a large language model and the model as reader. Reporting on experiments with LLM-generated poem interpretations, I examine how models’ responsiveness to textual detail affects our understanding of close reading as a human practice and our judgments of people who delegate interpretation to them.

Read together, these cases trouble the relation between attentiveness and good reading. They present attention not as a quantity but as a selective, situated practice shaped by texts, technologies, pleasures, and purposes. Turning the lens on empirical literary studies, I argue we should read readers as closely as we expect them to read texts, treating distinctions between good and bad reading as objects of inquiry rather than starting assumptions.

Lovro Škopljanac 
Attention: W(e)aves

The premise of this talk is that the study of literature is faced with a sea change caused not by the usual waves of literary theory, but by two attentional shifts. The first one is major and mostly involuntary, spurred by (popular) cultural and (language-generative) computational changes. These have brought about the present situation in which complex textual interpretations that have been almost exclusively within the domain of (literary) experts have become commonplace, since fans and personal computers may now produce interpretations of texts with abundant expertise and nuance.

This means that scholarly attention must shift from text to context, since the latter is by definition still exclusively within the domain of the expert, and nested in this major shift of attention is the minor and voluntary one. For the purpose of this talk, it will be the shift away from the “here and now” of literary reading to facts observed in over a thousand interviews with non-professional Croatian readers about how they remembered texts in long duration through various spatial, temporal (mental time travel), and personal configurations. The latter refers to instances of social reading, when a subject is reading a text simultaneously with other readers, such as in “parental reading,” involving the joint attention of parents and children. These distinguishing links between text and context may be identified as “weaves,” and literary experts would arguably do well to weave such attentional shifts into their research at a time when less and less attention is being given to literature.

Sarah McGeown 
The Power and Pleasures of Reading: How Books (and other Texts) can Engage, Empower, and Enrich Us

Reading practices are changing. Over the last two decades there have been considerable shifts in the reading attitudes, habits, and experiences of children, young people, and adults, with books being repositioned with contemporary reading cultures. Drawing on a decade of research centring readers’ perspectives and experiences, this talk is structured around five themes to frame thinking and discussion. The first, Enjoy, draws upon research highlighting the diversity of readers’ reading experiences, and the importance of supporting and promoting reading in personally enjoyable and meaningful ways. The second, Engage, focuses on the multidimensional nature of reading engagement and its central role in supporting and shaping reading experiences and outcomes. The third, Empower, draws attention to research highlighting the empowering effects of fiction book reading, including for those with minority identities or experiences. The fourth theme, Enrich, focuses on book reading as a source of intellectual, educational, social, and emotional enrichment, examining reading as a source of personal growth across the lifespan. The final theme, Expand, encourages us to shift attention beyond the study of books, to explore the diversity of contemporary reading practices, utilising different methodological approaches, and how we can support all readers to find texts which are personally enjoyable, engaging, empowering, and enriching.

A detailed program will be added soon.