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Peggy Kamuf's Home Page The "End of Reading" Controversy: Relevant Documents This page was created initially on 12/19/2000. The principal aim was to respond to requests received for the text of a lecture that, unexpectedly, became the focus of attacks first in the Web magazine, Salon.com, and from there in many other publications, notably US News & World Report. The lecture itself was delivered at the conference Book/Ends, organized at the University at Albany, October 12th –15th, 2000. The conference sought to explore the state many have called “the end of the book” from a great many perspectives. I titled my own contribution “The End of Reading” to reflect research I had begun some months earlier into scientific discourses around reading, and specifically around so-called “reading disorders” or “dyslexias.” My own background is in literary theory, so I was exploring unfamiliar terrain. And yet, as both a teacher and a scholar, I have been principally concerned with the activity of reading for many years, and the theorists most important for my own work have made the reading activity or experience the focus of their thinking. The central aim in my lecture was to question the assumption that there can or should be no communication between scientific approaches to the reading process and those that set out from the literary, philosophical, psychoanalytic, or linguistic insights informing work such as my own and many others in the humanities. This assumption maintains severe limits on the possibilities for interdisciplinary exchange around the subject of reading, limits that, in my opinion, are unjustifiable. I sought above all in the lecture to challenge these limits and call for more truly interdisciplinary considerations of the reading activity. In the audience at my lecture, there was a freelance journalist who got Salon.com to buy a piece she wrote about it. They bought the article because this journalist, Amy Halloran, made it sound as if I had ranted for 45 minutes about the violence mothers do to their children by reading to them. Salon never contacted me to check the accuracy of her story. Her article appeared in the 10/30 issue of that publication. I responded at length to this piece of outrageous distortion, which seemed to me to betray the sort of anti-intellectualism and “academic bashing” that has, alas, become so commonplace in our Limbaugh-ized society. Salon posted my reply, but with 3 days delay. The Salon piece got noticed fairly widely, notably by John Leo who writes a weekly column for USN&WP. Leo put his own spin on things and then things spun really out of control, with local newspapers picking up his statements to the effect that I had denounced reading to children as a form of “victimization”! Or even child abuse! The links below reconstitute this series of events. They will be added to as needed. · The End of Reading (the original lecture) ·
Amy
Halloran's Salon.com article |