Reading Reading

Here I talk about why I use this word "reading" in the title of my book, Reading the Way of Things.

I purposefully want reading to be something different than the decoding of letters or images, as if the world were already written and we decipher it. I want reading to be a creative act, an inaugural act. I want reading to entail a different posture of standing towards the world: a leaning in and an opening up, a going with so that reader and text create each other.

I talk about why, when I taught comp, I taught reading. To write critically is to read critically. I never understood how one could separate the two.

I also talk about the materiality of literature, the way Deleuze crawls into the skin of texts, and why I haven't read his book on Bergson.