PMLA Special Topic: Cultures of Reading

Literary studies has a long-standing commitment to ideals of close and critical reading. As the scope of our discipline has broadened, however, so has our conception of what reading entails. A new readiness to explore the physical, temporal, and spatial modalities of reading has led scholars to scrutinize the material conditions of this activity at a time when our reading matter appears on a screen as often as it does in a codex. The PMLA Editorial Board invites essays that build on these explorations of reading as a plural activity and that consider readers and the social institutions of literacy in any period or cultural tradition. Potential contributors are encouraged to think about reading expansively—and to consider it as a social practice that enrolls the reader in textual communities or as an integral aspect of particular forms of subjectivity or of memory. The coordinators of the special topic are Evelyne Ender (Hunter Coll., City Univ. of New York) and Deidre Lynch (Harvard Univ.). The deadline for submissions is 7 November 2016. For a complete description of the topic and for submission guidelines, please see the MLA Web site.