ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that while reading repeatedly reappears as a site of cultural crisis, this apparent crisis is an effect of shifts in production and not only a cultural matter. Through an extended critique of contemporary theories of reading – ranging from Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading , which privatizes and personalizes all reading, to John Berger’s classic Ways of Seeing , which demythologizes reading and surfaces the political economy of culture in capitalism – the chapter develops a materialist theory of reading through which to intervene in the dominant theories of reading. The chapter argues that, contrary to the dominant theories, class is the base of all reading and that the resolution of the “crisis” is to be found in the development of class-conscious reading: comprehensive, conceptual reading that takes the side of working people in the struggle for a just society.
