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How do (and should) we read today? What kinds of readers are we becoming? Against the influx of new writings on close reading, the so-called Method Wars, and the rapid popularization of AI and computational approaches, this symposium brings together leading scholars for two days of panels and dialogues. Through an exploration of close, distant, embodied, and artificial modes of reading, speakers consider the contemporary reading-scape in which people and machines, within and beyond academia, across global contexts and in dialogue with different pasts, encounter, teach, and make sense of texts today.

Featuring some of the most compelling voices in the field, the conversation opens onto the embodied and affective dimensions of interpretation; the pedagogical challenges posed by artificial intelligence; and the ways reading practices shape subjectivity while registering, or reproducing, long histories of racial, gendered, and political power.

DAY ONE • Thursday, Feb 19

12 pm: Introductory Remarks by Yael Segalovitz (Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies), symposium organizer

12:15–1:45 pm: Close Reading at Issue 
Conceptual clarification; definitional pressure
Jonathan Kramnick, “What is Close Reading?”
Toril Moi, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Close Reading”
Joshua Gang, “The ‘Affected Fallacy’”

2–3:30 pm: Disciplines, Fields, and the Limits of Literary Hegemony 
Close reading beyond its disciplinary, geo-linguistic, and historical conventions
Farah Bakaari, “Close Reading as Field Making”
Nicholas Baer, “Unattainable Texts: Reading Beyond Literary Studies”
Sherry (Chiayi) Lee, “Reading, Sight Reading, Close Reading: The Case of Classics"

3:30–4 pm: Break

4–5:30 pm: Conversation: Reading, Sleep, and Attention 
Podcast-format discussion of sleep as a readerly mode
David Marno
Yael Segalovitz
Facilitated by Matt Seybold

DAY TWO • Friday, Feb 20

10–11:30 am: What Kind of Reader Is This? 
Affect, embodiment, sexual difference, and typification
Liesl Yamaguchi, “Reduced to Tears”
Emma Lieber, “Reading and Sexual Difference (Again)”
Dora Zhang, “On Generalizing”

11:30 am–1 pm: Break

1–3 pm: Technological Encounters: AI, Technofeudalism, and Machine Reading
Putting pressure on the possibilities and costs of machine reading
David Bates, “Reading and Writing: Technological Origins of Thought and the Rise of AI”
Matt Seybold, “The Technofeudal Reader”
Nina Beguš, “Novel Audiences of Finnegans Wake”
Hannes Bajohr, “Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Texts and Its Styles”

Cosponsored by the Departments of English, Comparative Literature, and German