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 TWO • Friday, Feb 20, 2026

Introductory Remarks: Yael Segalovitz (Comparative Literature and Jewish Studies, UC Berkeley), symposium organizer

PANEL 5: Technological Encounters: AI, Technofeudalism, and Machine Reading

Putting pressure on the possibilities and costs of machine reading

David Bates (Rhetoric), “Reading and Writing: Technological Origins of Thought and the Rise of AI”

Matt Seybold (English), “The Technofeudal Reader”

Nina Beguš (Center for Science, Technology, Medicine & Society), “Novel Audiences of Finnegans Wake”

Hannes Bajohr (German), “Surface Reading LLMs: Synthetic Texts and Its Styles”