The concept “cultures of reading” should be expanded to include machines that read. Machine reading is exemplified by the computer system called Never-Ending Language Learning (NELL). Because NELL lacks real-world experience, its semantic comprehension is limited to forming categories of words. This process illustrates a major difference between human and machine reading: whereas human reading involves causal reasoning, machine reading relies more on correlations. Human-machine hybrid reading, for example the kind done with an e-book, can be understood as a cognitive assemblage through which information, interpretations, and meanings circulate. The introduction of mechanical cognition into printing can be seen in the Paige Compositor, from 1878. The transition from electromechanical cognition to more flexible digital and electronic computational media marks the movement from print, understood as a technology involving the arrangement of type pieces to impress ink on paper, to postprint, in which inked products originate as computer files. This change, which signals an ontological rupture in writing and reading practices, is addressed through a cognitive-assemblage approach emphasizing the distribution of cognition among technical and human actors.

From the late seventies until her death, british-born writer and artist anna mendelssohn (1948–2009) authored fifteen poetry collections and at least two dozen short fictions and dramas, often publishing under the name Grace Lake. A consummate autodidact, Mendelssohn's passion was international vanguardism, a truth exemplified by the writers she translated: in Turkey in 1969, the poetry of political exile Nâzim Hikmet; from the late nineties, the work of Gisèle Prassinos, the surrealist child prodigy celebrated by André Breton. Mendelssohn's devotion to a modernist legacy situates her within the British Poetry Revival, a label applied to a wave of avant-garde poets that surfaced in the sixties and seventies. Given that she spent her last three decades in Cambridge, Mendelssohn can be further located on the margins of “that most underground of poetic brotherhoods, the Cambridge Poets” (Leslie 28). Mendelssohn's poems appeared in journals receptive to experimentalism, among them Parataxis, Jacket, Critical Quarterly, and Comparative Criticism. In the 1990s, Mendelssohn was anthologized in collections released by Virago, Macmillan, and Reality Street. Iain Sinclair included her in his influential Conductors of Chaos (Picador, 1996); in 2004, she featured in Rod Mengham and John Kinsella's Vanishing Points (Salt Publishing, 2004) alongside John Ashbery and Susan Howe. Her most readily available text remains Implacable Art (Salt Publishing, 2000). Increasingly recognized in her later years, Mendelssohn gave poetry readings at the University of Cambridge, London's Southbank Centre, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, among many other venues.

It would be easy to assume that our students write, or aim to write, the way we do. after all, we, their instructors, provide them with models and sustained tutelage. Yet, while many students learn to negotiate the genres and conventions of specific disciplines as they proceed through college, their writing also moves beyond the concepts and practices we offer because they have views and desires of their own. A look at history reveals that students' concepts and practices have, in fact, long shaped the ways writing is approached in the academy, and consideration of a recent longitudinal study demonstrates some of the ways students continue that shaping process. he academy, then, offers a space of mutual influence where the expectations and goals of faculty members intersect with the interests and practices of student writers.

Viet thanh nguyen always insists that he is a refugee, not an immigrant, and that his novel the sympathizer is a war novel rather than an immigrant story (“Viet Thanh Nguyen”). In an era when the refugee has become the epicenter of debates about extreme nationalism and closed borders, the distinction between refugee and immigrant demands further parsing. Nguyen states the difference clearly when he contrasts the refugee, rendered stateless and vulnerable by persecution or catastrophe, to the immigrant, whose mobility reaffirms existing narratives of bounded territories. “Immigrant studies,” he writes, “affirms the nation-states the immigrant comes from and settles into; refugee studies brings into question the viability of the nation- state” (“Refugee Memories” 930).

“That Book's been Read,” the Poet Susan Howe said this about a copy—my copy—of her book, that this, it has been mauled, spine not quite broken but on the verge, phrases scored under and over, words circled, passages marked with vertical lines, gnarled questions to myself from myself in handwriting only I can read. Program leaflets scrawled with notes are tucked between the endpaper and the back cover and transparent sticky tabs peak up over the top and out from the sides. The only thing I won't do is turn down the corner of a page. Everything else is fair game and the more I care about a book, the more abuse it gets. Fortunately Howe understands.

Among the numerous accolades and awards garnered by viet thanh nguyen's debut novel, the sympathizer (2015), the one receiving the least attention from academic critics will probably be the Edgar Award, bestowed by the Mystery Writers of America. After all, The Sympathizer boasts aesthetic achievements that far exceed the generic confines of a conventional mystery novel. Also, even in the age of cultural studies, when the divide between the popular and the elite is supposed to have all but disappeared, literary scholars, if they are honest with themselves, still hang on to the notion that there is a qualitative difference, or a hierarchy, separating literary fiction from crime fiction, the highbrow from the lowbrow. It may be true that we no longer live at a time when an eminent critic like Edmund Wilson would attack mystery novels by asserting, as he did in 1945, partly in response to Agatha Christie's popular mystery novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, that “with so many fine books to read …; there is no need to bore ourselves with this rubbish” (qtd. in Bradford 117). And there is more than half a century separating us from the era when Ross Macdonald, one of the most accomplished practitioners of the mystery genre as well as a trained literary scholar, lamented in his 1954 lecture at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, where he had received a doctoral degree in English, that “[t]hough it is one of the dominant literary forms of our age, the mystery has received very little study” (11). Even after Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida enshrined Edgar Allan Poe's detective short story “The Purloined Letter” as a darling of poststructuralist analysis, most literary scholars worth their salt would continue to regard crime fiction as a subpar genre, something that, as Macdonald said, is reserved for their leisure hours, akin to crossword puzzles in a newspaper (11). Or, as Wilson put it, “Who cares who killed Roger Ackroyd?” (qtd. in Bradford 117).

On our frigid first day of class, one week after donald trump's inauguration, my coteacher, christa donner, and I began our course Community Zine Projects at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the question, Why zines now? In this era of blogs and Twitter, these tiny-edition handmade paper publications might seem irrelevant. So why take this class? The answers offered by this group of undergraduate and graduate student artists, writers, scholars, and educators were inspiring.

I wrote my dissertation in the late 1990s. it compared harriet beecher stowe and other antebellum sentimental women writers with professional male orators and rhetoricians. I argued that these women authors hadn't been writing in a rhetorical room of their own. Instead, they were solving problems that the professionals could not. While writing the dissertation, I asked a friend who was in my program to read my chapter on the most popular book in the nineteenth-century United States, Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Viet thanh nguyen's award-winning novel, the sympathizer, interpellates an internal vietnamese reader alongside an american (or Anglo) reader through a dialectical appeal subsequently developed into a complex plot. The novel simultaneously demolishes the legitimacy of the American dream and that of the revolutionary communist one. Nguyen launches this two-sided attack with ironic digs whose target oscillates between Americans and Vietnamese. The critique begins lightheartedly when the Vietnamese-born, communist narrator concedes that the English of his American friend from the Central Intelligence Agency, Claude, is excellent—a point the narrator makes “only because the same could not be said” of Claude's fellow Americans (5). In the same disarming manner, he notes, “Even if” the narrator's Vietnamese compatriots “found themselves in Heaven,” they “would find occasion to remark that this was not as warm as Hell” (24). Then he turns back to “America,” which “would not be satisfied until it locked every nation of the world into a full nelson and made it cry Uncle Sam” (29). What quickly becomes evident is that the plot (and perhaps the point) is the narration. In an extraordinary formalist feat (or coincidence), the narrative illustrates the materialist dialectic as proposed by Marx and Engels (122-38). The narrator's confession, which frames the novel, becomes linked to his material reality in an extreme and vivid form when the narrator is imprisoned and consequently generates the narrative from the knowledge that his bruised body allows his mind to piece together. He incarnates, in his slippery and changeable identity, the essence of social reality: dynamism. This dynamism, as the subject (and hope) of Marx and Engels's theorization, illustrates through Nguyen's vertiginous plot the Marxian dialectic. The dialectic holds that opposites—as Hegel pointed out—inhere in one another and that the process of change occurs through transformation of quantity to quality. It also shows, dramatically, how the law of the negation of negation operates. These aspects of the dialectic are cleverly developed through a process that implicates the reader and is nothing short of brilliant, recalling the poem that opens Charles Baudelaire's collection Les fleurs du mal (Flowers of Evil), “Au lecteur” (“To the Reader”), at the end of which the poet addresses his reader as an “[h]ypocrite” (“hypocrite”) while also resembling him and being his “frère” (“brother”). Although Nguyen's narrator does not reach out to the reader in this type of direct address, he does establish complicity with the reader through the use of metaphor and revelations in the plot.

I find myself returning to the theme of reading against noise and reimagining it as something more like reading up against noise, in which noise is a foe or fiend, something one is up against: not only a challenge, close and insistent, that presents itself whenever one takes up a text (the literal noise that invades one's chair or couch, the ads in the margins of an e-book or a Web page, the wandering thoughts or obligations that draw one away), but also a challenge that is spatially there—up against one's ears and body, encroaching on the very space of one's reading. To read, in this sense, is thus inevitably to come up against noise, to attempt to overcome it–and yet to keep it, as part of the very act of reading, within reach.

Language and flesh create each other. here you will find three stories, from three ongoing projects, that are each in some way about the metamorphosis between word and body. Each story is an example of my use of fiction writing as a scholarly tool: for understanding a map as a material object, for weaving lives from textual fragments, and for making a little world with little gods as a way of exploring a work of theory. Fiction, here, is an apparatus for paying new kinds of attention, as well as a vehicle for creating stories, worlds, and selves to give to others. Some persistent concerns in my fiction writing have deeply influenced how I pay attention to the documents I work with in my research: concerns with materiality and history, with the legibility of bodies, with fragmentariness and the transformative power of desire, with the nature of selves and flesh as constantly in the process of becoming, with voicing and with fiction as technologies of conversion. (I did not understand, before writing “The Gesture of Smoking a Pipe,” which you'll read below, that there was an important link in Vilém Flusser's work between physical gesture, selfhood, and the calling down of—and metamorphosis of selves into—gods. Now, the connection between movement, identity, and conversion is becoming central to my work as a historian.) Imagining materiality and metamorphoses this way—and practicing the metamorphosis and conversion of documents—has pointed me toward the ways that materiality and material experience emerge out of relations and relationships and the ways that the kind of orientations that relate bodies in space and time leave traces in our documents.

What time is it when we read? There are many answers to this question. Time might refer to a particular day of the week, as in Sunday reading, a practice that Christina Lupton finds has spanned both religious and secular contexts. Or time might imply a sense of pace, that reading is something we do quickly or slowly, which Rolf Engelsing suggests when he distinguishes between intensive and extensive reading. Or perhaps time is more periodic, an argument one finds in Deidre Lynch's work on nineteenth-century habitual reading or Christopher Cannon's work on medieval practices of rereading. Or time could be closer to an idea or topos, as in Mikhail Bakhtin's notion of the chronotope like idyllic time. Finally, for someone like Gerard Genette the time of reading is fundamentally about anachronism, the nonlinear nature of narrative time.

The rise of an interethnic imagination in recent american literature has been remaking what we think of as ethnic fiction into interethnic fiction. While memory, history, and tradition continue as shaping forces in American letters, an urge toward encounter with others is vividly reworking fictional structures, plots, casts of characters, and uses of language, as well as social visions, literary ambitions, and currents of intertextual influence. In some cases, the mind of a protagonist or narrator, indeed the very mind of a text, comes to seem the site of a momentous encounter of peoples, a living human nexus (Rody). Such is the case in the fiction of Viet Thanh Nguyen, in which the interethnic impulse generates a remarkable pronominal drama, a performance that oscillates between a narratorial “I” and a “we” to negotiate—across the pain and struggle of war, dislocation, and immigrant Americanization and across disparate political and literary allegiances—a Vietnamese American voice.

I noticed the dynamic relation between age and narrative the second time i read edith wharton's the house of mirth. on my first experience of reading the novel, as an undergraduate of eighteen, I was engaged by its thwarted love story and saddened by Lily Bart's tragic but honorable end. When I reread the novel in graduate school, however, I was about to turn twenty-nine, the age at which Lily's marriage prospects and high expectations for the future begin to fade. Although Lily is widely admired for her remarkable beauty, readers are alerted in the novel's opening pages to the incipient erosion of that beauty. Even as Lawrence Selden finds his eyes “refreshed” when he catches a glimpse of Lily at Grand Central Station, remarking that “he had never seen her more radiant” (37), he credits this impression to the way her dark hat and veil have temporarily restored “the girlish smoothness, the purity of tint, that she was beginning to lose after eleven years of late hours and indefatigable dancing” (38). While Selden silently muses about her age (“here was nothing new about Lily Bart. … [H]ad she indeed reached the nine-and-twentieth birthday with which her rivals credited her?” [37–38]), Lily declares that she's “as old as the hills” (38); she perceives that “people are getting tired” of her and saying she “ought to marry” (42). Lily is ambivalent about marriage as her “vocation” (as Selden puts it [43]) but undertakes this quest. By the end of the novel, having lost her social and economic standing and failed to secure a husband—and thereby a future—she puts her affairs in order and overdoses on chloral (43). Her age is certainly not the only factor contributing to her decline: Selden's continuing fascination with Lily affirms that she has remained dis-tractingly attractive (even if, perhaps, “ever so slightly brightened by art” [39]), and the novel attributes her social descent more directly to her financial circumstances than to her age. Nevertheless, the opening scene of The House of Mirth emphatically establishes twenty-nine as a precipice over which Lily Bart falls to her doom.