The Anti-Intellectual Reader [or, on Reading as a Form of Hunting]

Fifteen years ago it was common to think that technology would drive readers away from literature, that “Gutenberg's tribe” would disappear. Were we getting ahead of ourselves? Readers have not disappeared and neither has literature; however, they have changed deeply. Reading continues to be very much alive, perhaps more than ever, given that digital culture has overemphasized writing, despite the fact that its materiality and subject matter have multiplied and become somewhat strange. If we start out from the commonplace assertion that the book exists as literature only because and when it is read, carrying out a reflection on the representability of reading would lead us to think about the state of literature. The article delves deeply into three images of reading as archetypal images of culture, in order to identify the different ways in which they survive in the universe of images that defines us