Course: Literature in the Digital Age: from Close Reading to Distant Reading

The literary-historical contexts of a work include, among others, the institutional aspects of its publication, its relation to the dynamics of various literary and artistic movements, and the connection of …

Bob Stein is the founder of the Institute for the Future of the Book. On the institute’s website, he has posted a useful essay entitled ‘A Taxonomy of Social Reading: …

Exploring the historical contexts of a literary text is one path to understanding. In this video Philipp Schweighauser discusses the question of how Ezra Pound’s poem ‘In a Station of …

While modernism was a literary and artistic movement to which Pound belonged, modernity names the broader socioeconomic context in which modernism flourished. Modernity is a multifaceted term whose origins are …

Social reading is a form of collaborative reading that takes place online. It incorporates discussion into the reading process and thus turns it into a community experience. In Week 1, …

At the beginning of the chapter in How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012) that focuses on hyper reading, N. Katherine Hayles cites several U. S. studies that …

In previous steps, we took a good look at the first five of James Sosnoski’s eight hyper reading strategies: filtering, skimming, pecking, imposing, and filming. Watch Philipp Schweighauser outline the …

Continuing where we left off, this article briefly outlines three further hyper reading strategies described by James J. Sosnoski in ‘Hyper-Readers and Their Reading-Engines’ (trespassing, de-authorizing, fragmenting) and two further …

This week, you have learned about the six reading strategies in the digital age that we will cover. Each of the remaining weeks is dedicated to one of these strategies …

When reading online texts on computers, we typically engage in hyper reading. This way of reading has probably become the dominant or at least the most frequently used reading strategy …

In his essay ‘Hyper-Readers and Their Reading-Engines’, James J. Sosnoski defines hyper reading as ‘reader-directed, screen-based, computer-assisted reading’ (167) and outlines eight hyper reading strategies: filtering, skimming, pecking, imposing, filming, …

To see the enduring power of close reading at work, one great resource is Frank Lentricchia and Andrew DuBois’s Close Reading: The Reader (2003), an essay collection that brings together …

To look up terms and concepts relevant to the study of literature − from metaphor to deconstruction and beyond − M. H. Abrams’s A Glossary of Literary Terms is an …

Next to the lay reading strategies discussed in the previous steps, there are also reading strategies employed by professional readers of literary texts. This video explores four of them. Philipp …

Close reading is one of the most widespread scholarly methods in literary criticism and constitutes an indispensable tool, the bread and butter, for professional readers. Learn about its origins and …