Cultural Studies and Media Studies / American/Diaspora

Malaika Sutter (University of Bern)

Sofie Behluli (Universität Bern)

We are constantly engaged in processes of reading. We read literary texts, historical sources, films and other media, political moods and affects, and shifting social formations. Amongst the plethora of reading strategies available to us, close reading is perhaps the most widely known and most accepted one in literary studies (cf. I.A. Richards and William Empson). Other approaches to texts include ‘paranoid’ and ‘reparative reading’ (Sedgwick 1997), ‘distant reading’ (Moretti 2000), ‘wide reading’ (Hallet 2010), and ‘surface reading’ (Best and Marcus 2009), to name just a few. More recent research has examined intermedial reading practices (Rippl 2015), the reading of affects (Brinkema 2014), and non/institutional readers (Emre 2017).

This panel addresses contemporary issues of “reading” within the fields of literary, cultural and media studies. It explores the umbrella term “reading” and examines what cultural products it can be applied to today. Taking such a vast approach to “reading” allows us to reflect on the parallels and distinctions between ‘traditional’ reading strategies of texts and other practices such as binging, watching, consuming, interpreting, and analyzing. Do we read social media, TikToks and Reels the same way we read books? How do we make sense of the constant flicking and sliding through short videos that entail advertisements in between and switch from elaborately constructed performances to short-lived trends and random recordings? Do these new forms of reading, often driven by algorithms, affect the ways in which we read novels, plays and poems?

This panel thus ‘reads’ the processes of contemporary reading and asks its panellists to think about intermedial, interdisciplinary and other border-crossing aspects of contemporary media literacy. We welcome 20min contributions from literary studies, media studies, cultural studies and all other scholars that propose critical interventions in theories & practices of reading. Please submit your abstracts (300 words) and author bios (100 words) by September 30 on the NeMLA portal.

This panel "reads" the processes of contemporary reading and asks its panellists to think about intermedial, interdisciplinary and other border-crossing aspects of contemporary media literacy. We welcome contributions from literary studies, media studies, cultural studies and all other scholars that engage with questions of representations, practices, and methodologies of "reading."