قوة القراءة: من أفلاطون إلى الكتب الصوتية

> Peter Szendi offers a precise, compelling, and unprecedented account of the time and place of reading, one that is as archaic as it is contemporary. When we read, are we listening to a voice or is it being read to us? If reading is not a solitary, one-sided practice, how do we make sense of the crowded reading landscape? What is read when we read, and how does reading interact between tenses and sounds? Why do we continually move away from the text when we seek to adhere to its terms? Questions like these raise a new, even startling, look at a wide range of literary and popular texts, including Hobbes's Leviathan, Flaubert's Madame Bovary, Kant's Moral Commandments, and the works of Sade, Valéry, Blanchot, and de Certeau, as well as modern literature, films, audiobooks, and hypertexts. The power of reading lies in its amazing interaction with time and place: the intentional reader stays close but deviates, tries to fill in the gaps but is pushed back by a countercurrent. The key to the text is sought “externally” and ultimately returns to the text itself and its inability to provide a final answer. Unlike older versions of literary formalism that insist on the self-referentiality of the text, as well as contextualists who search the external social order to discover the truth of the text, Szendi treats precisely this conflict as an oscillation that constitutes the essence of reading itself. Ironically, reading continues precisely by what interrupts its teleological path. The result is a humorous, profound, and timely reformulation of the concept of reading, that reading that rushes forward to find itself pushed to the heart of the text, only to discover that this continuous separation from the text, and this reckless rush towards the world outside it, is nothing but a series of bypasses, delays, and returns, constituting the intermittent rhythm of reading itself. The Powers of Reading is a patient, brilliant, and illuminating investigation into the cross-currents of voice and discourse, one that addresses the speed and complexity of our time, and how our forward impulses turn us upside down, to contemplate how voice, action, and multiple passivity are rearranged in the landscape of reading. - Judith Butler, Distinguished Professor at the Graduate School, University of California, Berkeley