Peggy Kamuf, Professor of French and Comparative Literature at USC, describes the witchhunt by a freelance reporter for Salon and, subsequently, a US News and World Reports columnist, who couldn’t even begin to understand the line of argument she was making in her lecture ‘The End of Reading.’ In the lecture, she tried to describe the contributions literary criticism and psychoanalytic theory could make to the neurologically-based science of reading and reading disorders, expanding our perspective on the interiority of the reading experience rather than just focusing on its externals. She was described by her detractors as making a 45-minute rant about the violence done by parents’ reading aloud to their children. She links to the text of her lecture, the Salon article and the USN&WR writeup, and her responses to both. Here, admittedly taken out of context, is the offending passage of her lecture:
The common notion of reading
as information-extraction sets the principles, and thus institutes the laws and the institutions through which reading practices are maintained, that is,
reintroduced, reproduced, and reinforced in each new generation of readers, as we like to think of them. And we do like our dearest common notion of
reading to remind us of the whole family scene. Reading is also thereby getting produced and maintained as site for the patriarchal, paternalistic family’s
reproduction of itself. The practice gets passed down, most typically, in the voice of mothers, usually mothers, reading aloud to their children. There where
this ancient practice of reading aloud survives, before the child’s invention of silent reading, it is the mother’s voice that has been made to echo with the
letters taking shape on the page. I say “has been made to” because the scene is certainly not a natural one. It has also to be produced, reproduced, instituted.
With the scene we are evoking of the child learning to read by listening to the mother’s voice, it is the institution of written signs themselves, and thus of all
possible institutions that is being passed down. The institution of the family of man takes place in a scene of learning to read. But what we forget, what we
have to forget or repress is that this is always also a violent scene inasmuch as it has to repeat, reinflict the violence that wrenches the human animal out of
the state of sheer animality, where, as we are taught to believe once we can read, there is no such thing as reading in this common sense, the sense we all
supposedly share, sharing thus the belief that only humans read or do what we call reading.
Some might suggest that, with prose like that, Prof. Kamuf set herself up for a hysterical misreading! But it’s no more lurid than much to be found in the psychoanalytic literature, for example, and far more comprehensible than much contemporary literary criticism, IMHO.
