Literary Citizens and Consumers

Seminar by Mikko Lehtonen

Remark: This seminar will be organized twice. Both on 12/07 and 14/07.

This seminar looks at the changing relations between economy, politics and culture and their effects on reading. Readers are often seen as solitary figures alone with what they read. Reading is, however, social action, always already part of complex everyday practices and relations. In what kinds of power relations readers enter? What forms of subjectivities various forms of reading produce? What effects the commodification of culture has for reading? Is it so that rational citizens read printed texts whereas affective consumers view and listen to audiovisual texts? Or should cultural studies practitioners, instead of such ?either-or? models concerning reading, develop more nuanced ?both-and? approaches allowing them to see both subjugating and empowering potentials of all kinds of reading.