Timely, Impure Reading

Abstract

Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why (2000) came as a surprise. Twenty-five years earlier, his insightful and theoretically informed A Map of Misreading (1975) had begun to shape a generation of powerful scholarship on reading, writing, and pedagogy. After Bloom's provocative and enabling notion that all readings are "misreadings" but that some misreadings are stronger because they enable new work to be produced by the reader (who is always-already a writer), How to Read heralds either a retrenchment or an exercise in willful amnesia. Bloom writes for a reader who wants to share in what he calls "the restoration of reading" (2000: 25), reading having apparently been destroyed by universities that teach "supermarket fiction" (196) and thereby sacrifice pleasure for the sake of ideology or social reform. Instead, Bloom argues, we should read for ourselves only: for pleasure, wisdom, and healing and to prepare ourselves for change and death. The book seems to be written for a translucent reader who is, impossibly, untouched by ideology and located at an impossible time.I call this kind of reading pure reading because it invokes a series of deeply rooted atemporal utopian impulses, and here I argue instead for an impure, located, deeply temporal notion of reading. Pure reading imagines that the act of reading is truly (at its lost but recoverable roots) for upliftment and solitary pleasure unstained by any current social forces of marketing, ideology, theory, or schooling. Like all utopian concepts, pure reading places the reader in an impossible time by invoking change but circumventing any