Power of Reading - Frank Furedi

'The culture of reading faces some serious challenges, but the drivers of these problems are not to be found in the domain of technology. The principle challenge we face is to revitalize the ethos that values reading as a cultural accomplishment in its own right'.

In recent years, it has become fashionable to bemoan the death of the novel, and serious literature in general. The internet, so the argument goes, has lowered attention spans, and readers no longer develop the skills required to interpret complex literature. In fact, these concerns are nothing new -they have been around almost as long as the written word itself. Generally, the elite's concerns about reading focus on three issues: a lack of confidence in their ability to influence the tastes of the wider public (to stop them from reading ‘kidult boywizardromans and soft sadomasochistic soft porn fantasies’), a fear that the public will be drawn to corrupting influences, and a fear that public will be 'literally helpless to resist the manipulative influence of the written word'. All of these fears recur in discussions about the 'consumption of digital culture', but how afraid should we be? This is the question posed in Frank Furedi’s essay Power of Reading.

To make his argument, Furedi creates a distinction between ‘reading’ and ‘literacy’; reading, for him, requires interpretation and imagination. The act of reading has evolved over time as much as the technology of printing books has. The development of the codex, for example, was vital to the early spread of Christianity, allowing for copious amounts of material to be organised sequentially and transported. In the medieval period, with books scarce and expensive, reading was an intensive activity: an individual would read a limited number of texts repeatedly, looking to deepen their understanding of god. After Gutenberg’s press made printed materials more readily available, the skills required of a reader changed; now, individuals would read extensively, and would need to compare and analyse the merits of information from multiple sources. The purpose of reading also shifted, towards self-improvement.

In post-Gutenberg society,  readers made up 'a powerful public force' - readers drove the Protestant movement, and public opinion during the English Civil War was driven by a blizzard of publications debating radical new ideas, which made online forums today seem tame by comparison. The early stages of the Civil War have been described as ‘a war of words conducted through printed texts’, such was the importance of the pamphleteers.

Often, moral panics about reading have focussed on technology, what Furedi refers to as the ‘media effect’. Printing makes reading too easy, for example, and pamphlets distract readers from longer books. Victorians panicked over the cheapness and accessibility of books and printed materials, fearing that unsophisticated working class readers would be corrupted by ideas found in novels. This attitude was still evident at time of Chatterley trial, where the low cost of the Penguin edition was an important factor in the case being bought against the publisher.

At other times, though, moral anxiety has been provoked by the content of the novels themselves. In particular, Furedi notes the hysteria which surrounded Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, which was rather spuriously linked to a spate of copycat suicides around Europe. Werther’s critics shared a belief that readers would be unable to retain psychic distance from novels, particularly those written in epistolary form, and some held Goethe morally responsible for this supposed outbreak. Again, contemporary parallels may be drawn with reactions to novels as diverse as 50 Shades of Grey and American Psycho.

So far, reading has managed to remain relevant in spite of all these issues, but where does this leave the modern reader? For Furedi, the Judaeo-Christian and canonical ideas of textual authority may seem outdated in our postmodern world, but digital culture increasingly requires us to read and evaluate multiple sources of information, across different media - being a good reader is increasingly important. The challenge is not whether readers choose e-books or hardbacks, but a culture in which serious reading is devalued by politicians and educators in favour of STEM.

Power of Reading is a thorough and superbly researched argument, which should contain something of interest for all passionate readers; I was particularly taken by three Eighteenth century terms for the moral danger of over-reading (lesewut – reading rage, lesesucht – reading lust and leserei – reading mania). The writing is a little dry at times, so this is a book for serious study at home rather than a commute – but there is plenty of value here.