Last year's lecture focused on building mental libraries, finding lost works and editing texts. But once the texts and corpora are there, what are we to do with them? In other words, how do we read? A deceptively simple question.
Last year's survey focused on the pleasure, even happiness, of reading, the memory and repetition of which can illuminate an entire existence. Reading, however, is not just a matter of sensitivity. Texts are there to be, if not loved, at least understood, and the cognitive dimension of the operation cannot be underestimated. In recent years, new ways of reading and interpreting have emerged that give readers all-powerful inquisitorial power. It is important to place this recent development within a historical and cultural panorama of modes of reading and interpretation.
Is it possible to maintain a relationship with texts that escapes the simplistic alternative of indignant condemnation or full approval? There are so many other, more subtle and perhaps more emancipating ways of reading: catharsis, allegory, philology, benevolence, admiration, epiphany, to name but a few. What if knowing how we read could help us to know how to read today?