Volume 37, Issue 1, 1 May 2026
For Whom Do We Read?
For Whom Do We Read? introduces the notion of the readee. There have been so many theories of reading, with their more or less normative claims, that consider the reader on the one hand and the text on the other. But what seems to be forgotten, especially since reading has come to be considered mainly a silent and solitary activity, is the addressee of reading. The special issue, edited by Peter Szendy, invites literary theorists and historians to engage a question raised by this readee: for whom do we read?
Contributors
- “Introducing: The Readee”
Peter Szendy - “Reading Fore”
Emily Apter - “A Politics of Proxy Reading”
Leah Price - “Purloin—pour loin: Rousseau and Poe”
Thomas Schestag - “Letters from Underground”
Rosalind C. Morris - “From Readers to Readers: Sovereign Acts of Reading in Anglophone Caribbean Women's Writing”
Emily Greenwood - “Toward a Theory of the Black Superaddressee”
Jesse McCarthy - “For the Proletariat”
Paul North - “Reading Bits and Pieces”
Daniel Heller-Roazen