Klaus Benesch, Mythos Lesen: Buchkultur und Geisteswissenschaften im Informationszeitalter (Bielefeld: transcript, 2021), 96 pp.

The death of the book has long seemed imminent; the open question has been which technical device would serve as undertaker. At the turn of the twentieth century, the phonograph seemed like a viable candidate, as depicted in the short story “With the Eyes Shut” (1899) by utopian writer Edward Bellamy, which imagined a future cultural scene entirely dependent on audio content played via a handheld phonographic device. In this scenario, people would not need to read texts anymore, they would listen to them. Later in the twentieth century, television became the nemesis of book culture, leading to a pronounced “anxiety of obsolescence” among American writers, as Kathleen Fitzpatrick has shown. Our contemporary reckoning with the future of reading in the digital age rehearses many timeworn arguments from these earlier periods, yet it has also inaugurated a robust scholarly conversation on the media histories of books and printing, as lucidly reflected in the footnotes of Klaus Benesch’s long essay Mythos Lesen. Part of a new book series called “Wie wir lesen—Zur Geschichte, Praxis und Zukunft einer Kulturtechnik” (also edited by Benesch), this short monograph positions itself less as an academic study and more as an insider’s report on the state of reading in the contemporary humanities written for a wider public.

While Mythos Lesen engages with recent scholarship on reading in the digital era by Katherine Hayles, Franco Moretti, and Andreas Reckwitz, its more direct interlocutors are the critics and public intellectuals who have been driving the discourse on the crisis of reading in the culture sections and Feuilletons of the FAZ, The Atlantic, and other outlets. Steering clear of the common essentialisms and determinisms available to a critic of media change, Benesch uses his opening chapter to find a productive middle ground from which to argue for the continued relevance of “deep reading” and sustained engagement with printed literature while debunking the myth of book culture as the supreme locus of social cohesion and moral education. He argues that humanities scholars need to free book reading from all bourgeois-intellectual baggage (“von allem bildungsbürgerlichen Ballast”) while continuing to treat it as an important mode of challenging our imagination and of sharing our ideas with one another—one mode among other cultural practices that can serve similar ends (21). In a timely manner, Benesch connects these abstract concerns to the sudden technological shifts caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which digitized university classrooms virtually overnight during the spring of 2020. For Benesch, many of the online formats and collaborative tools now used in remote teaching have the potential to profitably unsettle the status quo in text-based pedagogies and nudge the humanities forward on their path to adapting to the digital age.

The three central chapters of the book address common topoi regarding the entanglement of the humanities with long-form reading—and they do so in elegant essayistic prose. Benesch neither aims to pick sides along the divide between old and new media, nor does he attempt a media-theoretical or sociological synthesis regarding the nature and uses of printed books. Befitting the public-facing spirit of his book, he rather picks up several familiar conceptions of reading’s place in the world and complicates them by drawing surprising critical connections and by stressing the transatlantic cross-currents between the U.S.-based humanities and the German Geisteswissenschaften. The second chapter tackles the notion of reading as a disinterested practice that can serve as a refuge and a form of resistance against the constraints of capitalist society, as expressed recently in Martha Nussbaum’s treatise Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (2016). Benesch associates this ethos of reading as anti-economic and proto-democratic practice with the precarious standing of close reading as the central methodology of literary studies. With recourse to Hannah Arendt, Bertrand Russell, and Theodor Adorno, he complicates this simplistic art / life dichotomy and recuperates a sense of reading in and for public contexts. Chapter Three carries this line further by using the same exploratory method as it zones in on the ethical potential of reading and the critical embrace of elusive notions of the “good reader,” leaning on J. Hillis Miller and Jürgen Habermas along the way. Chapter Four finds Benesch embarking on yet another path toward his object, this time starting with an account of the rise of cultural studies over the past thirty-odd years. The chapter coordinates the expansive promise of cultural studies—its base assumption that not only the products of high culture, but all cultural artifacts deserve to be read professionally—with the academic print culture of the humanities. In some of the most outspoken passages of the book, Benesch here criticizes the current publishing ecosystem, in which unprecedented amounts of humanist scholarship stream from the presses while academics themselves are so caught up with grant proposals and administrative tasks that they barely have the time to read each other’s work. From such a dysfunctional professional sphere of reading, he holds, one should not expect impulses for the future renaissance of high-minded book culture. In its final movement, Mythos Lesen presents two tactical recommendations on how to foster benign reading practices in and through the humanities. For one, the practical teaching of literary texts on the university level should incorporate digital media in a more engaging and experimental manner, as expressed in the chapter title “Reading Proust on My Cellphone.” For another, the paradigm of the “public humanities” as currently emerging in the United States should be adapted to the mission of carrying reading practices from the seminar room to public spaces and vice versa, for example via public book events or by enlisting authors, publishers, and other practitioners in more prominent academic roles on campus.

Even though Benesch counts writers and publishers as key allies in the struggle for better reading practices, Mythos Lesen has surprisingly little to say about the impact of contemporary literature on this broader conversation. In Mythos Lesen, one learns about the continued relevance of Pound, Faulkner, Eliot, and Proust for digital natives, but twenty-first-century authors or bookmakers who creatively use digital tools and print formats to engage today’s readers remain unaccounted for. Partly due to its brevity, the book only hints at several elements relevant to its larger theme, which may still trigger productive debate. As such, to pick just one example, Benesch pays only little attention to the contributions of activist scholarship in American studies and ethnic studies in his account of the cultural turn, before pointing to the public humanities as a potential model for reading-based community engagement. The emergence of North American public humanities, however, has been conceptually and institutionally tied to these fields and their modes of academic praxis centered on race and social justice. These ties could have been marked more clearly, especially to document for a German-speaking audience how publicly engaged scholarship can profit from an American studies framework.

Such concerns notwithstanding, Mythos Lesen practices what it preaches: it is a short and precise intervention that carries its scholarly credentials lightly and offers stimulating insights for multiple reading publics. For an academic audience, Benesch’s essay contains a unique perspective on contemporary debates in literary studies centered on close reading and comparative media studies. For the non-initiated, the essay provides succinct micro-histories of some of the most important intellectual trends in twentieth-century literary studies, extracting practical and timely impulses from the intellectual currents that triggered the new criticism, the new historicism, cultural studies, and the digital humanities. As Benesch himself admits, the main goal of this position paper in book form is not to provide a strategic blueprint with detailed recommendations; rather he intends to raise awareness for the existential challenge of the information age as it affects publishing houses, political players, and academics alike. Among the many crises currently encircling academia, the perceived decline of book culture—substantial as its repercussions may be—at least offers academics the chance to intervene using tools they know well, confronting the myth of reading with renewed attention to the form and spirit of academic writing.

Alexander Starre (Freie Universität Berlin)