Pre-Reading

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1:00Welcome to the new Books Network. Hi. See you. Welcome to High Theory. In this podcast, we get high on the Substance of Theory. I am Sharleneck Boshu. And I am Kim Adams. We are too tired, academic, trying to save critique from itself. Today, I am speaking with Milan Teleunin about pre-reading. Milan, can I ask you to introduce yourself to our listeners? Sure. So, my name is Milan Teleunin, and I'm a student. And I am a literary scholar with a focus in my research on novels and narrative

2:05and the history and theory of reading practices. Cool. So, Teleunin, what the heck is pre-reading? Yeah, so as I'm using this term pre-reading, what I mean by it is to describe the relationship that exists between a person and any book that that person knows something about but hasn't yet read. So, pre-reading, you're in a state before you've read a particular book. A game that I like to play with friends is like asking people like, what's the most important book you've never read? I won't put you on the spot, but I'll share my own. So, I'm a scholar of 19th, early 20th century literature, a book that is really like central to that period and to the kind of things I study that I haven't read is Virginia Wolves to the Lighthouse. So, this is a novel that is very famous in British literature, in women's literature, in modernist literature, and I've never read it.

3:08But, despite having never read it, I think I know quite a lot about it. I think there's something to do with a brown woolen stocking. I think there's like a scene with a dinner table. I think there's a sort of episode in the middle where like decades pass in an empty house with nobody in it. I see you nodding, so maybe I'm right about those things. I don't know if I'm right, that's kind of the point. I might have been misinformed. I might be misremembering, but this is the kind of pre-reading relationship that I have with that particular book. And so, I don't know, Kim, if you feel comfortable sharing like for you, what's the most important book that you've never read? And it can be important to you personally. I don't think we need to care about what the world thinks is important, but to you, what's a book that comes to mind? Ah, this is embarrassing. Right, and suppose that is the book. Beloved, never read the love it. Okay, so beloved by Tony Morrison. And so, other things that you know about it or think that you know about it,

4:12despite not having read it? Yes, yes, there are. Okay, it's a hugely important novel in 20th century African-American literature. And in women's literature and American literature, generally, it's a novel. I think it's a novel about reproduction under slavery. And it's a novel in which a woman kills her children, or maybe just one child. And then they're haunted by the ghost, the baby whose name I think is Shelves. But I've never, yeah, I haven't actually read this. I have proposed teaching it many times and not actually taught it. I think many of us, maybe especially people that like professional readers of literature, feel that embarrassment about things we haven't read, I don't think we should. And I think that like what you just said, it illustrates the fact that we actually know quite a bit about many books that we haven't read. So that relationship of pre-reading that we have to, in fact, many, many more books than we ever read, right?

5:12Like just by virtue of being like limited beings of limited time and energy, like of all the books in the world, many more of them. We have a relationship of pre-reading to them, a relationship of having read. And in some cases, maybe we can kind of trace back like how we came to know certain things, certain things that I remember learning about to the lighthouse I learned from academic articles or books that I read that mentioned that novel. But other things I don't know how they reached me, or maybe they didn't reach me and I made them up. But either way, this is a kind of knowledge that I think we all have, and that we all use in our daily lives, and sometimes in our academic lives, if those are bold reading, but that we haven't really acknowledged until now. Let me ask you my second question, and I think we'll get more deeply into this. How do I use pre-reading? I can give two answers, one that's kind of about everyday life, and then another that's more about like how it can be used in academic research. I think in everyday life, I hope that like listeners are also recognizing this as something

6:14that they already use, right? There are all kinds of books, you know, newly published that we learn about and haven't yet read, but we already know some things about them. Sometimes that information is useful to us, it can give us new ideas, it might move us to actually read the book, or it might not, we might just be happy with the sort of second-hand information. I would tell us that we don't read this book. Totally, yeah, because our time is precious, and why would we spend it on books that we don't actually want to know about? So yeah, totally, and I think that's a useful thing to have, right? To be able to filter through all of the books in existence to find ones that you actually want to invest the time in reading, and also maybe just to feel like, okay, you have enough of the knowledge of books that you don't have time to read or don't want to read right now for your purposes. So I think we're all already using pre-reading, or like this relationship of pre-reading that we have to the books we haven't read, that's something that we use in our daily lives

7:16all the time. And by the way, I mean, I'm calling it pre-reading, I think this can also apply to like movies, it can also apply to like books that are not works of literature, but non-fiction books, really kind of anything that is like a vehicle for a story, or for information, or for ideas, we can think about it in terms of pre-reading, at least as I want to think about it. And then the kind of more academic research side of how you might use this is that, so I have just published this article about what I'm calling pre-reading environments, and this is a way to actually research pre-reading, not as something that is like individual to each of us in the way we've been talking about it so far, but that is about an environment that surrounds a whole community of people in a specific time and place. So in the article I look at book reviews in the early 20th century that are published in newspapers, right, those form part of an environment that gives people pre-readers of a particular book information about that book. I also look at

8:20Twitter in 2015, and the way that that was also a place where people that hadn't yet read a book could pick up information about a particular book. So if you're interested in doing academic research, like thinking about pre-reading environments as something that we can research, generate data on, or explore an archive to try and get a sense of what information was in circulation within a specific community, what could and couldn't people know about a given book in a given time and place. So I recently taught Stanley Fischer's essay, is there a text in this class? Yeah, might say it's about post-reading environments, right? It gets about different ways of interpreting a text, but it is he does have a similar idea, I think, of sort of interpretive communities, which I think is similar to the like pre-reading environment that you are suggesting that belongs to a particular place. So I guess how does pre-reading as a practice like shape

9:27the meaning of text? If we assume that textual meaning is not stable? Yeah, I think that's complicated. One of the things that I've been interested in is thinking about the kinds of reading experiences of narratives that have plot twists, how those depend for their success on a certain kind of pre-reading environment, specifically one that with hold spoilers about the plot and about the twist, right? Because if you know that what the twist is before you read it for the first time or before you watch a movie for the first time, you're going to have a totally different experience and like arguably you're not going to have that true twist experience where like the rug is pulled out from under you suddenly you're like, oh my god, all along, everything was totally different from what I thought, but now I realize how it all makes sense in a new light. So in those cases like what an audience doesn't know is going to shape the way that they interpret the story, right? If they know that what the twist is,

10:34they're going to interpret it in that light from the get-go. If they don't, they'll presumably be misdirected in the way that is intended and then the twist will come as a surprise. But that said, yes, pre-reading environments or our own individual pre-reading relationships can, I think, shape our responses if and when we come to read or the ways we interpret things, right? If reviews have told us that a certain novel is sort of like exploitative, we might also feel that it's exploitative at the same time we might actually as we're reading no, I don't think it's exploitative. I think these other reviewers or these people that told me this were wrong. So I don't think there's any sort of direct cause, cause an effect of what your pre-reading environment is telling you what your own expectations are and then what you experience or what you interpret as you're reading. But it does in some way shape or condition or

11:34relate to what you would experience as a reader eventually. And the example you gave of like saying a particular text is exploitative. What is the politics of pre-reading? Is there a politics of food? I think this starts to get into what I know is your third question, because I've listened to many other episodes of your podcast. So I don't think there is an inherent politics to pre-reading. I think it's like a fact of life, it's a fact of reading or it's a fact of non-reading. But I want to think about pre-reading as at least potentially and at its best related to a certain kind of ethics of care. And I know you have had an episode in the past about care ethics. And there is a kind of indirect connection here because listeners may be familiar with spoiler alerts or content notes, trigger warnings that are sometimes known as

12:34and content notes, trigger warnings come out of a sort of feminist theorizing about care and about how you kind of care for people before they read a certain book or a certain text that might be distressing or traumatizing. So that's one way that I do want to think about a certain kind of political significance that pre-reading can have is that when we are crafting a pre-reading environment for other people through, for example, a content note or a spoiler alert that tells people like, if you don't want this plot spoiled for you, start reading right now, that's also a kind of care, right? Yeah. So I think that's one part of it, but there's not a sort of inherent politics to pre-reading because on the other hand, we could think about the politics of getting your information in second hand, the potential for misinformation, a lot of current

13:36politics around in the United States, around critical race theory, the people that are attacking it, sort of right-wing politicians and activists, I think haven't read any of the text in question, right? The text in our critical race theory and might even openly say I refuse to read it. So there's also a kind of like pre-reading that is, you know, I would say like politically reactionary and that is not about care, but that is about a certain kind of refusal to engage and quite supremacy and so on. Pre-reading as pre-judgment as prejudice. Yeah, yeah. Well, let me actually ask you the third question. How will pre-reading save the world? You know, one thing I've been thinking about is book bans and the way that in the United States, particularly in like public and dominated states at the moment, there have been these book bans

14:40where particularly in schools and in libraries, politicians have been banning books that are either about topics like race, gender, sexuality, and or are by authors of color or queer authors or trans authors. And I want to say, first of all, that I think that is very bad. It is bad. It is harmful. But when we bring pre-reading into that picture, I think it gives us ways of thinking a little more optimistically about that situation and also thinking tactically about that situation, right? When physical books are being withheld from people, like books are not our only medium for accessing information, accessing ideas, accessing stories. And so if we want certain communities to have access to information ideas, stories that currently are being banned in their book form, we can think potentially about how we can cultivate pre-reading relationships in communities of

15:45people that we think might want to have some kind of knowledge of what is in those books. Maybe that allows them to eventually seek out those books themselves. Maybe just having that information, second hand, is valuable to them. So that's one potential modest way that pre-reading could save the world. And then I think the other thing is thinking about pre-reading as a potential kind of care ethics, that when we value and care for each other's pre-reading relationships, when we craft pre-reading environments that embody care for each other, in just a very ordinary everyday way. You are the friend that doesn't spoil the plot of a movie or of a new book, but instead gives someone a little description of it that tantalizes them but doesn't spoil it. Assuming that's what the person wants. Or that if somebody hasn't read a

16:46book yet, you don't judge them for it, but you actually find out what they're interested in, give them a kind of summary of a book if you've read it and they haven't that might either lead them to read it or just give them a working knowledge that is good enough for their purposes. That's a world that I want to live in. And so I think valuing pre-reading more highly and being more conscious of how we are all for each other, shaping these pre-reading relationships, I think that also in some sense contributes to a better world. That's really nice. Yeah. No academic concept is going to save the world single-handedly, it's nice because it's a thing but it's going to do its work regardless of our political structures or really our efforts as academics to shape and control things around us. And I think academics in particular are maybe especially bad at valuing pre-reading, at least let's say like literary scholars, scholars in the humanities,

17:51book learning has been the thing that we value above all else. And I think we have been trained over many years to view that relationship of pre-reading as a sort of embarrassing immature one that if only we had more time, we would correct it and read this, read that. But the reality is you're never going to read everything. And what's important to you might not be important to me and vice versa. And yeah, so I think academics in particular might need to kind of learn this lesson, but just in general, you know, anytime that people are feeling negatively about books that they haven't read, I would encourage them to think instead about, okay, so what do you know about that book? And how did you come to know it? And why does that seem to you like a valuable thing that you might someday want to know more about and want to read that book? Because I think that then connects us with our knowledge, connects us with our values. That seems like a good thing. Well, thank you for your life. Yeah, it was, yeah, really great. Thank you for coming and talking

18:53with us about pre-reading. Absolutely. And thank you for listening to High Theory. If you like our podcast, please review and subscribe wherever you get your podcast fixed. Owen Quinn composes our theme music. Aja Garcia edited this episode and Lily Epstein supplied the image. We are getting off social media. But if you would like to know what we are up to, please subscribe to our Patreon for free. Paid subscribers will get episodes without ads and warm fuzzy feelings. You can find High Theory on the new book's network and also on High Theory.net. We hope you have a highly theoretical day. This episode is brought to you by Athletic Brewing Company. No matter how you do game

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