On Reading: Form, Fictionality, Friendship

by Jeremy Fernando (Editor)

This text attempts to read the unreadable. To read the possibility of reading as a one that doesn't claim to know, to understand, to have read. Hence, all reading(s) are always already haunted by the fictionality of reading itself.  And it is only through the form of the fiction that we can make any statement--provisional as it may be--about the object of reading.
 
But even as we acknowledge, foreground even, the problems--impossibilities--of reading, we are clearly reading.  Perhaps it is precisely the highlighting of these fictionalities, and the unveiling of forms, that reveals moments in these texts. And the exposure of the reader herself--the gesture of friendship to and with the text--is what allows a glimpse of a singular moment, a moment of nothing other than reading itself.

502 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 2012