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I have been asked to say something about the ‘overall goal’ of teaching/ reading the open-ended and growing body of texts so awkwardly collected under the rubric of ‘Theology, Philosophy, History’. That body of texts might more reasonably be called Post-Classical Jewish Studies, since it encompasses everything outside of what is usually understood as ‘Rabbinic Literature’, yet it is as much a part of our ‘textual tradition’ as the Bavli and the great collections of Midrashim. I can only speak to, and for, what I am closest to: the Jewish texts of ‘modernity’, ‘post-modernity’, and, by now, what might need to be called ‘post-post-modernity’. Of course, many (most?) of these texts exist in a loving, intimate, though often conflictual ‘dialogue’ with their textual predecessors, even when they appear to be in rebellion or repudiation.

This article draws on interview data gathered from a broader study concerned with examining issues associated with boys, masculinities, and reading at school. The focus is on eight boys in Years 5 and 6 who attend schools in a range of socioeconomic communities in Australia. The boys offer polarized perspectives on reading, with four boys reporting positive attitudes toward reading and describing reading books as “fun” and another four boys describing reading books as “boring.” Examined are inflections in these two groups of boys’ experiences as readers at school, making visible the way boys’ attitudes influence engagement with reading. This research moves beyond broad generalizations about boys to consider complexities inherent in notions of masculinity and how different groups of boys internalize their positioning of reading in ways that influence their attitudes, engagement, and subsequently outcomes in reading.

Sarah Rothschild. 2013. The Princess Story: Modeling the Feminine in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film. New York: Peter Lang.

Amy S. Pattee. 2011. Reading the Adolescent Romance: Sweet Valley High and the Popular Young Adult. New York: Routledge.

Drawing on an anthropological study of the social organisation of the world of Irish writers, this article investigates the literary reading as performance which has become central for the career and promotion of contemporary writers. How is the reading - live as well as recorded - constituted, and how is it experienced from the writer's point of view? The data are derived from participant observation and interviews at literary festivals and conferences, writers' retreats, book launches and more informal situations with writers, as well as from fiction and essays by the writers. For this article, I asked some of the writers to write short texts on the reading. It turned out that the frames of the reading as performance reach beyond the reading event, and also that a reading includes elements of risk, such as not attracting a big enough audience or performing badly. Finally, the article considers the changing role of the ethnographer.

This article focuses on some of the themes and questions at the heart of Gabriel Josipovici’s fictional and critical writing, most notably the idea that reading is a matter of participation rather than understanding. It asks what is distinctive about Josipovici’s relationship with other philosophically inclined critics and theorists. It offers a participatory reading of one of his critical writings demonstrating the care with which it is arranged. The article concludes with a brief consideration of how other writers and works are brought into Josipovici’s fiction.

This article considers the theoretical and practice-based evidence for the therapeutic effects of the shared reading of literature (poetry, fiction, plays, short stories) in prison communities. Taking as its starting point recent research and practice relating to the successful intervention ('Get into Reading') pioneered by UK charity The Reader Organisation, the article situates the components of this model in the context of established theories of reader response, as well as new research on reading and the brain. Yet its focus is always shared reading in practice and, through specific examples and testimony from prisoners and those who read with them (including health professionals), the article demonstrates the vital relation of this intervention to current recommendations in respect of the mental health needs of prisoners. It also offers a possible model for future interdisciplinary research in this field.

Peter Reading’s work provokes two questions about poetry; what is it and what is its role in the modern world? Perhaps the very fact that his writing poses these questions provides a positive answer to his query ‘am I art?’;1 since it is part of the job of art to raise fundamental issues. But art also has other qualities of transformation and transcendence which Reading’s work seems to lack. ‘I DO NOT’, he asserts, ‘transcend pain with poetry’ (‘On the Other Hand’, CP1, 167). We need to distinguish here between at least two traditions in British poetry, one lyrical and the other conceptual. Reading’s work partakes of both but favours the latter. In many ways, he is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot in the choice of subject matter, classical allusion and mixture of registers. The difference is that whereas Eliot believed that poetry could be a vehicle for the redemption of modernity, Reading gives it no such privileged status. It does not stand apart from other discourses but confronts, embraces and is contained by them. Hence we find in Reading, among other registers, those of geology, chemistry, physics, biology, ornithology, medicine, Latin quotations, journalese, letters from local newspapers, adverts offering country barns at knock down prices and the demotic. The effect is, to say the least, jarring but it does serve, perhaps, to negate social meaning by the elevation of form, which is normally invisible in our dominant ‘realistic’ representations. It also challenges our traditional ideas of verse as do his prose poems, collages, typographical experiments and crossings out – the latter finding an echo in Derrida’s idea that writing should always be presented under erasure.

In this article I consider the white British and Australian schoolgirl through a notionally comparative study of Enid Blyton’s The Naughtiest Girl in the School (1940–1952) series and the contemporary Go Girl (2005–2012) series, texts spanning my lived experience as girl, mother, and teacher. Through incendiary fragments of memory and media, I, as researcher and writer, seek the girl addressed by these texts and consider the struggles, denials, and ambivalences that produce and are produced by reading the schoolgirl. This girl resists historical determinism, coalescing as contemporaneous past, present, and future as the reader performs her own girlhood through reading and writing. This creative analytical article notices the visual and physical manifestations of texts, as well as their linguistic discourses. Through this work, we perceive postfeminist entanglement in the ongoing re-configuration of the schoolgirl, with implications for policy and practice in education and for cultural and girlhood studies.