Introduction: A New Way to Look at Reading

Reading a text constitutes a daily activity for millions of people around the world. Yet the processes involved are largely opaque to readers, and many questions on text reading puzzle even philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists and scholars of literature. What role does the unconscious play in text reading? How is reading a text different from merely looking at a page full of writing? How is it possible for texts to connect to their readers’ lives, sometimes even against their will? Are we like computers when we read? This chapter will propose a new way of looking at reading which connects hitherto fragmented answers to these questions. It will claim that one needs to examine the reader’s synthesis of experience if one wishes to understand how a plurality of meaning experiences can constitute the activity of ‘reading a text’.