Theory of Reading

Abstract

The essay presents the fundamental lines of the critical theory of reading, based on the historical-anthropological reality and on the conviction that the act of reading is structured according to these very same paradigms, wherever the civilization of modern books has settled. Throughout the century, before and especially after Sartre, academics with very different training and disciplinary backgrounds contributed to the development of research on reading problems: ranging from linguistics to educational psychology, from the history of literature to that of books, from communication theory to philosophical aesthetics to sociology. The Italians include Umberto Eco, Cesare Segre, Maria Corti, Armando Petrucci, Giuseppe Petronio, Graziella Pagliano, Franco Brioschi. The author also analyses the literary reading, the aim of which is to satisfy the desires of our aesthetic imagination, using a written product elaborated precisely for this purpose.