Slow Reading - Philosophy and Literature

Philosophy and Literature

The earliest reference to slow reading appears to be in Nietzsche's (1887) preface to Daybreak: "It is not for nothing that one has been a philologist, perhaps one is a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading."

Birkerts (1994) stated "Reading, because we control it, is adaptable to our needs and rhythms. We are free to indulge our subjective associative impulse; the term I coin for this is deep reading: the slow and meditative possession of a book." His statement speaks to the idea that slow reading is not merely about slowing down, but about controlling the pace of reading. Slow readers may speed up at times, and then slow down for the more difficult or pleasurable portions of a text.

The importance of personal control over the speed of reading is echoed by Pullman (2004) who argued that slow reading is needed to reinforce democracy in America. Part of its democratic nature is that the manner of reading is not determined by someone else: "we can skim, or we can read it slowly". A similar view was stated by Postman (1985) who noted the character of the ordinary citizen of the 19th century, a mind that could listen for hours on end to political orations clearly shaped by a culture favouring text. Postman warns that reading books is important for developing rational thinking and political astuteness.

Lindsay Waters, Executive Editor for the Humanities at Harvard University Press, declared a worldwide reading crisis resulting from our global push toward productivity. He asserts that young children are learning to read faster, skipping phonetics and diagramming sentences, and concludes that these children will not grow up to read Milton. He foresees the end of graduate English literature programs. "There is something similar between a reading method that focuses primarily on the bottom-line meaning of a story in a novel and the economic emphasis on the bottom line that makes automobile manufacturers speed up assembly lines." He advised re-introducing time into reading, "The mighty imperative is to speed everything up, but there might be some advantage in slowing things down. People are trying slow eating. Why not slow reading?" (2007).