UC Berkeley

This dissertation examines scenes of reading – a literary motif where one or more figures are portrayed in the act of reading – in German literature from the High Middle Ages to today. Against the pressure to interpret such scenes as depictions of historic or exemplary reading practices, I analyze them as imaginative theorizations of reading, as nexuses of imagery, form, and content that reflect on, explicate, and influence the role of reading in a textual culture. As an integral part of a text’s poetical structure, these scenes render the reading process visible, exposing it to critique and reflection. In my analysis of several texts, including a medieval Arthurian romance, a late medieval devotional text, a nineteenth-century novella, and a contemporary narrative of migration, I demonstrate how the matrix of people, practices, and technologies that constitute reading scenes have affected and continue to affect popular as well as academic discourses on this fundamental cultural practice. By elucidating the theoretical and meaning-making capacities of scenes of reading, my project offers a unique approach to the study of reading: it incorporates the diversity of historic reading practices with the symbolic potency of reading’s representation to explicate reading’s poetological role in literature.