originally published 8/28/2018
Historian of reading practices Matthew Rubery argues that it is a false opposition to say that one reads a printed book but only listens to an audiobook. Instead, the two modes of reception are not so easily divided, for “orality” is present even when we read silently. When we ask the question of what “counts” as reading, Rubery observes, we are revealing an anxiety that simply wasn’t of concern to earlier generations and societies. While visual reading and aural or oral reading engage different senses, one is not necessarily inferior to the other, but both present an approach to reading that emphasizes and reveals different aspects of a text. Rubery is the author ofThe Untold Story of the Talking Book (Harvard University Press, 2016). This interview was originally published on Volume 140 of the Journal.
22 minutes
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