3 Review(s)

A significant, original contribution to the study of reading. - Matei Calinescu, Indiana University. A book about how readers read and how critics read, "An Anthropology of Reading" pieces together ethnographic descriptions, cultural artifacts, and descriptive analyses to reveal literary criticism as its own culture of reading. Livingston interleaves discussions of captioned photographs, simple arithmetical calculations, tests of reading comprehension and the like with original readings of poems by T. S. Eliot, Dudley Fitts, Wilfred Owen, and Dylan Thomas, and with interrogations of the criticism about these poems.