Speed Reading the Novel: Reading Dynamics and the Value of Reading at Midcentury.
This essay explores the literary foundations of the mid-twentieth-century speed-reading craze. Focusing on the most popular speed-reading program of its day, Reading Dynamics, and on its founder, Evelyn Wood, a former high school and university English instructor, I suggest understanding midcentury...
| Publicado en: | American Literary History Vol. 37; no. 2; pp. 370 - 400 |
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| Formato: | Artículo |
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Oxford University Press / USA
Summer2025
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| Acceso en línea: | Ver este registro en EBSCOhost |
| fields | @attributes: recordID: 1 pdfLink: plink: https://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=hlh&AN=186085002&site=ehost-live header: @attributes: shortDbName: hlh uiTerm: 186085002 longDbName: Humanities International Complete uiTag: AN controlInfo: bkinfo: jinfo: jid: 08967148 7IY jtl: American Literary History issn: 08967148 maglogo: N pubinfo: dt: Summer2025 vid: 37 iid: 2 pid: 622 pub: Oxford University Press / USA artinfo: ui: 186085002 10.1093/alh/ajaf036 ppf: 370 ppct: 30 formats: tig: atl: Speed Reading the Novel: Reading Dynamics and the Value of Reading at Midcentury. aug: au: Thomas, Lindsay affil: Cornell University, Ithaca, United States su: Oral interpretation Information overload College teachers Computers Machine design sug: subj: Oral interpretation Information overload College teachers Computers Machine design ab: This essay explores the literary foundations of the mid-twentieth-century speed-reading craze. Focusing on the most popular speed-reading program of its day, Reading Dynamics, and on its founder, Evelyn Wood, a former high school and university English instructor, I suggest understanding midcentury speed reading as part of our disciplinary history. Reading Dynamics claimed its students could learn to read "at a pace formerly reserved for electronic computers," pitching speed reading as a solution to information overload. However, it was also concerned with defending the value of literary reading as both specialized skill and pleasurable pursuit. Despite the company's invocations of computing, its materials emphasize reading as an embodied, subjective, and specifically human pursuit. While speed reading is remembered today as a scam, its attention to skills for reading literature aligns it with close reading, another midcentury literary reading practice. Emerging in response to the ever-deepening flood of information and to the rise of reading machines designed to process it, both close reading and speed reading sought to promote, in their different ways, the value of reading literature in a world that seemed increasingly uninterested in taking the time to do it. pubtype: Academic Journal doctype: Article src: R language: English refInfo: copyright: @attributes: flag: Y dt: @attributes: year: 2025 holdings: @attributes: islocal: N |
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