On Reading

From the Back Cover "The essays assembled in Fernando's collection bear testament to the contemporary status of reading as a perpetual act of creative engagement and continually remind us of the beautiful treachery of bringing provocative ideas into contact with the complexity of imaginary worlds. Shape-shifting fiction, we are repeatedly reminded in these exciting essays, is the true constant in both the process of reading and of writing, and whether that fiction materializes as aesthetic, ethical, or gendered, matters little. The elegant readerly encounters that we discover across the pages of this collection are all potent, provocative acknowledgments of the essential haunted evasiveness of final meanings."   -- Neil Murphy, Associate Professor of English, Nanyang Technological University; author of Irish Fiction and Postmodern Doubt and editor of Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form Product Description This text attempts to read the unreadable. To read the possibility of reading as a response: one that doesn't claim to know, to understand, to have read. Hence, all reading(s) are always already haunted by the fictionality of reading itself.  And it is only through the form of the fiction that we can make any statement--provisional as it may be--about the object of reading.   But even as we acknowledge, foreground even, the problems--impossibilities--of reading, we are clearly reading.  Perhaps it is precisely the highlighting of these fictionalities, and the unveiling of forms, that reveals moments in these texts. And the exposure of the reader herself--the gesture of friendship to and with the text--is what allows a glimpse of a singular moment, a moment of nothing other than reading itself. About the Author Jeremy Fernando is the Jean Baudrillard Fellow at The European Graduate School; and a Fellow of Tembusu College at the National University of Singapore. He is the general editor of Delere Press, and the thematic magazine One Imperative.