“The Only Way to be Moved to Think is to Lose One’s Way”: Bewilderment(ing) Reading Practices

Abstract

This paper engages with concepts from Nathan Snaza’s book Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism in relation to reading practices as an academic, both as a scholar and as a teacher. This paper thinks with Snaza’s writing on bewilderment to (re)think academic reading practices. I focus on reading for pleasure, reading outside one’s disciplinary field, and reading difficult texts. The title of this article is a quote from Snaza’s (2019) book where they discuss bewilderment and literacy. Bewilderment is an affective condition of disorientation when disciplined attention fails and thus, one might not know one’s way as a reader. Therefore, I question, similarly to Snaza, what if literacy is a both/and—both meaning-making and something else, something more? Is it possible for literacy to not be about conscious meaning-making events or representational constructions? In the literacy community we think of literacy as symbolic representations of thought and readers must crack the phonetic code of symbols to make meaning. However, Snaza’s writing prompts us to think differently about reading. Thus, reading creates spaces for us to be otherwise if we conceptualize reading as otherwise, not solely as an act of meaning-making and comprehension but also about how and what it a/effectually produces.