Out of Print: Edmund King on the fantasy of reading's power

The anxieties around the decline of reading and literacy paradoxically give rise to outsized fantasies of the power of reading. As humanists feel increasingly under threat in the institutions, they attribute to reading (particularly the reading of fiction) miraculous and healing powers.

In this, the final part of Out of Print, Edmund King reflects on bibliotherapy and some of the symposium's highlights.

Edmund King is a writer and senior lecturer in English Literature at The Open University. He writes on the history of books and reading, contemporary literary sociology, and the culture wars. With Thomas Prosser, he is the author of Beyond Woke and Anti-woke. He is known online as Christopher Lasch’s Angry Ghost.

If you liked what you heard, may enjoy the just-published ⁠The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society⁠ by James Marriott, whose commentary is pertinent to Kit’s argument. 

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