On the value and the future of reading

The past, present, and future of reading is the subject of the LMU-Princeton Summer Seminar, which will be held at LMU from 16 to 18 June 2025. In our interview, Susanne Reichlin and Carlos Spoerhase, both professors of literature at LMU, discuss how various forms of attention and distraction affect our reading practices.

We often hear complaints that reading skills are diminishing. Nobody can concentrate on longer texts anymore, so the critics say, because our attention spans have become too short. Is the reading situation really that bad?

Carlos Spoerhase: Currently, you hear this complaint everywhere. Open the culture pages of any broadsheet newspaper and you will find stark warnings that people are much less willing to read longer texts. However, it is difficult to judge whether this is actually true. These fears are often highly anecdotal, voiced by professors or teachers in academic high schools. And in genres like young adult fiction at least, we see that adolescents have no problem at all immersing themselves in books for thousands of pages.

Attitudes often depend on the genres to which attention is devoted. If it’s the ‘wrong’ genre – not high-brow literature, say, but romantic fantasy novels – suddenly it doesn’t make a blind bit of difference that people read them with great attention. So the question of what’s valuable attention, and what’s worthless, is always a factor.

Professor Reichlin, you’re involved in a research project in the Collaborative Research Centre “Cultures of Vigilance” that looks at a period well before the 19th century. Was the attention of readers a concern in those days?

Susanne Reichlin: People today tend to blame the new media for the loss of reading skills they’re lamenting and thus see it as a highly topical problem. But complaints about people being addicted to distractions, and about the decline of culture because nobody is able to concentrate on what’s important anymore, were ubiquitous a century ago. It would presumably be easy to find texts that mirror today’s concerns.

But we can look back even further. For example, texts in late antiquity discussed the question: How can I concentrate on the ‘One’ (God)? The hermits who wanted to read the Holy Scriptures with complete absorption for days on end ran up against similar problems to people today: Why am I constantly having thoughts that distract me from the ‘Actual’ or seduce me into dealing with things other than the text in front of me?

History also tells us that attention was seen as a very limited, fallible capability in late antiquity. There was much interest in depictions of waning attention and mind-wandering.

Carlos Spoerhase: In the Enlightenment, too, people gave much consideration to questions of attentiveness and distractedness. Attempts were made to present distraction as something positive, to demonstrate that it might even have cognitive advantages if you do not just concentrate on one thing. Philosophers like Denis Diderot and writers like Laurence Sterne tried in various ways to show that being distracted can be tremendously creative and intellectually stimulating. Moreover, it frees us in a certain respect from political and social authorities seeking to impose certain things on our attention.

Paying attention, but for what?

Isn’t divided attention part of reading in any case. Book clubs appear to be back in vogue, even on social media. How new, or old, is that?

Carlos Spoerhase: In the 18th century, reading was a key means of forming communities. This might involve people gathering in the same place where one person would read out loud while the others listened. Or it might take the form of intensive correspondence about what you have read. This shows, moreover, that paying attention to literature is not something one simply acquires on one’s own, but something learned and practiced in social contexts – and this includes parents reading to their children.

Social training of attention practices in relation to literature or other arts can be an imposition that is associated with discipline or self-discipline. You notice this as a child when your parents drag you to a museum for the first time, and you’re expected to spend more time in front of a picture than you would initially be inclined to do. This is a form of discipline that is repeated until eventually you’re ready to spend longer amounts of time in front of a Rembrandt without getting bored and distracted. This kind of self-discipline plays a substantial role in how subjects develop and form.

Susanne Reichlin: Attention to so-called high culture and disparaging remarks about, say, social media as distraction is also something very class-specific. It’s a distinction mechanism by which groups with certain education levels try to differentiate themselves from other classes.

Carlos Spoerhase: Yes, people act as if it’s about the ability to pay attention. But when you look closer, it becomes clear: It was, and is, about where the attention is directed. About whether you go to watch a B-movie or read a canonized novel or gaze at the aforementioned Rembrandt painting.

Certain classes or cultures universalize their own attention model and then act as if this is the way in which people should ideally pay attention and behave. In the process, many forms of attentiveness that exist alongside the universalized model are delegitimized.

Huge doorstoppers, innovative shorter forms

Sehen Sie, dass die Literatur auf die angeblich veränderte Aufmerksamkeit seitens der Lesenden reagiert?

Carlos Spoerhase: It’s very difficult to assess what happens in the present, because there’s hardly any research on understanding attention behavior not just in anthropological or psychological terms, but by radically historicizing the subject itself. The fundamental attitudes to attention discussed in the 18th century, when people read bulky novels by Samuel Richardson, may well be very different to ours today, even though they used the same terms back then as we do now.

There are still huge doorstoppers today, even novels that flaunt their size and require that readers submit to their yoke, as it were. But naturally, there are also many innovative shorter forms.

Susanne Reichlin: There’s the phenomenon of Instapoetry, say, which responds to new reading habits. Things like images, layout, and the reception community play a much larger role here than in conventional poetry. It attracts and holds attention in a different way than a book of verse.

Carlos Spoerhase: One of the most successful poets in the world currently is Rupi Kaur, who published her poetry first on Instagram. This allows her to reach a completely different global audience than with a conventional printed poetry volume.

Practicing different forms of reading

The title of the graduate seminar you organize refers to the “future of reading.” What is your view on this? Do your students read?

Carlos Spoerhase: Yes. In the United States, there’s a big debate going on about students not reading as much as they used to, when two substantial novels were assigned every week. But people are not asking how exactly these hefty tomes were read back then.

Unquestionably, there are different forms of reading and perhaps many students used to skim-read a lot of text in the past. It would be nice if the discourse about reading practices and how they are changing led to more honesty and caused people to abandon normative perspectives and look with curiosity at what’s really happening in practice.

Susanne Reichlin: As a Germanist, I was socialized in the heyday of close reading and attended seminars where we would read three sentences in 90 minutes. This changed around ten years ago, not least because of distant reading (digital reading techniques), which meant that suddenly large volumes of literature (100 novels, say) could be analyzed again. What we need to teach students today is that they can read at different paces and help them understand when and for what purpose they need a certain reading practice.

Carlos Spoerhase: To what extent students should train themselves to read in a highly concentrated manner is a question that philologists have to collectively reevaluate. Also regarding the extent to which this is a cultural practice that is perhaps being lost in other parts of society. There’s a very nice quote from Friedrich Nietzsche to the effect that philology is nothing but learning to read attentively. Specifically against the backdrop of the possibility of using generative AI to read texts, it’s important to make students aware of these questions and to incorporate reflection on the complexity of reading into their curricula.

LMU-Princeton Sommerschool

The LMU-Princeton Graduate Seminar is being held at LMU from 16 to 18 June 2025. Its topic is the past, present, and future of reading. The doctoral students will explore the cultural history of attention in lectures and workshops. On all three evenings, there will be public events starting at 7 pm.

Writer Uljana Wolf will be giving the address “Centrifugal Sound With Grammar Girls” on 16 June; Professor David Marno (UC Berkeley) will gave a talk “On Falling Asleep” on 17 June; and Professor Jeff Dolven (Princeton University) will discuss “Attention and Metaphor” on 18 June.

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Prof. Dr. Susanne Reichlin is Professor of Late Medieval and Early Modern German Literature with a focus on textual theory. One of her research interests is in “the literary dynamics of self-observation and the observation of others in medieval religious literature,” which she pursues within the CRC Cultures of Vigilance.

Professor Reichlin is also involved in the new Cross-Cultural Philology Cluster of Excellence .

For more on the research of Susanne Reichlin, see:

Interview: Hate speech - From Luther to the present

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Prof. Dr. Carlos Spoerhase is Professor of Modern German Literature with a focus on the literature of the 18th and 19th centuries. His main research interests include the sociology of literature and the history of the humanities. As part of CRC Cultures of Vigilance, he carries out research in the Watchful Readings project on “hermeneutical attentiveness in the 19th century literary culture of vigilance.”

Professor Spoerhase is also involved in the new Cross-Cultural Philology Cluster of Excellence .

For more on the research of Carlos Spoerhase, see:

Interview: On the art of shortening literary texts