Reading for Democracy

Is literature of political use, and if yes, how might this use be defined?  Reading for Democracy  addresses this question in a series of essays, with topics ranging from reading as a political practice to literature as critical infrastructure, from the public sphere as a space of appearance to the art of the essay in the digital age. At its core is an understanding of literature as a social practice – of literary texts as shape-shifting agents in a dynamic web of relations, created through literature’s linking and bonding capacities. In trying and institutionalizing collective forms of judgment, these agents are essential to negotiating the shape of the world. Which is what the political is all about.