Reading as involvement with text

This dissertation contributes to scholarship on reading as cognitive and socio-cultural activity through an analysis of modes of human involvement with text and their relation to appropriation of meaning. The dissertation proposes an integrated spectrum of modes of involvement related to reading practices. This spectrum includes sensori-motor, interpretive and emotional involvement. Modes of involvement with text are intricately structured by historically rooted social conventions and cultural ideologies. Reading positions the reader in a web of socio-culturally stipulated relations between bodies and minds on the one hand, and texts as artifacts and symbols, on the other. This dissertation then proposes a set of socio-cultural dimensions as a matrix to stipulate the socio-historical characteristics of involvement with text. These dimensions are: (1) reading artifacts and built environment; (2) participant roles and relationships; (3) communicative modalities; and (4) ideologies of reading.; Employing the analytic framework outlined in chapters One and Two, the dissertation presents three studies of situated practices of involvement with text. Chapter Three explores the ways in which autism organizes involvement with text, and, in doing so, illuminates certain fundamental underpinnings of reading competence. Autistic impairments impact the sensori-motor enactment of reading as well as the appropriation of meaning, and reveal socio-cultural conventions and institutional expectations surrounding involvement with text as an embodied situated practice.; Chapter Four analyzes clandestine episodes of children's interactional involvement with text, within an educational context in which individual silent involvement with text is the preferred way of reading. The chapter highlights the cognitive and emotional affordances of peer interactional reading practices.; Chapter Five lends an historical perspective on involvement with text and reading as social activity, by examining the medieval devotional practice of reading the book of hours. By examining the materiality and design of books of hours in conjunction with pedagogical treatises that instructed how to read them, this chapter shows how in medieval Christian tradition reading was primarily a spiritual activity and meditation encoded reading. In examining involvement with text in different educational settings, communities, and historical epochs, this dissertation illuminates the nexus between individuals' agency and socio-cultural determinations in situated practices of reading.