Journal of Language, Literature and Culture

The Postliterate World? Reading, Writing and Culture After the Age of Reading

The Journal of Language, Literature and Culture invites academic articles for a special issue examining the idea of the postliterate world.

Rose Horowitch recently argued in her article ‘The age of reading is over: the postliterate era’, published in The Atlantic, that literacy is declining at a rapid pace and will forever change not only how we develop and share new knowledge, but the very fabric of our social systems. A counter essay written by David Wallace-Wells and published in The New Yorks Times argues the situation is more nuanced and requires deeper thinking and interrogation into the contributing factors without succumbing to generational moral panic.

This special issue draws inspiration from both of these articles to ask: what does it mean to describe our current juncture as postliterate? Does the decline of long-form reading signal a fundamental cultural shift, or are practices of literacy being redistributed across new media, technologies and forms? What happens to literature when written texts compete with video, audio, images, algorithms, summaries and artificial intelligence?

We welcome submissions addressing topics including:

• changing practices of reading, writing and attention;
• the cultural and political value of sustained or “deep” reading;
• postliteracy as diagnosis, metaphor or moral panic;
• books, screens and the changing media environment;
• artificial intelligence, summarisation and outsourced interpretation;
• short-form media and the fragmentation of knowledge;
• literacy, citizenship and democratic participation;
• generational narratives about reading decline;
• education and the teaching of complete and complex texts;
• authorship, cultural authority and the future of literary expertise;
• digital, visual, oral, sonic and multimodal literacies;
• inequalities in access to literacy and literary culture;
• multilingual, translingual and cross-cultural reading practices;
• Indigenous and oral knowledge traditions that challenge the privileging of print;
• libraries, archives and cultural memory;
• literary resistance, slow reading and the recovery of attention.

The special issue welcomes critical approaches from literary studies, cultural studies, media studies, education, applied linguistics, book history, digital humanities and related fields. Interdisciplinary and comparative contributions are particularly encouraged.