A dialogue between distributed language and reading disciplines

Introduction to the Special Issue: This special issue grows out of the Reading Symposium: Skilled Embodiment: Learning from Symbolizations held in Odense, Denmark on 27–28 August, 2018. The core idea pursued here was the possibility of moving forward the traditional paradigm of reading and writing, in which both are taken to be technologies and implementations of technologies by an autonomous cogito. The movement forward involved, instead, taking a distributed language perspective (Cowley, 2011). In contrast to the argument in which reading is often theorised as processes used to interpret ‘text’, a distributed perspective replaces this view's tendency to deploy the concept of code with due attention to the embodied and multi-scalar nature of the activity. Rather than posit reading in a rather abstract way, as if all reading were more or less the same – that is, an individual, silent and inward act of mental interpretation – reading is traced in terms of the repertoire of bodily attributes and capacities that are required to actualize it, as well as the interplay of internal (the aforementioned capacities) and external (contexts, situations, technologies, cultural practice). Habitual linguistic action allows for construing symbolizations as neurophysiological processes which (re-)evoke parts of an individual's life experience of encultured social activity. While symbolizations are often treated as words or verbal patterns (forms and lexicogrammar), a distributed view puts emphasis on how the material and spatio-temporal features involved in action–perception cycles – from the bodily or haptic actions required, to the physical spaces of action – constitute reading and impact understanding and imagination. [...]

© 2021. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/