Reading (in) German Literature

What is reading? We will discuss theories of reading from reader-response-theory to performativity and its history. Beginning with Goethe's novel "Werther," we will read German literature since the 18th century. We will focus on the emerging conditions and techniques of reading (extensity, accessibility, popularity) which still shape text-reader-relations and on the double-bind of reading as a bourgeois model for subject-formation alongside profound ambivalence towards its pleasures. Finally: How is our own experience and performance of reading German literature? In German.