"Reading for Democracy" with Laura Bieger, 06/18 - GLAM Lecture

Is literature of political use, and if yes, how might this use be defined? My new book, 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. This talk zeroes in on my understanding of literature as a social practice, in which literary texts are shape-shifting agents in a dynamic web of relations, created through literature’s linking and bonding capacities. I contend that, 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.

Laura Bieger is Professor of American Studies at Ruhr-Universität Bochum. She is the author of Reading for Democracy (Metzler 2025), Belonging and Narrative (transcript 2018), and Ästhetik der Immersion (transcript 2007). Her essays have appeared in New Literary History, Narrative, Parallax, Studies in American Naturalism, Amerikastudien/American Studies and ZAA. She is a member of the DFG-funded Research Group “Infrastructure: Aesthetics and Supply,” where she leads the project “‘Race as Infrastructure’ and Literary Infrastructures of Resistance.” Together with Philipp Loeffler, she is currently co-editing two special issues: “After Contemporary Literature” for American Literature, and “What was Contemporary Literature? Or: The End of Periodization as We Know It” for Post45.