The Séance of Reading Project — YouTube Channel Statistics

These informal talks all relate to an ongoing teaching-and-writing project to which I've given the general title, "The Séance of Reading" and which explores the uncanny emergence within individually authored literary masterpieces of the anonymously evolved pre-literate practices from which they have drawn their inspiration since the invention of writing. In each volume, I draw the reader's' attention to the disguised return of a single practice: in Volume I, the expelling of a human scapegoat in a purification ritual; in Volume II, the immuring of a "human pillar" in a building ritual; and in Volume III, the projecting of the bilateral structure of the human body onto the left-right symmetry of archaic artifacts.