• Plato, from Phaedrus (the myth of Theuth and the invention of writing) (360 B.C.E.)
• Alberto Manguel, "The Silent Readers" from his A History of Reading (1996)
  
•  Alberto Manguel, "How Pinocchio Learned to Read", open-access version of essay from his A Reader on Reading (2011)
• Nicholas Carr, "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" (2008)

• Belle Lettres": Hugh Blair, excerpt from "Taste" , Lecture II in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (1787)
• "Close Reading": Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, "Introduction" to Understanding Poetry (1938)
• "Critique" vs. "Surface Reading":  Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, "Surface Reading: An Introduction" (2009)
• Toward "Distant Reading": N. Katherine Hayles, excerpt on "Scale Matters" from How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis (2012)

Readings for Class 4

• Archibald MacLeish, "Ars Poetica" (1926)
• John Crowe Ransom, from "Wanted: An Ontological Critic" (pp. 279-316 only) from his New Criticism (1941)
• Cleanth Brooks, "The Heresy of Paraphrase" from his The Well Wrought Urn (1947)