When William James wanted to explain “the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the signiWcance of alien lives,” the exam- ple that he chose was reading: Take our dogs and ourselves, connected as we are by a tie more intimate than most ties in this world; and yet . . . how insensible, each of us, to all that makes life signiWcant for the other!—we to the rapture of bones under hedges, or smells of trees and lamp-posts, they to the delights of literature and art. As you sit reading the most moving romance you ever fell upon, what sort of a judge is your fox-terrier of your behaviour? With all his good will toward you, the nature of your conduct is absolutely excluded from his comprehen- sion. To sit there like a senseless statue when you might be taking him to walk and throwing sticks for him to catch! What queer dis- ease is this that comes over you every day, of holding things and staring at them for hours together, paralyzed of motion and vacant of all conscious life? 1 James’s example points to one of the central difWculties of a history of read- ing: how to analyze an activity that’s too close for critical distance, and Reading The State of the Discipline Leah Price