Historiographic perspectives on reading practices

Abstract

In order to identify theoretical elements that could guide a conceptual and historical description of reading practices, this article includes the voices of authors, in themselves readers, who narrate and describe their own history of reading: Alberto Manguel, Roger Chartier, Michel de Certeau, Ana Teberosky and Guglielmo Cavallo (the practices of reading and reading); Robert Darnton, Peter Burke and Renán Silva (historical and historiographical foundations), and Giovanni Papini, Carl Sagan and Marcel Proust (reading spaces and stories about reading practices).There are three perspectives that base themselves on this. The first is the approach to silent reading as a milestone in the transformation of learning, of cognitive processes and  of privacy. The second, the impact of the printing press on reading practices, a mechanical invention that made widespread the use of paper in the printing of texts and revolutionized the social, political, and religious conditions at the time, the access to information, the transformation of printing formats and the dissemination and production of information; and finally a conceptual approach, the research approaches from the perspective of practice and a historical approximation toward reading practices.