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Part of
Children's Cultures after Childhood
Edited by Justyna Deszcz-Tryhubczak and Macarena García-González
[Children’s Literature, Culture, and Cognition 16] 2023
► pp. 171–184

Chapter 11
Weird readings and little machines

Against reading engagement

| Centro de Desarrollo de Tecnologías de Inclusión (CEDETi UC) | Center for Advanced Studies on Educational Justice (CJE) PIA-ANID CIE
Reading engagement is presented as an affect that organizes the relationships between children and books. The OECD-PISA reading framework has co-opted engagement as an attentive, involved, and joyful relationship with literature. A reading assemblage is offered to explain how engagement is instrumental to producing readers as bodies with potential for human capital, that is, children. The author uses a literary encounter to propose weird readings as an affect that breaks into the reading assemblage, complicating joy and pleasure, and as the affect that precludes the possibilities of creating relationships with materialities (books) from outside a reading assemblage.
Keywords: reading, assemblages, weird, posthuman, new materialism
Article outline
  • Affective affordances of the assemblage
  • Engagement as an affect that produces children as readers
  • Is it possible to be a child without being a reader?
  • Picturebooks and (dis)engaged encounters
  • The limits of the reading assemblage: Small openings
  • Weird readings: Books as little machines
  • References
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For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 8 August 2023
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clcc.16.11vel
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