Reading Fore

This essay tracks the history and theory of the critical reading as it emerged from structuralism, poststructuralism, and reception theory and prepared the ground for contemporary debates around postcritical reading, “sovereign reading” (as theorized by Peter Szendy), and what is referred to as “reading fore”—in the sense of preparing for or setting up a reading that conjures an absent subject through vocative modes of address. Drawing on Barbara Johnson's signal essay “Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,” which focused on Gwendolyn Brooks's address to “abortions” as the object of apostrophe in her poem “The Mother,” this essay considers the figure of the text's addressee as a kind of pre-person or unborn subject impossible to disentangle from the politics of reproductive justice.