This is Not the End of Reading. It's the End of Modernism.

Why academics and journalists are confusing Modernism with reading itself.

Cover art for Rose Horowitch’s recent article in The Atlantic

If you’re over 40 and grew up in the United States, chances are you were taught two distinct forms of reading. One was ‘reading for pleasure,’ often reinforced by summer programs put on by schools, public libraries, and local businesses that reward kids for completing summer reading lists on their own, outside of school. The idea behind such programs—a good one—is that reading is, among other things, a beneficial and enjoyable habit best adopted early in life. Parents are encouraged to read to their kids from infancy and kids to retreat into books on their own, once they’re capable.

The other form of reading most of us were taught is the kind you do for school. This was typically contrasted with reading for pleasure, because its premise was a specific form of difficulty: the text is an intricate art form full of hidden or implicit meanings.

From this simple premise we get the classroom activities and intellectual operations most commonly associated with ‘English’ today, whether in school or in college. ‘Reading’ in this sense means finding the ‘theme’ of a text and the aims of the author through an investigation of ‘symbolism,’ ‘devices,’ and ‘hidden meaning,’ then demonstrating one’s findings in essay form, with supporting quotes from the text. Distinguished from reading for pleasure because it expressly entailed labor, difficulty, and resistance (‘you think this text says x, but it’s really saying y’), this form of reading rewards engagement with long, complex sentences, long works of narrative fiction, and densely imagist, allusive, and lyric poetry. It’s not a coincidence that the cover art for Rose Horowitch’s recent piece on ‘The End of Reading’ is Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a winding late-19th century novel of over 900 pages.

All of this tacitly establishes an historically specific idea of ‘literacy’ that we’ve come to conflate with literacy itself.

Further, this specific idea of what it means to read and to be literate has a name, though one consequence of mistaking it for fundamental or universal literacy is that we embrace its definitive characteristics without naming it. So let’s name it.

It’s called Modernism.

Most teachers, I gather, would not have used the specialist terminology of literary history to describe this second form of reading, but those familiar will recognize the heavy-handed presence of literary Modernism in this idea of reading. Among the core principles of literary Modernism are that (a) literature is a form of art, and not just any form, but an especially (b) difficult form that (c) demands the types of close reading and analysis privileged by literary formalism. Toril Moi incisively calls this combination ‘Modernist-formalism,’ and critiques the ways teachers of literature tend to tacitly smuggle such ideas into the teaching and learning of literature without naming them as just one of a great number of ways to understand both literature and reading:

I am not against either modernism or the analysis of form. I am against making such values the hidden and unchallenged foundation of academic criticism, for then we will fall into the trap of projecting the values of “modernist formalism” onto every kind of literature. Besides leading to anachronistic and historically insensitive criticism, this produces a canon that marginalizes any kinds of writing that can’t easily be evaluated according to modernist-formalist criteria. As a result, the taboo makes whole categories of modern writing come to seem inferior: not just realism in general, but the existentialist novel, and generally any kind of character-driven storytelling.

Here Moi is talking about academic literary criticism, but I think the basic argument extends to the way we in the US teach literature and reading in schools (and to a large extent in universities, especially in lower-level courses).

For example, when I teach first-year undergraduate writing or introductory literature courses, for most of my career, students came in expecting that what we must do in ‘English class’ is some version of formalist literary criticism (though never named), and that the texts we’d do it with will not be what critics derisively and nonsensically call ‘genre fiction’ (sci-fi, mystery, YA…you know, the things most US Americans today are reading when they’re reading fiction!), and certainly not nonfiction. The naturalization of literary Modernism means ‘great works’ of literature are those written to be difficult to read and analyze, to ‘dig under the surface’ of, to engage in ‘deep analysis’ with.

In my introductory English course at Colby College, I lead students through what I call the A.I. Richards exercise: I give them 10 unlabeled passages on a sheet of paper, some of which are drawn from Shakespeare or Baldwin or Joyce or Wharton or Austen or Plath, some of which are from corporate advertisements or self-help books and speeches, and ask students to rank all passages in order of (1) what they like best to what they like least and (2) what they think is most to least literary. The idea here is to make explicit all the tacit ideas about ‘the literary’ that have been drilled into them since they could read, and see where their personal sensibilities align (or not) with ‘the literary’ as constructed by the wider regime of literary Modernism.

Such an activity is only necessary, again, because US education and learned cultures have effectively naturalized Modernism as the alpha and omega of literature, the literary, reading, and literacy.

Actually, it’s Modernist ideas of reading that are in decline.

If we want to understand the thesis that the US has become ‘post-literate,’ recently put forward by Rose Horowitch in a piece in The Atlantic ominously titled ‘The End of Reading is Here,’ we have to start with the foregoing context. Most people in US media and academia today, regardless of subject area, were taught from a young age that ‘reading’ is either reading for pleasure or reading for Modernist difficulty. Again, they may or may not have the specialist vocabulary to name the latter, but such ideas of reading are deeply ingrained. Reading for pleasure has and has long had competition from digital media, but what’s new is that reading for Modernist difficulty no longer holds the cachet or civic value it once did. People no longer think of the virtues of reading or of literacy as difficult, close engagement with literary art in the Modernist sense.

My argument here is that Modernist ideas of reading are so deeply ingrained, so thoroughly naturalized, that even educated and informed people like Horowitch—and the many literary studies academics accepting the ‘end of reading’ thesis at face value—are conflating the end of Modernism with the end of reading itself.

But let’s take a closer look at the evidence.

The Horowitch essay cites a few alarming figures to provide a baseline for ‘the end of reading.’ One is a 2022 NEA survey that finds ‘fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.’ Another, from the same survey, finds that ‘only 38 percent read a novel or a short story.’ A third statistic comes from the American Time Use survey—that respondents who read for pleasure dropped from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023—though this I think has too many confounds involved (what are the changes in work hours, habits, financial circumstances, overall free time over that period in the respondent pool?) to do much with.

This sounds bad for reading and literacy, but to understand what’s really going on you have to put these figures in context.

For one, a more recent Pew Research survey, from 2025, finds that 75% of US adults reported reading one or more books—the whole book or part of it—within the prior 12 months. Further, the Pew survey reports ‘the overall share of Americans who have read a book in the past year has remained fairly stable since we first asked this question in 2011.’ So you have one report, from 2022, in which the sky is falling, and another, from 2025, which finds not only that reading is far more prevalent than is reflected in the 2022 survey, but also that survey data on this question has remained fairly consistent for as long as Pew has asked this specific question.

You’d be right to wonder about the discrepancy between the 2022 and 2025 data. It turns out, despite regular periods of concern that US Americans have stopped reading, surveys about our reading habits tend waver quite a bit in findings as well as sentiment. In 2004, for example, reading was ‘at risk.’ By 2009, it was ‘on the rise.’ This goes back even further. In 1955, a Gallup poll found that only 39% of US Americans had read one book or more. In a 1978 Gallup poll, that figure was up to 88%. The Pew figure in 2011 was 72%, which is 3% less than Pew’s 2025 figure.

Here I’m not offering an explanation for these different figures over time, only demonstrating that despite these survey results on reading going up and down in some cases or remaining consistently high in others, people have been lamenting something like the ‘end of reading’ for at least 75 years now. Citing one or two polls is not sufficient to establish an ‘end of reading’ baseline, especially when at least one more recent poll returns > 25% increase from the 2022 figure, from ‘fewer than half’ to 75%.

But there’s another element of the Horowitch thesis on ‘the end of reading’ that’s I think more telling, more explanatory, than the survey data. The NEA report that Horowitch cites explicitly concerns ‘literary’ reading, not reading in general. The NEA survey describes ‘literary reading’ as ‘the reading of novels, short stories, poetry, or drama in any print format, including the Internet. Any type was admitted, from romance novels to classical poetry.’ This is the source of the ‘only 38% read a novel or a short story’ claim in the piece.

It’s not that ‘read a novel or a short story’ is a dishonest representation here, only that it’s a misleading one if your thesis is that US Americans are ‘post-literate,’ as opposed to post-Modernist. Especially because most people’s encounters with the concept of ‘the literary’ will have been the second type of reading above—the literary Modernist reading delivered in schools—a survey question about ‘literary’ reading is likely to return answers concerning a very narrow slice of reading activity.

Furthermore, we know that Horowitch is smuggling in the assumptions of literary Modernism as a stand-in for reading and literacy tout court, because the piece says as much. She acknowledges, for example, that ‘strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before,’ but laments ‘the books that people do read are simpler than they used to be.’ How do we know they’re simpler?

New York Times bestsellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago. Longer sentences aren’t inherently better. But their former ubiquity suggests an age when Americans had the inclination and ability to read serious works of literature.

There’s a lot to unpack here, but I’ll keep it simple for my Modern American Readers. In the very sentence that follows an acknowledgement that sentence length is not determinative of ‘inherently better’ (or worse) literature, Horowitch goes on to use sentence length as the sole marker of (a) literary difficulty (‘the inclination and ability’) and (b) literary ‘seriousness.’ This is just Modernism pretending to speak for the entirety of literature, literacy, and reading: only literature with long sentences can be ‘serious’ or demanding of our ‘inclination’ and ‘ability,’ and only such literature can be cognitively and habitually rewarding.

If we take a long view of literary history—technically it’s my job to do so—we’ll find massive shifts in the relationship between formal and aesthetic observations (how long are the sentences; what is the vocabulary density) and cultural norms about how to value literature, which literature is the most ‘serious’ or ‘beautiful’ or ‘classic,’ and so on. ‘Great’ literature, ‘serious’ literature, even ‘difficult’ literature was not always composed of long sentences, and long sentences were not always valued as markers of complexity or seriousness or aesthetic merit. Much literature today that’s both popular and praised—I’m thinking of the novels of Sally Rooney and Ian McEwen, for example—do not follow the formal and aesthetic norms of literary Modernism, though I think critical commentary on Rooney’s ‘simplicity’ as a writer is often a reflection of Modernist aesthetic prejudice…but I digress. From a literary-critical standpoint, it may just be that what we take to be good and ‘serious’ literature is changing, or that even contemporary literary art has been moving away from Modernist ideals.

As an example in the other historical direction, the period of British literary history in which I specialize, the eighteenth century, is widely considered a period of the worst and least aesthetically appealing literature (look up any number of ‘best 100 novels’ lists and count how many 18th c. texts are on them compared with other periods; or pluck any anthology of British literature from the last 50 years off the shelf and see which period volume is the thinnest). Today we apprehend the long, windy, idiosyncratically punctuated sentences of Henry Fielding or Jonathan Swift as primitive, as pre-literary, not as exemplary of literary seriousness or literary art. By the same token, the spare writing of Ernest Hemingway or Raymond Carver wouldn’t strike most people as unserious; or at least if you told Rose Horowitch that you’ve merely been reading Hemingway and Carver, I doubt she’d think of you as a ‘post-literate’ person who doesn’t actually read.

It’s worth going a step further: not only is it false that the values and aesthetics of literary Modernism must be the only legitimate, rewarding, or cognitively beneficial forms of reading difficulty (let alone of reading); it’s true that many types of reading encounters—from reading articles with interpolated charts and data to reading expressly informational, nonfiction texts, to reading fiction that dwells on conversations between characters formatted in everyday speech—can also be legitimate, challenging, prosocial forms of reading. To observe that people are reading different things differently doesn’t mean they’re not reading at all! It could only be interpreted that way if you’ve fully naturalized Modernism as the only legitimate idea of reading.

Just-so Stories

'Culture’ is a slippery thing, and though I obviously think Horowitch’s ‘end of reading’ thesis is extremely flawed, I don’t think it’s easy to get a grasp on these kinds of things. What concerns me most about the stir that this piece instigated is that many academics—including literature scholars—seem too eager to accept Horowitch’s thesis uncritically. At first this struck me as odd, but then it occurred to me that ‘the end of literacy’ has an important role to play in the just-so metanarrative of the contemporary humanities decline.

That is, literature scholars have perhaps a greater stake in preserving the assumptions and prejudices of literary Modernism than anyone else! This is largely because, as Eric Hayot has convincingly argued, the discipline of literary studies is premised on what Hayot calls ‘generalized modernism.’ The way I’ve put it, in separate and parallel discussions, is that English departments are actually Modernist studies departments in disguise, because we locate so much of our sense of scholarly identity and expertise in Modernist ideas about literature, regardless of which period or nationality of literature we actually study and teach. What I’ve called the proprietary method of close reading, for example, is heavily based in Modernist ideas about literature and interpretation, even when it branches out ostensibly further afield. Modernist ideas about literature, ‘the literary,’ interpretation, and difficulty supply most of the materials for the disciplinary wall between literary studies and history and philosophy. We have, in short, some very strong incentives to hold onto ideas of reading and literacy as extensions of Modernist principles, i.e. as extensions of our domain of expertise and authority.

The other part of the just-so story that makes literary studies academics more sympathetic to the ‘end of reading’ thesis than I think we should be is that clinging to Modernist principles (as above) articulates and necessitates no internal theory of change. It’s not, in other words, that we need to rethink who we are and what we do for a differently-literate world that no longer reads as Modernists; it’s that bad people out there are doing this to us!

Understood this way, what’s happening can’t be the complex nexus of cultural and technological change (of the sort that many of us are trained to analyze, if only it happens in the past, not to us!). No, it must be that evil corporations are trying to make all of us stupid. Without denying aspects of the corporate malfeasance thesis, I think it’s entirely too simple, too reductive, to think that any widespread cultural change can only move from the top down, as a nefarious plot against the Modernists, such that the only legitimate form of action or resistance is to double down on outdated principles and objectives. I could go on forever about this, with many conflicted views and feelings, but I think you get the gist.

We should not blindly accept the ‘end of reading’ thesis. We should reject it for the right reasons, i.e. that it’s analytically flawed. And we should resist accepting it for the wrong reasons, i.e. that it flatters some of the stories we tell ourselves as literature scholars that prevent us from having to look inward and reexamine our senses of purpose and professional identity.