Reading well: useful reading, futile reading

The history of reading is inseparable from that of definitions of "reading well", i.e. from reading standards. Traditionally based on the search for wisdom, these rules have, with scholarly education, shifted towards the acquisition of knowledge. These two types of useful reading are opposed to futile reading, condemned, accused of corrupting the reader, body and soul. But with the change from the 20th to the 21st century a new development gained acceptance: the rehabilitation of everyday reading, becoming equally the way towards wisdom and the establishment of new distinctions, due to technological progress and to the emergence of unpublished forms of reading.
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