Incipit: On Reading (Chambers)

Originally prepared for oral delivery at a conference session on the author's study of Baudelaire as a city poet, the paper explores related academic genres involving academic judgment before giving an autobiographical account of the author's reading of Baudelaire, which was mediated by the experience of the AIDS epidemic in Ronald Reagan's United States as Baudelaire's Parisian experience had been mediated by the Second Empire. Thus is suggested a theory of the ongoing readability of literary texts as that readability is mediated by the successive events of changing human history. (RC)