(No) Book Club First Meetup: What Can Be Read? Group #1

What can be read?

Due to the interest this concept has received, there will be two separate sessions of the same event, on November 6 and 7. Both will cover the same topic and follow the same format, so please sign up for only one, whichever date suits you better. This event is for group #1.

For our first meetup of The (No) Book Club, we'll get to know each other's curiosities, reading experiences, and hopes for the club. We'll also try to make sense of its deliberately confusing name. Rather than having me explain what the “No” means, we'll explore the premise together and determine the boundaries of a text.

I've prepared five very different kinds of “texts”: a verbal text, an advertisement, a piece of architecture, a photograph, and a ritual. We'll split into small groups, interpret them, compare our readings, and try to answer three deceptively simple questions:

• What does this say?
• What allows you to claim that?
• What could make your interpretation wrong?

There is no required reading beforehand. I'll bring everything to the meetup. If curiosity gets the better of you, you're welcome to look through the materials in advance, but please don't research their context. The less you know, the better the experiment works: we want to see what can be inferred from the texts themselves, what we bring to them ourselves, and where the boundary between the two lies. This should give us a shared foundation for what we mean by a “text”, while also opening up the range of things you might choose to read, interpret, and bring to future meetups.

You can find the materials here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1nGwJhswCg-7P1JmnSAezA2Me9m86I3ag/view?usp=sharing

For anyone who wants to explore the ideas behind the meeting more seriously (entirely optional) three particularly relevant works are:

• Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method
• Umberto Eco, The Limits of Interpretation
• Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures

No preparation required. Curiosity is enough.
Looking forward to seeing you!