Introduction

Abstract

In early November 2008, after I had just received tenure from the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and was finishing the final draft of my second book entitled Technology and the Early Modern Self, something strange began to happen: I lost my ability to read. This was very frustrating. One evening I tried but was unable to read bedtime stories to my two-year-old daughter Lauren, and my four-year-old Hailey had to ask my wife Debbie to read. Prior to the Thanksgiving break I saw my local eye doctor who told me to take it easy. He said I was working too many hours on the final revision of Technology and the Early Modern Self and that the headaches and vision loss were the results of working too hard. I tried working less and playing with my girls more often during the evenings, but my daughters love to read so interacting with them meant suffering terrible frustration. For my three Shakespeare classes at UMass Dartmouth I tried enlarging pages of Shakespeare’s texts on the computer and using giant printed emails, but these attempts did not work either. The old technologies on which I had relied were ineffective and new ones were unusable. I began to feel a creeping terror and a dizzying sense of dislocation. What kind of Shakespeare scholar can not read? I had become partially blind. How could I learn to read again?