Pre-Reading

Mar 30, 2026

They explore the idea of knowing about books and films before we actually read or watch them. The conversation traces how shared sources like newspapers and Twitter shape expectations and spoilers. They consider ethical and political consequences, including care, spoiler culture, and tactics against book bans. They also argue for treating pre-reading as a legitimate object of study in literary scholarship.

Ask episode

AI Snips

Chapters

Books

Transcript

Episode notes

INSIGHT

Pre-Reading Defined And Illustrated

Pre-reading is the relationship you have to a book you know something about but haven't read.
Milan Terlunen describes knowing plot points and scenes from Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse despite never having read it.

ANECDOTE

Game Reveals What We Know Without Reading

Milan plays a game asking friends the most important book they've never read to reveal common pre-reading knowledge.
He admits never reading To the Lighthouse yet recalls specific scenes like a dinner table and decades passing in an empty house.

INSIGHT

Pre-Reading Environments Surround Communities

Pre-reading operates both in everyday life and as an academic object called a pre-reading environment.
Terlunen studies newspapers and Twitter as communal spaces that circulate knowledge about books before people read them.

Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode

Get the app

In this episode of High Theory, Milan Terlunen talks to Kim about Pre-Reading. There are many books we will never read and films we will never watch, but it turns out we know quite a bit about them in advance. A concept developed in his work on the plot twist, pre-reading names the epistemic practices by which we approach a text before we read it (if we ever do). The pre-reading environment is shared, social knowledge that shapes our expectations long before we open the cover or hit play.

This podcast episode forms part of the pre-reading environment for Milan’s article, "What We Can(’t) Know Before We Read: Towards a Theory of the Pre-Reading Environment" (Book History 27, no. 2 (2024): 346-374). The article proposes the Pre-Reading Environment as a new object of study for understanding how texts relate to communal knowledge. While easily overlooked by scholars, equipped with fuller knowledge derived from their own reading, Pre-Reading Environments are among the most widespread epistemic objects in book history. Turning to two literary texts, Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926) and Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life (2015), the article examines how their respective Pre-Reading Environments, in newspapers and on Twitter, strategically concealed key plot points that might pre-emptively spoil the experience of potential readers.

The transcript of this episode lives here as a WordDoc and here as a PDF.

Milan Terlunen is a scholar of literature, with a focus on narrative and the history of reading practices. He works as a Researcher in Digital Humanities at the University of Sussex. While a PhD student at Columbia University he co-created and hosted two podcasts – How To Read and In Sacred Spaces – and co-founded the Humanities Podcast Network in 2021, where he met Kim and Saronik. He is also an editor of the Palgrave Handbook of Humanities Podcasting, a huge project that he ran along with Kim, Saronik, and Beth Kramer. A book about podcasting would not be complete without its own podcast. Keep your ears peeled for Podcasting the Humanities later this year.

The image for this episode is an illustration from Jean de Bosschère’s Weird Islands (1921), titled “Read Books on Practical Navigation.” It is a line drawing showing a reader swamped by piles of books. The image was found for High Theory by Lili Epstein on the Public Domain Image Archive.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/critical-theory