Reading as a social relationship. Martín Cerda in La Gaceta, 1957-1958

Abstract

The article examines the essays of Martín Cerda collected in the volume A punta de lápiz. Textos de La Gaceta, 1957-1958 (2022). He proposes that the intervention carried out by Cerda in the public sphere of the time can be understood as a “civic philology”, since what underlies that intervention is the assumption that reading society is an operation equivalent to reading a text, since the same procedures that emerge from literary knowledge and tradition and that are used to read certain works of that tradition can be extrapolated to read the situations and problems that a society is going through at a given moment, in order to make diagnoses and propose alternatives. In this exercise, in turn, one of the powers that the act of reading possesses is revealed; Reading a text places us before a constitutive mode of connection with the world, and from there an ethics of the act of reading emerges.