Literacy and distinctive forms of reading are frequently invoked in Western popular discourse as keys to political empowerment and the sustainability of critically thinking publics. For instance, twenty years ago commentator Eric D. Hirsch sparked controversy in the United States with his plea for educational standards of “cultural literacy,” based on knowledge of and exposure to “great books.” Hirsh's program, to some, seemed naively essentialist; one prominent educational theorist, Henry Giroux, called instead for “critical literacy … as part of a moral and political project that links the production of meaning to the possibility for human agency, democratic community, and transformative social action.” I encountered similarly diverse yet convergent arguments about reading, literacy, and political socialization as I sat in Slovak language and literature classrooms, spoke with teachers after class, and perused what their peers were writing in professional publications. Pedagogues and public figures asserted that reading literature was somehow crucial to the country's political stability or ability to resist demagoguery.

Typical was the elusive 2004 headline of one article introducing the sale of a new series of classic literature: “Do you want to be immune to nonsense? Read!” Self-described critical journals were more specific in their assertions of the role a critical reader should play in sustaining a democratic state. Two of these that we encountered in chapter 1, Domino and K & K, claimed to arm readers with selected contextual information that would help them evaluate intellectual and political arguments so as not to be swayed easily by demagogic nonsense.