Reading Time is a collaborative web site produced between March and June 2001 by the convenor and students of a fourth-year Honours course, ENGL6080, within the School of English, Media Studies and Art History at the University of Queensland, Queensland, Australia.

Reading Time asks what happens when one text reads another--when two texts which are very different in their concerns, backgrounds and conceptual frameworks nevertheless talk to each other.

It begins from five very different texts: Erich Auerbach's Mimesis, Walter Benjamin's Illuminations, Jacques Derrida's Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money, Geoff Ryman's 253, or Tube Theatre. A novel for the Internet about London Underground in seven cars and a crash, and Michel Serres's Genesis.

The Reading Time site began as a way of making available the brief weekly reading notes which, in an earlier version of the course, I'd sent out students via email group. HTML seemed to offer more than that, though: it's a way of exploring possible linkages, and sometimes of generating unexpected linkages; it's a way of encouraging writing as a way of getting to know the material by working with it.

Tony Thwaites (site and course convenor)