You have to rely outside a text to see what reading is about.
A reading practice is a procedure while reading that is applied as a rule for reading that makes the reading easier or coherent or more pleasurable. Roland Wulbert speaks of reading practices that apply to logic. What do people do so as to make one sentence follow from another? How are they to be read as coherent or tied together? Otherwise, sentences would dangle next to one another, not overcoming the synapses between the neurons. It is always fruitful to explore the way people use their imaginations to leap across the divide, sometimes presuming a cause of one to the other such as “I went to the store. I bought a sixpack.” or else a contradiction, as when one notices saying sentences like “God loves everybody” and “I hate my enemy” are to be treated as in tension or God and you having different responsibilities or not noticing the possible disparity.
Another meaning for the term “reading practice” refers to how people deal with the mastery of a language depending on the purpose of the reading. Some reading is skimming, which means reading the first sentence in every paragraph quickly on the assumption that most prose is quite repetitive and so doesn't require close reading, just so as to get the gist of the meaning. “Close reading” is reserved to a careful inspection of a set of sentences or a text so as to assess its reverberations and nuances, so as to assess what Conrad or Austen are offering in the way of ambiguities. Also regarded as a reading practice is how to learn the mechanics of reading; the craft of learning and teaching people how to read, whether through phonics, or whole word reading, or providing computer assisted visuals so as to recognize the difference between the letters.The point is that the ways to learn reading are really the ways to provide ways to access texts and they are not themselves part of the texts.
The same principle applies to watching film for its images or its plot or its dialogue, teens reading or remembering key lines in “Casablanca”, or watching the mayhem at the ending of “Bonnie and Clyde”. An example of a reading practice for art was to ask what was it that was portrayed? Historically, portraits and landscapes and battle scenes were about their objects and could be assessed for that, while Jackson Pollack had the revolutionary idea that the objects he and others created was not the picture of a subject matter but something of itself alone and therefore without meaning, though in my old fashioned way think that Rothko should be understood philosophically as a swath of color before it is reduced or recognized as a patch of color. Or that Pollack is to be providing a philosophical appreciation of the sense of dimensionality in three directions via a two dimensional canvas.
A third kind of reading practice is what I call generic. It has to do with the rules that are used so that a particular genre of literature or any other of the arts can be understood for its own distinctive properties, novels and plays and declarative prose needing a rule so as to be understood for what they are, so everyone understands that people in “The Three Stooges” are not getting hurt and so slapstick is funny rather than experienced as wrenchingly brutal. Everybody knows this because cues to dealing with it that way are provided by the accompanying or initial music or even just because you know from the ads that this is farce, just as you know that a late night comedian is making jokes even when talking about the news and you are primed to think the remarks funny, just like an after dinner speaker.
A good example of a generic reading practice, something that has to be added by the reader or viewer so as to make the genre make sense, is what would seem an extreme case: that of reading scriptural texts, because the rules applied to them are different from those used with regard to other texts. Northrope Frye said of the Bible that it was a singular text in that it was given and so to be understood as to be read differently than other texts. Frye thought that the Bible was to be thought of as a great code from which a reader could infer morals and prophecies from stories. I would suggest some people think that the story of Sodom and Gehmorra is to be read as a condemnation of homosexuality, even though it is a story that does not announce its morality but the assumption is that the Bible is chuckful of stories to be read that way because it is the nature of that book to do so.
Here is another reading practice applied to Scripture that is not applied to other narratives or argumentative prose. Bert Erdman counters traditional Biblical scholars by showing that the story of the Resurrection is different in the four Gospels. In one, the risen Jesus meets a man on the road. In another the women who found the empty tomb went into town but did not in another gospe;. Which is it? There had to be a single correct account, not contradictory accounts. But Erdman is an historian, assigning to the texts their accuracy, when in fact the case is that people reading Scripture may decide to treat the text in another way. These texts that have become standardized for 1700 years or so are allowed to combine their various stories so that the life of Jesus includes all of its versions as part of the truth. Jesus met in the upper room in only one Gospel but that is also true rather than verified from another gospel. You can;t do that with novels whose parts of the story have to cohere, it being disquieting for Dickens to write two different endings to “Great Expectations”.
The Bible also allows other violations of verisimilitude in story telling. The skeptic will ask how there could be a city Cain could be exiled to if he was one of only the two offspring of Adam and Eve. Some religionists will say there were a lot of other people who had been born after the first two brothers were born but hardly enough to create another town. But the point is that for those Biblical literalists there is no problem even if Clarence Darrow thought otherwise. All the stories are to be read as correct, Cain a member of the seminal family and then exiled to another community. There is no need to gloss over that exile was a common practice during the ancient Middle East. It just stays as its own, a way to hold at the same time texts that seem to contradict one another. Believers find it surprising that the apparent anomaly would arise.
Here is another though less specialized genre where people apply a reading practice to make sense of what is happening. Classicists tell me that classical tragedy was accompanied by sets and music and so should be understood as grand opera rather than as just drama. But the distinguishing theory of classical tragedy was the introduction by Aeschylus of the second speaker so that people could engage in dialogue. In “Oedipus Rex” there are a set of passages where people successively relate some part of the backstory for Oedipus, the reader well aware that he had a fatal flaw, that of hubris, and so it made sense that hewill come to realize he had married his mother and the consequences that would result from that revelation, the suspense coming from him not pressing on to what had happened in the past while the audience knew the dreadful outcome. The drama consists of partial and cumulative narrations. Never mind the sets and music. The audience decides to find the words crucial, the words highlighted in the theatrical unity of time and space. The same is true of modern theatre where lighting can be used to separate scenes and set decoration help establish a mood but the words, the interchanges, are what matters, as happens in “Death of a Salesman”, where Willy Loman has pivotal exchanges with his son and where his grieving wife concludes by saying that Willy mattered. In that sense, all of drama is Ibsenism, even if Shakespeare also uses action also to move the story along, full of short scenes whose connection also has to be read for coherence through providing how one scene is connected to the next. You remember Hamlet killing Polonius, but also Hamlet sparring with Claudius and also sparring with Polonius when Polonious was trying to figure out what Hamlet was up to. Those are the cruxes, not the soliloquies which are commentaries on the background setting of Denmark and also on life. The dialogues make the story development make sense even if students are required to memorize the soliloquies for their single voiced poetry. Attending dialogue makes the dramatic story clear even if teachers attend to other aspects of a play as the reading practice instructs otherwise. The decision about which reading practice to follow is cultural and imposed rather than inevitably the way the genre has to be read.
Now shift to.a different genre where a feature that in drama is unimportant becomes important and people are trained to attend to it or attend to it to get its bearings. That happens in the novel, where the setting becomes important, perhaps because the novel began as a report on exotic situations and places, like Robinson Crusoe arriving in a desert island. The setting gives pleasure, whether to know what the Thames is like in A Mutual Friend or the moors are like in Wuthering Heights or the York battlements in a Wilkie Collins novel. In fact, readers can decide that all that counts about a novel is its setting as when a strange environment is reason alone for the presence of a murder mystery where you don't care very much about the plot and thereby providing the answer to Edmund Wilson’s question of who cares about Roger Achroyd, the answer being not very much at all, but rather the attendance of the quaint circumstances. Most readers will get that but some may not notice what it is they care about while reading mysteries.
Or shift to another genre that is a step along from the novel, which is the film, which relies on the novel for its multiple stories and moods. Movie goers do not need to be schooled to read the films they go to. They may not follow the directors or the writers but to decide their own practices that discount plot and dialogue for the atmospherics of the setting, the recording of a visualization of what a place looks like, whether an urban slum or Monument Valley, the locales for John Ford movies. Viewers will decide what is important and what to neglect as when friends in my youth went into a movie in the middle and caught up on the first part in the next showing because it was easy enough to figure out the plot and you knew the actors to do what they were used to doing and wanted and trained themselves to see the spectacle, whether the mass scenes in Intolerance or the Lord of the Rings movies or Star Wars.
The reason for attending to what one cares to see is about a fact of the movie as a genre, which is that it is itself generic in that the types of movies are readily put into slots as to the kind of movie they will be. There are cute romances and westerns and war movies and family dramas, each following its well worn progress, with John Wayne and Claire Trevor escaping from their pasts to set up new lives, the central action the world of its own, as the phrase goes, as that is evidenced in any number of ways, so that Shakespeare has short as well as long scenes so as to make him cinematic as well as deep themes whereby people become what they are, as happens with Othello a d Macbeth and Hamlet, that particular reading understood as an interpretation. But even the most pedestrian crime novel assault of the stagecoach by the Indians. That is different from novels which can also only be very general in their types, like mysteries or sagas, where the idea is to differentiate the particularity of the story, the Brontes are very different in composing strange romances, one filled in emotion and the other in social class conflict. In films, you want to see the same thing over and over again and so there are lots of remakes and franchises.
Just as there is a reading practice for sacred texts, such as the Koran or the Gospels or “Genesis”, whereby everything is simultaneously true even if contradictory, there is a reading practice that applies to secular texts, such as plays, novels and essays, which is very contrary in flavor. A reader is constrained to find a rule that shows the distinctive kind of thing that a particular poem or play pr novel us despite it changing from page to page or section to section, constructing a consistency whereby the created event seems to be of a piece, a particular and distinctive point of view, a, the central action the world of its own, as the phrase goes, as that is evidenced in any number of ways, so that Shakespeare has short as well as long scenes so as to make him cinematic as well as deep themes whereby people become what they are, as happens with Othello and Macbeth and Hamlet, that particular reading understood as an interpretation. But even the most pedestrian crime novel has a way of being on its own, whether in mood or in motivations or in the vantage point in life. Dreiser novels are filled with accident, selfishness, and taken by as well as a sense that economic life is remorseless. Specifying the particu;ars of the novel can become a life long endeavor: to get this world just right, just l its own, but that is an idealization of making a work of art as an incomparable jewel, just itself alone as it also is a standard variation on a set piece.The art of criticism is to play these to noticings against one another.