Proposal for a collection of essays
Reading for Pleasure: New Perspectives on Gender, Politics, and
Interpretation
Political readings have focused the field of literary studies for some
time--from feminism and Marxism to post-colonial contexts and queer turns.
Today it has become a commonplace that texts participate in the
construction and continuance of power relations. But political readings
have left some unanswered questions in their wake, and our collection
proposes to address a problem often missing from an analysis of the
relations between texts and power: the various pleasures of reading.
Firstly, we seek to address the complex and changing activity of reading
itself. It has been the habit of politically-minded critics to decide that
one text is subversive and another conservative. But if reading is itself
multivalent, variable, and active, then no single interpretation can speak
to the range of possible readers. So: how might criticism handle the fact
that one reader is inflamed by the revolutionary possibilities of a text,
while another remains unmoved, impassive? Do particular sites of reading
encourage or exclude certain ways of reading? And how might we think about
the case in which one reader finds subversive elements in the very same
text that another uses to reaffirm the status quo? In what sense is
politics located in reading practices themselves?
Secondly, political criticism has largely dismissed the pleasures of
reading popular texts as monolithic, market-driven, and conservative. Even
Roland Barthes, so concerned with the pleasure of the text, argued that
properly emancipatory pleasure lay in the active, writerly text--as
opposed to the deadening passivity of the popular readerly plot, which
reinforced dominant culture and power relations. But does a radical
politics require a surrender of readerly pleasure? Or do popular texts
afford surprisingly unsettling pleasures in particular
contexts-circumscribed by time and place? Is the category of the "popular"
itself part of an ascetic rejection of pleasure in favor of revolutionary
self-sacrifice? And should readers therefore be expected to give up the
pleasures of the readerly?
We invite abstracts which consider the theoretical side of reading for
pleasure, with a particular emphasis on gendered reading practices. The
deadline is October 15.
Dr. Caroline Levine Dr. Mark W. Turner
English Department English Department
Rutgers University Roehampton Institute
311 N. Fifth Street Roehampton Lane
Camden, NJ 08102 London SW15 5PH
levinec@crab.rutgers.edu m.turner@roehampton.ac.uk
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