New Directions in American Reception Study 9780195320879, 9780195320886, 0195320875

Table of contents :
Acknowledgment......Page 6
Contents......Page 8
Introduction: Reception Study: Achievements and New Directions......Page 12
I. (Re)Theorizing Reception Study......Page 30
Understanding an Other: Reading as a Receptive Form of Communicative Action......Page 32
Judging and Hoping: Rhetorical Effects of Reading about Reading......Page 52
Activating the Multitude: Audience Powers and Cultural Studies......Page 62
Habitus Clivé: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu......Page 86
II. Texts, Authors, and the Receptions of Literature......Page 114
The American Reception of Melville’s Short Fiction in the 1850s......Page 116
Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere: Reception Studies and Utopian Literature......Page 128
Richard Wright’s Native Son: From Naturalist Protest to Modernist Liberation and Beyond......Page 148
Main Street Reading Main Street......Page 168
Learning from Philistines: Suspicion, Refusing to Read, and the Rise of Dubious Modernism......Page 188
Reception and Authenticity: Danny Santiago’s Famous All over Town......Page 208
Discourses in Dialogue: The Reception of Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen......Page 224
III. Books, Print Culture, and Historical Sites of Reception......Page 238
The Power of Recirculation: Scrapbooks and the Reception of the Nineteenth-Century Press......Page 240
Accuracy or Fair Play? Complaining about the Newspaper in Early Twentieth-Century New York......Page 262
Sentiment without Tears: Uncle Tom’s Cabin as History in the 1890s......Page 284
IV. Audiences, Fans, and Viewers in Media and Cultural Studies......Page 306
Kiss Me Deadly: Cold War Threats from Spillane to Aldrich, New York to Los Angeles, and the Mafia to the H-Bomb......Page 308
Textual Poaching or Gamekeeping? A Comparative Study of Two Six Feet Under Internet Fan Forums......Page 318
Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television: Women Watching Oprah in an African American Hair Salon......Page 336
V. Retrospective Prospects......Page 354
What’s the Matter with Reception Study? Some Thoughts on the Disciplinary Origins, Conceptual Constraints, and Persistent Viability of a Paradigm......Page 356
The Reception Deception......Page 382
Notes on Contributors......Page 400
B......Page 404
H......Page 405
N......Page 406
T......Page 407
W......Page 408

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New Directions in American Reception Study

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New Directions in American Reception Study

Edited by PHILIP GOLDSTEIN and JAMES L. MACHOR

3 2008

3 Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further Oxford University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education. Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam

Copyright © 2008 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Published by Oxford University Press, Inc. 198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York, 10016 www.oup.com Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of Oxford University Press. A portion of Barbara Hochman’s essay was first published in “Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the World’s Columbian Exposition,” by Barbara Hochman, from Libraries & Culture 41:1, pp. 82–108. Copyright © 2006 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data New directions in American reception study / edited by Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 978-0-19-532087-9; 978-0-19-532088-6 (pbk.) 1. American literature—History and criticism—Theory, etc. 2. Reader-response criticism—United States. 3. Books and reading—United States. 4. Mass media—Audiences. I. Goldstein, Philip. II. Machor, James L. PS62.A8 2007 810.9—dc22 2007013837

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Acknowledgment

We wish to thank the University of Delaware, especially the Women’s Studies Program, the Black American Studies Program, the English Department, the Office of the President, and the University Committee on Cultural Activities and Public Events. Without their generous support, the conference on which this collection is based would not have been possible.

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Contents

Introduction: Reception Study: Achievements and New Directions xi Philip Goldstein and James L. Machor

I. (Re)Theorizing Reception Study Understanding an Other: Reading as a Receptive Form of Communicative Action 3 Patrocinio Schweickart Judging and Hoping: Rhetorical Effects of Reading about Reading 23 Steven Mailloux Activating the Multitude: Audience Powers and Cultural Studies 33 Jack Bratich Habitus Clivé: Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu 57 Tony Bennett

II. Texts, Authors, and the Receptions of Literature The American Reception of Melville’s Short Fiction in the 1850s 87 James L. Machor Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere: Reception Studies and Utopian Literature 99 Kenneth m. Roemer Richard Wright’s Native Son: From Naturalist Protest to Modernist Liberation and Beyond 119 Philip Goldstein Main Street Reading Main Street Amy L. Blair

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Learning from Philistines: Suspicion, Refusing to Read, and the Rise of Dubious Modernism 159 Leonard Diepeveen Reception and Authenticity: Danny Santiago’s Famous All over Town 179 Marcial González Discourses in Dialogue: The Reception of Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen 195 Charlotte Templin

III. Books, Print Culture, and Historical Sites of Reception The Power of Recirculation: Scrapbooks and the Reception of the Nineteenth-Century Press 211 Ellen Gruber Garvey Accuracy or Fair Play? Complaining about the Newspaper in Early Twentieth-Century New York 233 David Paul Nord Sentiment without Tears: Uncle Tom’s Cabin as History in the 1890s 255 Barbara Hochman

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IV. Audiences, Fans, and Viewers in Media and Cultural Studies Kiss Me Deadly: Cold War Threats from Spillane to Aldrich, New York to Los Angeles, and the Mafia to the H-Bomb 279 Janet Staiger Textual Poaching or Gamekeeping? A Comparative Study of Two Six Feet Under Internet Fan Forums 289 Rhiannon Bury Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television: Women Watching Oprah in an African American Hair Salon 307 Andrea Press and Camille Johnson-Yale

V. Retrospective Prospects What’s the Matter with Reception Study? Some Thoughts on the Disciplinary Origins, Conceptual Constraints, and Persistent Viability of a Paradigm 327 Janice Radway The Reception Deception Toby Miller Notes on Contributors Index 375

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Introduction Reception Study: Achievements and New Directions PHILIP GOLDSTEIN AND JAMES L. MACHOR

What I have been saying is that, whatever they do, it will only be interpretation in another guise because, like it or not, interpretation is the only game in town. Stanley Fish, Is There a Text in This Class? (355)

Since formal methods came to dominate Anglo-American literary study in the 1940s, interpretation has been its central activity. Interpretation became, as Stanley Fish says, the “only game in town,” not only for scholarly publications and college or university English classes but also for secondary or public school classes, since acting out a story as well as explicating a text’s lines can count as interpretation. In the twenty-first century, when formal methods are no longer obligatory and literary study includes diverse literatures and media, interpretation may examine the author’s intention, the reader’s reactions, the text’s figures, structure, or rhetoric, as well as the sexuality, gender, race, or nationality of the author, reader, audience, or text.

Reception study, which says that an audience’s interpretive practices explain a work’s meaning, has grown remarkably because it accepts this vast explosion of literatures and interpretive methods.1 Initially scholars believed that reception study was an aspect of an author’s development, not an independent form of literary history. They assumed that, since an author’s work often responds to commentary provided by friends, reviewers, or formal critics, the study of these responses helps explain how and why the style, ideas, aims, or forms of a writer evolved.2 Modern versions of this criticism emerged in the 1960s in reaction against the hegemonic New Criticism, which reduced accounts of the reader’s responses to the infamous “affective fallacy” and treated the devices and structures of the text as purely objective. Opposing this fallacy, reader-response criticism claimed, for example, that the interpretive activity of the reader explains a text’s import. Drawing on Freud and other psychologists, some reader-response criticism maintained that interpretation invariably reveals the self of the reader or the critic, rather than the aesthetic norms of the text. As David Bleich asserted, the text’s aesthetics “do not matter” because they deflect attention away from the reader’s role in shaping the text (309). Other reader-response critics said that readers produce their own textual structure or object, but the text still signals, guides, directs, and manipulates them. Wolfgang Iser maintained, for example, that readers wander through a text, constructing projections (“protentions”) of new experience and reinterpretations (“retentions”) of past experience. He adopted, nevertheless, the traditional formalist assumption that the text establishes norms guiding and limiting readers (49–50). In the early essay “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” Hans Robert Jauss, Iser’s colleague, also defended the reader’s responses as well as the transformative force of the great text, but he rehabilitated the historical method that Anglo-American formalist criticism discredited. In his account, the reader’s constructive activity overcomes the destructive opposition between objective truth and formal methods, or subjective judgment and absolute literary value. As Jauss said, “If the historicity of literature is viewed . . . within the horizon of a dialog between work and audience that forms a continuity, the opposition between its aesthetic and its historical aspects is also continually mediated” (19). More important, he suggested that, by examining the readers’ changing horizons and sociohistorical contexts, criticism reveals literature’s historical influence or reception. Like Iser and Jauss, Stanley Fish claimed that the irreducible effects of a text’s language move readers to produce interpretations, and that, as a normative force, the author teaches or fashions the reader. In later work, he went on, however, to reject the belief that the text’s aesthetic norms ensure a reader’s self-consciousness, govern interpretive practice, or change anything at all. Adopting the pragmatist’s belief that the community of inquirers establishes the truth of a theory, Fish claimed that what determines an interpretation’s validity is not the identity of the reader or the norms of aesthetic theory but the ideals and methods of the reader’s “interpretive community”—groups of xii

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scholars who accept and apply a common strategy and evaluate performances of it (Is There 171). New Critics, authorial humanists, phenomenologists, structuralists, Derrideans, feminists, and Marxists break into diverse communities whose discourse institutions disseminate, students master, scholars judge, and journals and publishing houses distribute. Steve Mailloux and Tony Bennett also critique foundational aesthetic or textual norms and examine the reader’s interpretive community or, in Bennett’s terms, his or her “reading formation.” A neopragmatist, Mailloux emphasizes the broad, sociopolitical import of rhetorical practices, whereas the Marxist Bennett limits their constitutive force and acknowledges the governmental policies or technologies of power regulating cultural institutions; they both favor, however, a Foucauldian approach that undertakes the historical study of a text’s diverse readings and, more generally, their legitimating schools and movements. As these diverse reader-response and historical methods suggest, reception study accommodates the interpretive practices of the twenty-first century, when, in addition to an author’s intention, literary study examines the reader’s reactions, the text’s structures or rhetoric, as well as the author’s, reader’s, or audience’s sexuality, gender, race, or nationality.3 By contrast, this explosion of literatures and methods has generated anxiety among traditional scholars, who fear that it means anarchy, relativism, solipsism, and cultural decline. In The Death of Literature, Alvin Kernan complains, for example, that what “were once the masterpieces of literature, the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of Flaubert, are now void of meaning, or, what comes to the same thing, filled with an infinity of meanings, their language indeterminate, contradictory, without foundation” (2). Like E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Gerald Graff, Walter Benn Michaels, and many others, Kernan accepts a textual or authorial essentialism in which works of literature lose their meaning if it is “conferred on them by the reader, not inherent in the text or set in place for all time by the writer’s word craft” (2). In Truth and Consequences, which defends this traditional essentialism, Reed Way Dasenbrock argues that those who consider interpretation contingent on the reader’s preferences make a universal claim that itself is necessary, not contingent (110). This Socratic objection dismisses or ignores the historical context that explains why reception study has developed and become so important and that establishes its validity. In other words, what justifies reception study is not universal truth but contemporary circumstances, which include the vast explosion of methods, media, and literatures. More important, Dasenbrock claims that reception study does not allow rational disagreement: “What is the point of debating or even discussing questions of method if our allegiance to a given set of methods is simply a function of the community to which we belong and can claim no further validity or normativity?” (12; see also Michaels 278–83). The essays collected in this volume indicate, however, that this claim does not hold up. On the one hand, they expand the scope of reception study by analyzing previously unexamined INTRODUCTION

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responses to movies, newspapers, television shows, and traditional American as well as modern Hispanic and black literature. On the other, the essays differ not only in subject matter but also in methodology, and their differences and disputes are rational and important. Contrary to Dasenbrock’s claim, the essays’ methods, which include historical, biographical, reader-oriented, sociological, and rhetorical or poststructuralist approaches, substantially differ with, and at times oppose, each other and other approaches.

Theories of Reception Study Demonstrating such differences, the essays discussing reception theory raise issues about ethics, ontology, and institutional practices. For instance, in the opening essay, Patrocinio Schweikart outlines a reader-response approach that adopts the communicative theory of Jürgen Habermas. With some important reservations, she accepts his claim that rational communication can overcome the alienating effects of literary methods and socioeconomic position and enable critics to evaluate interpretations fairly and impartially. In her 1986 essay “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,” Schweickart argued that, to overcome “androcentric” bias, reader-response criticism should read texts by women and texts by men very differently (35). Similarly, in her essay in this volume, she argues that, as Habermas says, the best argument will prevail, provided those who debate interpretations set aside their biases and seek consensus. She complains, however, that he construes the reader or hearer as a passive recipient, rather than an active listener or producer, of meaning. Since such active listening assumes that the reader/listener respects the author/speaker as a person, she defends an ethics of care in which the reader produces an understanding that shows that he or she has fully and fairly considered the author/text. She argues that reconceiving what it means to be a “responsible reader” in this fashion can enable critics to understand more fully literary criticism’s function as a “worthy knowledge project.” Moreover, she faults reader-response criticism, which does not adhere to this ethics, as well as previous reception study, which, she says, glosses over the interaction between reader and text. Steven Mailloux also examines and evaluates practices of reading, but instead of the Habermasian faith that the best argument can prevail, he defends a rhetorical hermeneutics in which the rhetorical conventions or “biases” of “interpretive” communities, rather than the foundational norms of a neutral rationality, explain and regulate the reader’s interpretive practice (see, for example, his Reception Histories). As a result, he emphasizes the historical contexts and political import of reading, not its ethical norms. In “Judging and Hoping: Rhetorical Effects of Reading about Reading,” he turns to a new politics: the multicultural context of the relationship of thinking and reading. He xiv

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evaluates, in particular, how reviewers and critics judge the depiction of this relationship in Reading Lolita in Tehran, which shows how college students read and judge classic Western novels within the Islamic Republic of Iran. Following one critic, he explains this depiction in terms of Hannah Arendt’s belief that thinking, in a totalitarian regime, subverts accepted beliefs. Hence, he assumes that the novel offers its readers the “hope” that reading the Western classics will move the Iranian students to question their beliefs. That is, to clarify the politics of this multicultural reading, he shows that reviewers and critics esteemed the novel because it supports the “hope” that reading Western novels, especially The Great Gatsby and Huckleberry Finn, moves the Iranian students to challenge their theological beliefs, but he complains that neither the critics nor the novel challenges their own Western ideologies, which, among other things, count Iran as a member of “the axis of evil.” Jack Bratich discusses the responses of audiences, not the politics or the ethics of reading, but he defends the value of what has come to be known as “active audience” theory in media and cultural studies. Using Michael Hardt and Toni Negri’s concept of the “multitude,” he construes the audience as a discursive construction whose ontological truth, rather than its ethics or its politics, gives it constitutive power. He argues that the active audience theory of cultural studies also emphasized the constitutive power of audiences, but this theory was limited by its equation of audiences with consumers and its adaptation of Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Consequently, he faults both the Frankfurt School’s claim that the cultural industry makes the audience passive and the cultural studies’ claim that, as consumers, active audiences resist the industry and make their own choices. In effect, Bratich asserts that active audience theory and practice conceptualize audiences not so much as active but as reactive—a narrowing that has prevented active audience study from “developing its own radical findings.” By contrast, an “autonomist” approach to audience activity can, he argues, help investigators define, explore, and understand more productively the complexity and nature of “audience power.” The post-Marxist Tony Bennett also emphasizes the interpretive activity of readers or audiences, but, rather than the ethics or politics of reading or the ontological status of the audience, he describes what he terms the “reading formations” or “literary technologies” regulating cultural institutions. As he shows in Culture: A Reformer’s Science (1998), libraries, television, movies, or academic disciplines form subjects with diverse economic, political, or literary kinds of loyalty or normality. In this collection, his essay, which faults the cultural analyses of Pierre Bourdieu, justifies this view of cultural technologies. However, unlike the earlier work, which called aesthetics useless, this essay defends the value of aesthetic norms. For instance, Bennett complains that Bourdieu’s distinction between bourgeois and working-class taste emphasizes their differences, but their preferences for high, middle, or low culture do not consistently divide them. On the contrary, they share such preferences in various ways, as Bennett’s detailed statistical analyses show. He INTRODUCTION

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also argues that Bourdieu reduces working-class taste to a reactive position because he accepts the traditional Marxist notion that the working class needs Marxist intellectuals to become free. Finally, Bennett claims that, although Bourdieu faults Kantian aesthetics in Distinction, in The Rules of Art he preserves the Kantian notion of aesthetic autonomy because he neglects the historical context of Kant’s theory. In Outside Literature (1990), Bennett considered aesthetics a useless form of knowledge because it does not establish universal values or exert transformative force. In his essay here, he accepts Jacques Rancière’s notion that an aesthetic regime organizes the community and has political import. Hence, he argues that what Bourdieu does not recognize is that aesthetics functions as a cultural technology providing public education and fostering self-government.

Literary Reception Studies The reception theorists dispute the importance of ethics, politics, ontology, and institutions for readers or audiences. By contrast, reception studies of literature, the media, and histories of the book dispute the relationship of text, reader, and their historical contexts. For example, James Machor, Kenneth Roemer, and Philip Goldstein engage in historical studies of reception that assume, as Hans Robert Jauss says, that time and change divide the perspective or horizon of the modern reader from that of the “ancient” author. However, while Jauss claims that interpretation requires a dialog in which the reader mediates between his or her perspective and the author’s, Machor, Roemer, and Goldstein favor alternative strategies. In “The American Reception of Melville’s Short Fiction in the 1850s,” Machor points out, for instance, that, while modern scholars have repeatedly sought to chart Melville’s relation to his contemporary readers, particularly as a factor in shaping his career, they have largely overlooked the reception antebellum readers gave to his short fiction. Although Melville turned to writing short fiction in an effort to restore his popularity and achieve some financial success following the disastrous reception and commercial failings of Moby-Dick and Pierre, reviewers did not respond to his stories positively enough to make them popular or financially successful. In examining these antebellum interpretations, Machor reveals that they differ markedly from modern interpretations of such highly regarded Melville tales as “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno.” In addition, by virtue of the reviewers’ prominent position in the public sphere, these antebellum responses affected the public perception of Melville and his fiction and help explain much of the disappointment that led him to abandon short story writing and, soon after, fiction writing as a whole. Kenneth Roemer discusses the reception of Edward Bellamy’s utopian work Looking Backward, not Melville’s short stories, but he, too, examines the

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division between Bellamy’s reviewers and modern readers, whom he labels “alien” to emphasize their distance from the novel’s historical context and governing assumptions. He argues that utopian fiction mixes diverse genres and, as a result, has a hybrid nature that provokes a rich variety of readers’ responses. Examining the responses of 733 alien readers to questionnaires about the novel, he shows that, although the reviewers and the alien readers share a generic conception of utopian fiction and of the fiction’s competent reader, they have a remarkably different view of literature’s ability to transform social life. Philip Goldstein also shows that modern readings of Richard Wright’s Native Son differ substantially from contemporary readings, but he goes on to explain the historical evolution of the modern readings. He argues that Native Son can be and has been read in two incompatible ways: (1) as a naturalist protest novel, in which Wright shows how racial discrimination and class oppression destroy Bigger Thomas, the novel’s hero; and (2) as a modernist work that depicts the existential struggle whereby Bigger overcomes oppression and achieves liberation. To explain these incompatible accounts, Goldstein grants that Wright’s changing beliefs are important, but more important are the evolution of the naturalist and modernist literary movements and the emergence of a black aesthetics and black studies programs, as well as the massive cultural influence that the modern university and giant corporate media acquired in the twentieth century. Other critics also examine the reader’s responses to the text but do not examine the differences of the reader’s modern and the author’s historical context or the historical evolution of these differences. These critics, who count as reader-response critics, examine instead what the interpretation of the reader reveals about his or her personality or culture. As Wolfgang Iser explained in The Act of Reading, the text moves readers to synthesize what he calls “perspectives” derived from the text’s narrator, characters, plot, and explicit reader, but readers arrive at their own interpretation and thereby implicate themselves in it. Initiated by Iser, along with Stanley Fish, Norman Holland, David Bleich, and others, this approach was, to begin with, mainly literary, but now has various versions, which include, in addition to the literary, audience or media studies and the history of the book. Amy Blair, who adopts a literary form of reader-response criticism, attributes the immense popularity of Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street to an emerging middlebrow culture that encouraged early twentieth-century readers to read material intended to improve them. Thanks to advertisements and reviews that fostered this form of middlebrow reading, the novel acquired an extraordinary popularity; however, instead of describing reviewers’ responses to Main Street, Blair investigates what previously unexamined archival materials—the fan letters Lewis received—indicate about the novel’s middleclass reception. Those letters reveal that, unlike Lewis, who critiques small-town life and middlebrow culture, his contemporaries did not read the novel as a

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critique. Instead, both male and female readers identified with the protagonist, Carol Kennicott, and, as a result, formulated Main Street as an affirmation either of the readers’ own rural society or of the middlebrow commitment to self and civic improvement. Marcial González also examines readers’ responses in his essay, but he examines the issues posed by an author’s lack of ethnic authenticity, rather than his treatment of his culture. Turning to U.S. Hispanic literature, which has thus far received little treatment in reception study, he shows that readers and critics reacted very harshly to the discovery that Danny Santiago, the author of the Hispanic novel Famous All over Town, was not the Hispanic writer they took him to be. “Danny Santiago” is a pseudonym Daniel James adopted to escape the anticommunist blacklist of the 1940s and 1950s. What explains his extensive knowledge of Hispanic life is not his national origins but his decades of work in Los Angeles’ Hispanic community. González demonstrates that readers who faulted James subscribed to a notion of cultural authenticity that was itself called into question by the novel’s representations, which emphasize the disparity between the narrator’s fetishized viewpoint and the novel’s world. Charlotte Templin examines readers’ responses, but she discusses reviews of Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen (1972), often cited as the first novel to emerge from the women’s liberation movement. The novel’s reviewers fall into two groups that occupy two different reading formations and participate in two different discourses. Reviewers who participated in the first discourse, which she calls the discourse of the conventional woman, saw little literary merit in Shulman’s novel and accused the author of narcissism. They complained that the novel flies in the face of realism and that the author fails to create credible characters and plots. In the second discourse, the discourse of the new feminist consciousness, reviewers shared the view that realism demands objectivity but praised the novel’s realism, focusing on the depiction of the subordination of women by social structures and hegemonic beliefs and the implied need to reclaim female sexuality. Like Blair, González, and Templin, Leonard Diepeveen examines readers’ responses but instead of responses to a single author, he discusses modernist fiction and art. He demonstrates that modernism, far from being popular during its emergence, faced a range of skeptical, negative responses in the public sphere. Rather than constructing formal arguments or critical interpretations, reviewers made dismissive comments that simply labeled modernist art unserious, mannered, and aesthetically impoverished. It was a reception that, in effect, consisted of a “refusal to read.” To counter it, the modernist New Criticism rejected both intentional and affective or reader-response criticism in favor of textual interpretation. In other words, to answer these skeptics, literary study institutionalized a set of practices that made detailed textual interpretation the requirement of good criticism.

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Histories of Reading and the Book Historians of reading and the book also examine readers’ responses, but these scholars emphasize the sociohistorical contexts of reading practices, rather than the relationship of text and reader or the differences of modern critics and the author’s audience. For instance, David Nord explores the cultural politics of newspaper reading in the early twentieth century. He examines, in particular, the work of the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, which was established by the New York World in 1913 and which addressed readers’ complaints about newspaper coverage and bias. Examining the archival record of the responses to newspaper reports and editorials the bureau received, Nord shows that readers, managers, and reporters understood key concepts of journalism such as “accuracy” and “fair play” in strikingly different ways. The records also trace the rise of an important new political player in the shaping of both the production and the reception of newspaper journalism in the early twentieth century: the organized interest group. Indeed, readers, especially those connected with interest groups, seized on the bureau to push their own agendas in the name of “fair play,” as they interpreted that phrase. Barbara Hochman also discusses readers’ responses but in a significantly different way: She problematizes the common distinction between reception and production. To be sure, within reception and response studies, the act of reading has repeatedly been seen as a form of production by virtue of its role in shaping—and even constituting—the meaning and significance of texts. Hochman, however, takes this insight further by demonstrating how the very physical act of producing texts both plays a role in and constitutes a version of response. She focuses, in particular, on the renewed popularity of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the nineteenth century’s last decade, a popularity she attributes to the influence of the nineteenth-century publishing industry and cultural concerns about the legacy of slavery. Both the new editions of the novel published in the 1890s and the commentators’ responses to them reveal that Stowe’s novel was employed to show that post–Civil War history was a “record of the moral, social, and cultural progress” of the United States. At the same time, the interpretation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin provided by these new editions and their paratextual materials allowed turn-of-the-century readers to experience it without tears or angst and steered them clear of any sense that Stowe’s novel might have something to say about contemporary issues of race. This treatment of production as a form of reception is central as well to Ellen Garvey’s essay. Focusing on the widespread nineteenth-century practice of making scrapbooks from newspaper clippings, which the makers then recirculated among friends and family, Garvey treats such homemade texts as fascinating sources for exploring vernacular reading practices. Garvey not only shows how these scrapbooks reveal everyday readers’ interpretations of important events and textual accounts, thereby making production a key

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component of their reception activities; she also uses her discussion to address the value and problems of using unique cultural artifacts such as scrapbooks to recover reception as a historically specific act.

Media Studies: Film and Television Scholars engaged in cultural and media studies also examine a work’s reception. Although these scholars do not examine the historical context of a work, some of them do treat production as a form of reception, while others produce detailed, empirical analyses of viewers’ comments and reactions and their sociocultural conditions. For example, Janet Staiger examines Robert Aldrich’s film version of Kiss Me, Deadly, Mickey Spillane’s popular detective/spy novel. Staiger shows that, since Aldrich opposed the cold war ideology and McCarthyite repression of the 1950s, he meant the film to stand the novel on its head. For that reason, he retained the novel’s violence but changed the story: Mike Hammer, the protagonist, became egoistic and greedy, not vengeful and self-righteous, and the evil characters became spies seeking fissionable materials for an H-bomb, not Mafia members buying a package of drugs. Staiger shows that, except for the French, reviewers as well as Spillane missed the political critiques implied by these (re)interpretations, and that result leads her to speculate about what audiences’ reactions can tell us about the author’s intentions. While Staiger examines the authorial intention implied by the viewers’ reactions, Rhiannon Bury analyzes the interpretive practices of fans of the popular HBO television show Six Feet Under. Examining two of the largest internet discussion sites, an area new to reception study, she argues that their comments and disputes indicate a traditional commitment to correct interpretation. In one dispute, some fans said a female character’s visit to a doctor’s office implied that, thanks to her sexual relations with a married character, she had gotten pregnant, while others argued that, as her briefcase indicated, she was just doing her job as a drug-company representative. Drawing on Henry Jenkins’s concept of “textual poaching” as a form of audience resistance to the products of the culture industry, Bury argues that such disputes show that viewers are not homogeneous “rebellious poachers that hijack authorial meaning” but instead are in many cases textual “gamekeepers” on a collective quest for the “right” meaning, using methods learned from the dominant culture’s educational practices. Disclosing the way viewers from both sites were equally interested in close readings that mine the text for “authorial intention,” Bury demonstrates that in the digital age print-based literacies of mass education remain central. Andrea Press and Camille Johnson also examine the fans of a television show, but instead of analyzing internet discussions, they employ audience

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ethnography. Moving beyond the interviews, surveys, and viewers’ diaries of conventional ethnographic reception studies, Press and Johnson-Yale undertake on-site participant observation at a Midwest African American women’s hairdressing salon. To determine the role ambient television plays in the salon’s social interactions, they interview Janelle, the owner of the salon, who, together with her clients, regularly watches and discusses the Oprah Winfrey Show. Press and Johnson show that the conversations of Janelle and her clients frequently raise broad political issues. They conclude that television is not a privatizing medium, as scholars say; rather, it establishes a public space in which fans can discuss their political beliefs.

Retrospective Prospects The influential work of Janice Radway has spanned all types of response and reception study, including the literary, book history, publishing, and media studies. In her essay here, she goes on, however, to reveal the limits of these types and to outline a new form of sociological and anthropological reception study. She argues that the interpretations of texts and critics and the histories of books, publishers, and institutions produced by all types of readerresponse and reception study ignore or misconstrue the practices of readers and justify the privileges of the literary discipline. Instead of challenging the critic’s authority, reader-response and reception study elaborate that authority, making the reader secondary to the text and its production and the critic an expert not only on texts but on readings of texts and, in the case of cultural studies, on cultural forms and their audiences. On this basis she reconsiders her previous work, particularly her two best-known works: Reading the Romance, which examines how a group of approximately forty women readers received popular romances, and the later A Feeling for Books, which analyzes the preferences, habits, and socioeconomic status of the Book of the Month Club’s editorial staff. Now she argues that Reading the Romance participated in the “reification of the literary” because it made the reader a function of the romance genre and because neither it nor A Feeling for Bookschallenged the corporate conglomerates dominating cultural production. Such critiques should enable her to produce, she says, a more fluid, “simultaneous” account of the cultural production and consumption of girls (including her daughter) and a more complex understanding not only of their reception activity but also of its simultaneous function as a form of cultural production. Like Radway, Toby Miller, whose essay concludes this volume, criticizes reader-response and reception study that engages in “static” interpretations, instead of examining the whole complex process whereby texts are produced, distributed, and received. However, while Radway emphasizes the cultural production and consumption of girls, he examines the worldwide distribution

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and reception of movies and television shows. On the one hand, he outlines the history of their reception, in which, for the most part, academics and others considered audiences passive dupes and studied them “scientifically.” In the modern era, this view divides, he says, into two basic types: the domestic effects model, which studies the psychological effects of the media, including its propensity to encourage violence or perversity; and the global effects model, which evaluates the extent to which the media encourages or fails to encourage national, local, or cultural loyalties. Engaging in what he terms “the reception deception,” these models reveal, he says, various faults, including a commitment to rational individualism and a neglect of the media’s libratory and pleasurable character. To move beyond these models, which focus narrowly on audiences and texts, he suggests that reception study examine the ways the media are produced, distributed, received, and criticized across the globe, especially since modern cultural texts are caught up in what he terms a “multiform network,” which varies by country or region as well as by genre and which includes “books, movies, CDs, the Web, DVDs, electronic games, TV, computers, telephones, and multiplexes.” The arguments of Radway and Miller underline the extent to which the disagreements and disputes of those engaged in reception study have enabled them to evolve a diversity of approaches and methods, which include the reader-response, institutional, textual, historical, and theoretical, and which explain the diverse ways in which readers, viewers, and fans have found old and new literatures, newspapers, movies, television shows, and other textualities meaningful. It is simply not the case, then, that reception theorists cannot seriously debate interpretations or interpretative practices but can only express solidarity with each other or acknowledge and respect their different viewpoints, as traditional scholars say (see Michaels 278–83 and Dasenbrock 12). Our overview of this collection’s essays clearly shows that they dispute a number of subjects, including the status of ethics, aesthetics, and ontology, the relationship between an author’s historical context and modern readers, the character and responses of fans, viewers, readers, or audiences, and the influence and historical evolution of cultural institutions. Some readers may object, however, that these disagreements can be rational only if they enable critics to establish correct interpretations of a text. While all the versions of reception theory assume that good art produces meaningful experiences or revelations, a rational method would establish demonstrable truth or, at least, resist relativism. As Michaels says, “The minute we see no point in asking whether we got a text right or wrong . . . we cease to understand ourselves as interpreting the text at all” (76). This objection implicitly justifies the anxiety of Alvin Kernan and other traditional scholars, who, as noted, defend a textual or authorial essentialism. The recent history of literary studies suggests, however, that this method does not overcome disputes or resolve methodological disagreements; on the contrary, it has produced a number of impasses that, to an extent, explain the emergence of reader-response and reception study. xxii

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A Brief History of Modern Criticism Initially adopted by philological scholars, the traditional Anglo-American method of criticism developed out of nineteenth-century Higher Criticism of the Bible and effectively opposed absolutist or allegorical theology, which interpreted not only the Bible but classical texts as prefiguring modern religious views (see Compagnon 58–62). In the late nineteenth century, when Anglo-American university departments included both languages and literature, the scientific philologists construed the method as a historical approach providing causal analyses of a work’s sources and influences or an author’s development, as well as broad cultural ideals, what Matthew Arnold termed “the best that is thought and said in the world.” As John Guillory points out, this historical method remained central until the 1940s and 1950s, when literary study, which had acquired graduate programs, distinct fields, and professional associations, fostered formal methods opposed to the historical method (32–36). Often very intense, this opposition persisted until Anglo-American universities, expanding rapidly in the 1960s, began to encourage various sorts of approaches. For instance, eclectic critics such as Northrop Frye brought the formal and historical approaches together, establishing what scholars term “objective” or purely “literary” methods and concepts and eventually opening literary study to poststructuralist or “New Historical” readings (see Graff, Professing 14–15 and 204–8). When reception study emerged in the 1970s, it also sought to move beyond the opposed formal and historical approaches, but it justified the reader’s interpretive activity. As noted, some reader-response critics dismissed formal analyses on the grounds that interpretation projects the identity of the reader or the critic on to the text. Other reader-response criticism, including the reception study of Jauss and Iser and the affective stylistics of Fish, maintained that the reader’s constructive activity can bring together the text’s formal or the author’s historical context and the reader’s aesthetic “repertoire.” Later Derridean and New Historical readings, which examined the text’s broad tropes and figures or the historical context’s discursive practices, also moved beyond the opposition of formal and historical accounts and, at the same time, intensified the opposition. In Tropics of Discourse, the New Historicist Hayden White argued, for example, that historical criticism does not escape the ambiguities of rhetorical tropes, because, as an art as well as a science, historical study requires interpretations, not just facts, and rhetorical modes or genres, not formal logic alone (67; see also Greenblatt, “Towards” 8). Like Kernan, White maintained, however, that “absurdist” poststructuralist criticism reduces the text to language and language, in turn, to a mirror of the reader (265; see also Greenblatt, “What Is” 470). By contrast, reception theory also reconciles historical and rhetorical approaches, but it accepts a poststructuralist account of reading. As noted, Fish and others claimed that an INTRODUCTION

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interpretation’s validity depends on the norms, ideals, and methods of “interpretive communities” composed of readers who develop a common strategy and make it prevail. A pragmatic version of what Michel Foucault terms the archive or historical a priori, this notion of community both reconciled formal and historical approaches and exacerbated their conflict. In the 1980s and 1990s, when conservative politicians increasingly dominated federal and state government and the global economy was degrading American industry and finance, traditional scholars produced new disagreements, popularly termed “culture wars,” over newly established literary theory, women’s, African American, gay, cultural, and postcolonial programs. We do not intend to recapitulate these familiar arguments. We do want to suggest, however, that scholars as traditional as Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., and Gerald Graff and as radical as Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Susan Gubar, and Edward Said blamed the universities’ expanding disciplines, black, women’s, or ethnic studies, or multicultural clientele for the humanities’ growing fragmentation and declining public support.4 Both the traditional and the radical scholars argued that, with its theoretical “jargon,” subjective readers’ responses, and attention to black, minority, and women’s literatures, academic criticism alienated the public. By contrast, with a few exceptions, reception theory justified “subjective” responses and modern academic criticism. Fish, for example, complained that “both the left and the right” adopted “an antiprofessionalism that regards with suspicion activities tied narrowly to disciplinary pressures” (“Being Interdisciplinary” 15). Moreover, he insisted that academic interpretation is professional, not political (Professional 51). As Patrick Brantlinger points out, in the twenty-first century literary studies have grown increasingly marginal because federal and state governments have reduced their financial support, students are increasingly majoring in technological and other job-related areas, the global economy is undermining the nation-state and the national culture, and the demand for writing programs has expanded, along with what Brantlinger terms “the pressure from new literatures in English” (22; see also Readings 465–83). Brantlinger is right; however, this marginal status has generated sharp, new debates about the relationship of traditional methods and the new cultural approaches. In these new debates, critics seeking to restore the lost centrality of literature defend textual and aesthetic criticism against cultural, gay, feminist, or multicultural studies, which these critics consider political or ideological (see Armstrong, Berubé, Clark, Delbanco, Fluck, Krieger, Schwab, and Thomas). The varieties of reception theory suggest that, on the contrary, to enhance its influence, literary/cultural studies can open itself to the cultural and multicultural programs composing it in the twenty-first century. As Patrocinio Schweickart rightly says in her essay in this volume, as professional interpreters, “we are happy to entertain a variety of critical approaches, and . . . a diversity of values.” This brief history of modern literary study indicates that the defenders of an essential text or an accessible “objective” meaning have not overcome

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or reduced disagreements about a text’s meaning. These defenders mean to preserve historical objectivity, establish correct interpretations, defend the “great” tradition, or restore the “lost centrality” of the humanities, but their defenses have led to impasses from which reader-response criticism and historical and poststructuralist reception study have emerged and developed. Indeed, the differences and disputes of these reader-response and reception theories suggest that their development has produced a complex situation in which interpretive communities are no longer marked by sharply defined or impenetrable boundaries. Instead, the communities interpenetrate and at times overlap, with the result that they consist of both disparate and shared assumptions and interpretive codes, which in turn enable readers to inhabit several interpretive communities simultaneously. While the traditional essentialist method has restricted literary study and repeatedly produced impasses, reception study, thanks to its complexity and variety of methods, as well as its many differences and disputes, opens literary study to its twenty-first-century constituents—the reader’s personality, literary and cultural repertoire, institutional contexts, the fans and audiences of the media, as well as the historical, evolving practices of reading, publishing, and cultural institutions. Notes 1. Since the mid-1980s, numerous collections and casebooks have reexamined the reception of Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn, Pride and Prejudice, and Their Eyes Are Watching God, to mention just a few titles, and major works, including Steven Mailloux’s Rhetorical Power and Reception Histories, Gary Taylor’s Reinventing Shakespeare, Jane Tompkins’s Sensational Designs, and Peter Widdowson’s Hardy in History have contributed markedly to Anglo-American reception criticism. In literary studies alone, the number of books, articles, and book chapters in reception study has constituted a virtual explosion of interest, with the MLA Bibliography listing over eight thousand items published in the field. Add to this work the research on reception in cultural and media studies, including Janice Radway’s Feeling for Books, Henry Jenkins’s Textual Poachers, and Janet Staiger’s Media Reception Studies, as well as collections by Lawrence Grossberg, Jon Cruz, and Roger Dickinson, among others, and the significance of reception study becomes striking. 2. For example, Jerome McGann wrote that a work’s “critical history . . . dates from the first responses and reviews it receives. These reactions . . . modify the author’s purposes and intentions, sometimes drastically, and they remain part of processive life” of the author and the work (24). 3. A different but related set of methodological shifts and broadening of approaches has occurred in audience and reception analysis in media and cultural studies, as the earlier “effects” and “uses and gratifications” models began to give way in the 1980s to active-audience theory and audience and reception ethnographies. For a brief overview and discussion of these shifts, see Machor and Goldstein 203–7. For the shape of and problems with “effects” models, see Toby Miller’s essay in this volume; for an

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analysis of both the value and the limitations of active-audience theory and methods, see Jack Bratich’s essay here. 4. For a full discussion of these polemics, see Goldstein 17–20.

References Armstrong, Isabel. The Radical Aesthetic. Oxford: Blackwell, 2000. Bennett, Tony. Culture: A Reformer’s Science. St. Leonards, Australia: Allyn & Unwin, 1998. Bérubé, Michael. “Engaging the Aesthetic.” The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies. Ed. Michael Bérubé. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1–27. Bleich, David. “What Literature Is ‘Ours’?” Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response. Ed. Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn. New York: Modern Language Association, 2004. 286–313. Bloom, Allan. The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987. Brantlinger, Patrick. Who Killed Shakespeare? What’s Happened to English since the Radical Sixties. New York: Routledge, 2001. Clark, Michael P. Introduction. Revenge of the Aesthetic: The Place of Literature in Theory Today. Ed. Michael P. Clark. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. 1–24. Compagnon, Antoine. Le démon de la théorie littérature et sense commun. Paris: Éditions de Seuil, 1998. Cruz, Jon, and Justin Lewis, eds. Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audience and Cultural Reception. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994. Dasenbrock, Reed Way. Truth and Consequences: Intentions, Conventions, and the New Thematics. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001. Delbanco, Andrew. Required Reading: Why Our American Classics Matter Now. New York: Noonday, 1997. Dickinson, Roger, Ramaswami Harindranath, and Olga Linné, eds. Approaches to Audiences. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1998. Eagleton, Terry. The Function of Criticism: From the “Spectator” to Post-Structuralism. London: Verso, 1984. Fish, Stanley. “Being Interdisciplinary Is So Very Hard to Do.” Profession 89 (1989): 15–22. ———. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. ———. “Literature in the Reader: Affective Stylistics.” Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. 70–100. ———. Professional Correctness: Literary Studies and Political Change. New York: Clarendon Press, 1995. Fluck, Winnifred. “Aesthetics and Cultural Studies.” Aesthetics in a Multicultural Age. Ed. Emory Elliott, Louis Freitas, and Jeffrey Rhyne. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. 79–104. xxvi

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Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. “Tradition and the Female Talent.” The Poetics of Gender. Ed. Nancy K. Miller. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. 183–207. Goldstein, Philip. Communities of Cultural Value: Reception Study, Political Differences, and Literary History. Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2001. Graff, Gerald. Literature against Itself: Literary Ideas in Modern Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. ———. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Greenblatt, Stephen. “Towards a Poetics of Culture.” The New Historicism. Ed. H. Aram Veeser. New York: Routledge, 1989. 1–14. ———. “What Is the History of Literature?” Critical Inquiry 23 (1997): 460–81. Grossberg, Lawrence, James Hay, and Ellen Wartella, eds. The Audience and Its Landscape. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. Guillory, John. “Literary Study and the Modern System of the Disciplines.” Disciplinarity at the Fin de Siècle. Ed. Amanda Anderson and Joseph Valente. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. 19–43. Hirsch, E. D., Jr. Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. New York: Vintage, 1988. ———. Validity in Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967. Holland, Norman. “Unity Identity Text Self.” Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Ed. Jane P. Tompkins. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. 118–33. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Kernan, Alvin. The Death of Literature. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. Kreiger, Murray. “The ‘Imaginary’ and Its Enemies.” New Literary History 31 (2000): 130–74. Machor, James L., and Philip Goldstein. “Reception Study, Cultural Studies, and Mass Communication.” Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies. Ed. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein. New York: Routledge, 2001. 203–12. Mailloux, Steven. Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. ———. Rhetorical Power. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1989. McGann, Jerome J. The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in Historical Method and Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Clarendon Press, 1985. Michaels, Walter Benn. The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004. Radway, Janice A. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. INTRODUCTION

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———. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Readings, Bill. “The University without Culture?” New Literary History 26 (1995): 465–92. Said, Edward. The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983. Schwab, Gabriele. “ ‘If Only I Were Not Obliged to Manifest’: Iser’s Aesthetics of Negativity.” New Literary History 31 (2000): 73–89. Schweickart, Patrocinio P. “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading.” Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Ed. Elizabeth A. Flynn and Patrocinio P. Schweickart. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. 31–62. Staiger, Janet. Media Reception Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Taylor, Gary. Reinventing Shakespeare: A Cultural History from the Restoration to the Present. New York: Oxford University Press, 1989. Thomas, Brook. “Restaging the Reception of Iser’s Earlier Work, Or Sides Not Taken in Discussions of the Aesthetic.” New Literary History 31 (2000): 13–44. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Widdowson, Peter. Hardy in History: A Study in Literary Sociology. London: Routledge, 1989.

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I (Re)Theorizing Reception Study

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Understanding an Other Reading as a Receptive Form of Communicative Action PATROCINIO SCHWEICKART

The term “audience” is problematical, according to drama critic Alice Rayner, not only because it obscures the diverse perspectives and reactions that can be found in every actual audience but also because it glosses over the “listening function” that constitutes the activity of the audience members. Something similar can be said of the term “reception.” Although reception study understands the variability of meaning and has long been concerned to restrain collectivizing and homogenizing tendencies, something like the second problem persists, particularly in the tension between reception study and readerresponse criticism. Reception study emphasizes the macroscopic analysis of reading conditions and effects, but it tends to gloss over the “receiving function,” the interaction between reader and a text that, multiplied countless times, constitutes the phenomenon of reception. In this essay, I will develop a theory of reading that portrays reading as a communicative activity in which the reader encounters other subjectivities. My point of departure will be Jürgen Habermas’s theory of communicative

action. I will argue that, contrary to Habermas, communication requires two modes of action, an expressive mode represented by speaking and writing and a receptive mode represented by listening and reading. The most developed corollary of Habermas’s theory is the moral theory he calls “discourse ethics,” in which the norm of mutual respect for individual dignity and autonomy is expressed in the ideal of domination-free discourse. I will argue that a theory of communicative action that takes account of receptive as well as expressive roles yields a different discourse ethics, and that the conception of reading within this framework enables a notion of the validity of interpretation that is not dependent on objective verbal meaning in the text but, rather, on the cognitive and moral constituents of the receptive role of understanding the utterance of an other.

Habermas’s Paradigm of Communicative Reason Habermas recommends the development of a paradigm of communicative reason, based not on the discredited metaphysical premises of the “philosophy of consciousness,” but on the capacities and presuppositions that enable everyday communicative practices (“An Alternative Way”). Habermas is particularly interested in “communicative action oriented toward understanding,” a group of practices stylized in the following scenario. Scenario 1: Two people are discussing an important topic, say the “Woman Question.” Assume that both speakers are skilled at argumentation. Speaker A says, “Women are equal.” Speaker B says, “What do you mean? Where in the world did you get such a notion?” A gives reasons for his claim, and B disagrees and gives reasons for his position. A contest of reasons ensues, and A and B agree to let the best reasons decide which position is worthy of agreement. For Habermas, “reason” goes hand in hand with a meaningful and usable notion of “validity.” Within the framework of communicative reason, “validity” is not a property of propositions, but a claim one makes when one speaks. When one speaks, one unavoidably makes four kinds of validity claims: a truth claim relating the utterance to the objective world, a correctness or moral claim relating it to the norms of interpersonal interaction, a truthfulness or sincerity claim relating it to the inner subjective world of the speaker, and an intelligibility claim relating it to the norms of the language of the utterance. When A says “Women are equal,” he is making a truth claim (women and men are really equal), a rightness claim (it is morally right to regard women and men as equals), a truthfulness claim (A is sincere), and an

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intelligibility claim (the utterance conforms to the linguistic norms shared by competent speakers of English). When B questions A, he could be questioning the truth, moral rightness, truthfulness, or intelligibility of A’s utterance. The goal of communicative action is to resolve differences and to arrive at mutual “understanding,” “meaning agreement,” regarding these validity claims. Habermas leaves sincerity and intelligibility claims largely unanalyzed. He is interested mainly in truth and rightness claims.1 I will not be concerned with the sincerity claim, but I will return to the issue of intelligibility later, because this is crucial to the problematics of reading. Truth and moral claims are intersubjective in the sense that when I claim something is true or morally right, I am claiming that this is so not just for me, but for everyone concerned. Habermas argues that the validity of truth and moral claims can be determined only through discussion in ideal domination-free discourse, where all participants have equal opportunity to speak their minds freely and openly and where no force operates except the unforced force of the better argument.2 When I say “Women are/ought to be equal,” my confidence in the validity of my claim rests on my willingness to submit it to the judgment of others, my readiness to give reasons for my position, and my commitment to let the case be decided on its merits. Habermas does not identify the properties of valid claims; instead, he designates a discursive procedure for distinguishing valid from invalid claims. Valid claims are those that everyone can willingly agree on because they are supported by the most cogent arguments. Habermas privileges argumentative discourse, but he does not commit himself to a specific definition of argument. For the purposes of this essay, it is enough to characterize argument broadly as claim-testing, reason-giving discourse, and “reason” as one’s response when one is asked to explain or elaborate. One might offer factual, logical, emotional, aesthetic, moral, political, and other considerations as reasons; it is not necessary to stipulate a priori qualifications for what might count as a reason. The paradigm of communicative reason advocated by Habermas has a number of appealing features: first, it presupposes a fallibilistic stance—all claims are in principle questionable; second, it recognizes validity as a social product and attributes epistemic and moral authority to the community of people who are willing to speak and collaborate with each other; third, it ties the notion of validity to the moral and political ideal of domination-free discussion in which all concerned have a voice; fourth, the idea of validity as the product of free and open discussion in which claims are evaluated strictly on their merits finds empirical corroboration in scientific and scholarly discourse, particularly in the practice of peer review; and finally, regardless of Habermas’s attachment to the notion of transcendent reason, the framework of everyday communicative practices brings “rationality” down to earth and invests it with the pragmatic quality of “reasonableness” we experience in productive and satisfying conversations.

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Habermas and Derrida: The Predicament of the Reader Habermas’s theory of communicative action has had very little influence on literary study, in part because of the current strong influence of critiques of the Enlightenment notions of reason and validity he is trying to preserve, and in part because the idea of literature as communication, whatever its practical uses, and in spite of the enduring favor accorded the metaphor of voice and the more recent appeal of “dialogism,” has been anathema in literary theory for nearly a century. The following scenario indicates the typical reading situation that forms the basis of the discipline of literary criticism. Scenario 2. C is alone in a room, reading a book, say Women in Love. Assume she is a skillful reader—a professor of literature. Lawrence’s novel can be read as being about the meanings of masculinity and femininity and the way these notions shape the relationship between women and men. However, C knows that underlying any discussion of the novel is the question of the validity of any interpretive claim. How does she know that her reading of the text is valid? Is there an objective ground—a verbal meaning in the text—to warrant a particular interpretation? Or is interpretation always a function of the subjectivity of the reader and the context of reading? How do readings vary with readers and contexts? If there are many readings possible, are they all equally valid? What is to distinguish valid interpretations from invalid ones? Does it even make sense to talk of validity with regard to interpretation? Scenario 2 reflects the general conception of reading as a relationship involving the interaction of a subject C and a textual object. Of course, someone wrote the book, but the author is typically absent from the scene of reading. The problem of interpretation highlights the inadequacy of Habermas’s treatment of the issue of intelligibility. In his model, the rational evaluation of validity claims presupposes that shared linguistic norms underwrite the intelligibility of utterances, and that competent speakers of a language are able (given enough time, effort, and good will) to agree on the meaning of utterances and hence on what claims are at issue. However, the experiences that inform literary criticism indicate that being able to recognize that an utterance consists of well-formed English sentences does not necessarily imply that we can determine what it is saying, that competent readers often interpret texts differently, and that there is no unproblematical way of deciding interpretive disputes. Moreover, as Derrida and others have shown, the problem is inherent in the nature of language. The meaning of a written text cannot be directly decoded from its language: Meaning is multiple, shifting, undecidable.3

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It might be said that the question of the decidability of meaning turns on whether one takes speech or writing as one’s paradigm for language. Habermas assumes an oral paradigm in which the utterance, or speech act, is the unit of communicative action. When I speak, I expect my interlocutors to understand what I am conveying through my utterance. If I think I am being misunderstood, I will object, give more information, elaborate, explain, and in this way bring my interlocutor’s understanding of my utterance in line with mine. Of course, this process may fail, and in this case, the discussion will go nowhere. Nevertheless, the expectation of being understood is one of the unavoidable presuppositions we make when we speak. It may require considerable time, effort, and good will, but in our everyday conversations, we expect to be understood, and we continue talking so long as we feel that this expectation is not futile. Derrida, for his part, argues that contrary to the dominant view, writing, not speech, is the primary form of language. It is true, one expects to be understood when one speaks, but this expectation, Derrida argues, is based on the illusory association of meaning with the sound of one’s voice—with the sensation that the sound is coming directly from inside the mind. But whatever I may feel when I am speaking or writing, other people always encounter my utterance as a textual object, the traces of meaning, not meaning itself. Any attempt by a speaker or writer to clarify and explain does not produce meaning, only more texts that need to be interpreted. Although Derrida designates his topic as “writing,” this does not refer to the activity, but to its textual product as it presents problems for reading. With regard to the question of meaning, in Derrida’s view, we are all in the predicament of the reader who is faced with the paradoxical task of tracking down meaning that is, and will always be, beyond our grasp. The situation is the same whether or not the author is able to respond. An authorial statement is an interpretation among other interpretations; it may be more or less illuminating, more or less persuasive, but it does not have decisive authority over the meaning of the text. We may seek meaning, but we can only produce oral or written texts that multiply the paradoxical call for reading. Habermas accepts the validity of the deconstruction thesis of the indeterminacy of textual meaning, but he localizes it to the “world-creating capacity” of language that is privileged in literature at the expense of its communicative function. Of course, any text can be read as literature. However, although the languages of science, philosophy, economics, law, and morality also “live off of the illuminating power of metaphorical tropes,” these rhetorical elements are “tamed,” enlisted in the service of “problem solving”—the formation of judgment regarding validity claims and the production of agreements that are necessary if people are to coordinate their action plans (“Excursus” 209). Habermas strenuously objects to the subordination of the communicative function of philosophical, scholarly, and scientific language (written or oral) beneath the world-creating capacity privileged by literature.

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Derrida’s mistake, from Habermas’s point of view, is to take the characteristics of one genre of writing—literature—as normative for writing in general. What is at issue for him is not the difference between speech and writing but that between different linguistic functions—between communicative uses of language that are oriented toward making and evaluating validity claims (e.g., philosophical, scientific, and scholarly discourse) and those that are not (literature and other discourses in which aesthetic and rhetorical functions are paramount). It is illuminating to examine the status of literary scholarship with regard to this distinction. According to Habermas, the “endemic self-doubt” of literary criticism with regard to its status as a scholarly discipline “forms the background” for its favorable reception of Derrida. Deconstruction appeals to literary critics, first because it “frees the critical enterprise from the unfortunate compulsion to submit to pseudo-scientific standards . . . [as it] lifts it above science to the level of creative activity,” and second because it allows literary criticism to share in the “business of the critique of metaphysics” and, in this way, to gain philosophical significance (“Excursus” 191–92). However, it is important to note that in spite of the theoretical power of deconstruction, the communicative function is practically normative in literary criticism.4 As much we may strive to partake of the creative quality of literature, our critical discourses have the goal of communicating with others, with the expectation that our claims will be shown, when subjected to critical examination, to be supported by cogent argument. We may or may not use the word “valid,” but in practice, we discriminate between scholarship that is competent, knowledgeable, incisive, informative, responsible, useful, “reasonable,” and thus worthy of recognition and further discussion, and scholarship that is not. Moreover, literary criticism provides empirical corroboration of Habermas’s claim of the crucial link between the notion of validity and the ideal of domination-free discourse. In practice, the integrity of the critical enterprise depends not on the existence of an objective verbal meaning, but on our ability, through peer review and critical discussion, to evaluate interpretive claims largely (if not strictly) on their merits. Like scholars in other disciplines, we would consider coercion, prejudice, or systematic bias to be damaging to our knowledge project.5 The idea of validity as the product of a discourse community is evident in Stanley Fish’s idea of the authority of interpretive communities. However, the closest approximation of Habermas’s model is Wayne Booth’s proposal of coduction as a method for the collaborative testing of interpretive claims. Coduction is a discursive procedure premised on the willingness and ability of each discourse participant to discuss her claims with others, to answer questions and give reasons supporting her views, and to let the better argument prevail, even if this means changing her mind (The Company We Keep). For Booth as for Habermas (but less clearly for Fish), the cognitive and moral integrity of interpretive claims depends on whether or not they are defensible in domination-free discourse. 8

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Habermas and other critics of Derrida are fond of pointing out that the credibility of deconstruction is undercut by a “performative contradiction.” Proponents of deconstruction, like everyone else, expect that their utterances (spoken or written) will be understood by others. As much as they may believe that all readings are necessarily misreadings, they bristle (or react more vigorously) when others misread their work. Nonetheless, the discourse of literary study offers conceptions of validity and of “communicative action oriented toward understanding” that deviate in crucial ways from the model proposed by Habermas. First, validity claims in literary study refer not to the world of objective states of affairs, but to the world of literature. Thus, when I make a claim, for example, that Women in Love puts forth such and such representations of women, the validity of that claim depends on whether it is supported by textual or contextual evidence. The issue is the validity of my reading, not the validity of Lawrence’s representation of women. Second, because we literary critics know from experience that texts can be competently read in different ways, we favor a pluralistic attitude toward validity claims. Like Richard Rorty, we regard relativism as a challenging fact of life, but unlike Habermas, we are not worried that it spells the end of “humane forms of collective life” (“Moral Consciousness” 3). We are happy to entertain a variety of critical approaches and to judge them in terms of a diversity of values; we do not think that we need, at all costs, to devise a procedure that, in theory if not in practice, would enable the resolution of interpretive disputes. Finally, we do not require critical consensus as a condition for the validation of an interpretive claim. Most of us would wonder why Habermas equates the communicative goal of “understanding” with “agreement.” Certainly, understanding a poem or a novel has no necessary connection with agreeing with anything it is saying, and we often understand and appreciate the merits of claims without feeling compelled to adopt them. In fact, some of us have found that the drive to agree or disagree often inhibits understanding. Above all, the universalizing impulse behind Habermas’s insistence on consensus as a necessary condition for the validation of claims runs counter to our practice of examining critical claims in the context of particular knowledge projects, our wariness of overreaching generalizations, and our experience that total consensus in the field of literary study is neither possible nor desirable. Booth is most Habermasian when he says that “ethical criticism that merely describes the [interpretive] conflicts, without permitting agreement or disagreement, is cowardly.” However, he speaks for many literary critics when he says that it is “from disagreements [that go to the center of the aesthetic achievement of a work] that the most productive literary criticism can emerge.” Reasonable disagreement can result in something critics value more than agreement, namely, growth in understanding, learning “something overlooked, either about the work itself or about the world of ethical values in which we all live” (“Why Ethical” 27). Understanding an Other

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Reading as a Receptive Form of Communicative Action Perhaps, one might say, the communicative function that is salient when critics are addressing each other recedes to the background when they are reading a literary text. Certainly, literary texts are different from scholarly texts and call for different reading practices. Nevertheless, in this section I will argue that reading any text is a form of communicative action. The key to my argument is the recognition of a receptive mode of communicative action represented by reading and listening that is different from the expressive mode of speaking and writing. By emphasizing the receptive role of the reader, rather than the nature of the text being read, I want to focus on what the reader is doing while she is reading, before she begins converting this activity into a spoken or written account. I will overlook the many controversies surrounding Habermas’s theory of communicative action in order to concentrate on what I take to be a fatal error in his model of communication—namely, the identification of communicative action only with speaking. Like Habermas, most of us think of scenario 1—people talking—when we think of communication. When we think of reading as dialogic, we form a picture of people talking—of voices in the text, of the real or implied author and the real or implied reader talking to each other, or of members of an interpretive community discussing what they have read. To think of reading as communicative action, it seems we need to convert readers into speakers. But when we look carefully at conversations, we see that I speak, you speak, the picture assumed by Habermas, is a misleading picture of what is going on. If communication is to happen, when I speak, you must listen; when you speak, I must listen. Every interval of communication consists of someone speaking and another listening. In oral situations, speaking and listening happen simultaneously, and the sound of the speaker’s voice masks the silent activity of the listener. When voice is taken to be the evidence of activity, silence becomes the sign of inactivity—listening becomes indistinguishable from doing nothing. I am not saying that Habermas does not see that someone has to listen as one speaks. But in his model, listening is drastically truncated to the quasi-speaking role of silently saying “yes” or “no” to what is being said in anticipation of one’s own speaking turn. The listener does not become a communicative agent until she speaks in response to the utterance of another. Paradoxically, Habermas’s conception of communicative action oriented toward understanding forecloses the theoretical elaboration of the activity—listening—specifically devoted to understanding the utterance of another. The simplistic treatment of intelligibility and the reduction of understanding to agreement follow directly from the underestimation of the receptive agency of the listener. Because writing and reading are usually temporally and spatially separated from each other, we see that the reader is clearly doing something dif10

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ferent from writing. Unfortunately, the absence of the author obscures the intersubjectivity that would qualify reading as a form of communicative action. There are, of course, differences between listening and reading, but I will discount these in favor of emphasizing the “receiving function” that defines both, that of understanding the utterance of an other.6 The analogy between listening and reading enables the recognition of listening as an activity different from speaking and of reading as the interaction between different subjectivities. Combining the vantage point of the oral and written forms enables us to define communication as a linguistically mediated interaction between subjectivities in two different communicative roles: the expressive role of speaking and writing and the receptive role of listening and reading. An objection might be raised to the idea of reading as interaction not with a text but with another subjectivity. There is actually only one subjectivity at work in reading—that of the reader. The text screens the reader from contact with any subjectivity other than her own. Furthermore, as Derrida argued, the situation is the same in an oral situation. What the listener engages is always a textual object, not a subject. In response, I would point out that objects always mediate human interactions. In particular, we always encounter each other through our bodies. A written or spoken text has a metonymic connection to subjectivity comparable to that Levinas attributes to “the face of the other.” Human faces, like (oral or written) texts, call for reading. Note that the intersubjectivity of reading is implicit in reading practices, said to be favored particularly by women, that are often derided for their “naïve” and “sentimental” tendency to confuse fictional characters with real people.7 I would argue that what such readers are after in “real people” is not the quality of being “real” but rather the subjectivity that can be imparted to fictional characters by treating them like “people.” These readers value reading as an occasion for engaging with other subjectivities and as an opportunity to exercise, enjoy, and refine the skills required for understanding other people by observing what they say and do. A similar approach is evident in Booth’s idea that the characters in the books we read, like the real people in the “company we keep,” affect us for good or ill, so that we have not only the right but the responsibility to understand and evaluate the way these characters live their fictional lives. The intersubjectivity of reading is also implicit in terms such as the “implied author” (Booth), “rhetorical criticism” (James Phelan), “authorial audience” (Peter Rabinowitz), and “authored text” (Derek Attridge), and in the concepts of “live-entering,” “acknowledging,” and “facing” that Adam Zachary Newton derives from Bakhtin, Cavell, and Levinas, respectively. Because a literary text consists of a multiplicity of shifting “voices” and “languages,” it is arguable that subjectivities are as undecidable as meaning. Moreover, it is not clear to what extent the subjectivity one encounters in reading is only the reproduction of one’s self, the elaboration of one’s own “identity theme.” Nevertheless, these objections do not invalidate the thesis of the intersubjectivity of reading; they only indicate the complicated problems that could be addressed within this framework. Understanding an Other

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The Ethics of Reading There have been, roughly, two approaches to the ethics of reading.8 The first, within the framework of deconstruction, is exemplified by J. Hillis Miller’s account of the normative strictures on reading that stem from the linguistic nature of the literary text. The second, the ethical criticism advocated by Booth and Martha Nussbaum, conceives of literature as a vehicle for moral understanding and argues that critical approaches that address the ethical issues raised by, and the potential moral effects of, literary works ought to be among the things some (if not all) critics do. More recently, the recognition that reading is an engagement with other subjectivities opens up a third approach, which connects the ethics of reading with the general ethical concern with interpersonal relations. For example, Derek Attridge reads “the text on the assumption that it is ‘authored,’ that it is creative work, however mediated, of at least one mind. . . . A full response to the otherness of a text includes an awareness of, a respect for, and in a certain sense . . . a taking of responsibility for, the creativity of its author” (25). And Newton emphasizes that for him, ethics is “first and foremost . . . an ‘ethics of telling and listening,’ a layered performance model of encounter, and its interrelated binding ties . . . [at] narrational, representational, and hermeneutic levels” (“Humanism” 209). My approach is different from Attridge’s in that I do not take otherness as the opposite of familiarity, and my concern to understand the utterance of another person may include appreciation for, but does not privilege, the qualities of singularity and newness that he prizes. Newton points out that the three writers he invokes have a religious “understanding of communication as presuming untranscendable over and above simply humanist claims and exigencies. . . . Each thinks of language in the sense of liturgy” (“Humanism” 210). For my part, I prefer the mundane, nonliturgical, interpersonal, pragmatic perspective and tone of Habermas’s theory of communicative action.9 The most developed corollary of Habermas’s theory is the moral theory he calls “discourse ethics,” in which valid norms are defined as those that are worthy of the willing agreement of all concerned under the conditions of an ideal domination-free discourse. Habermas suggests we view discourse ethics as a revision of Lawrence Kohlberg’s theory that moral reasoning consists of six stages of development, in which the highest stage corresponds to the ability to reason about moral issues in terms of universal principles. Since for Habermas, all norms (including universal principles) are questionable and there are no uncontroversial criteria for deciding moral questions, Kohlberg’s schema has to be supplemented by a stage where the focus shifts from normguided action to norm-testing discourse. Morally mature adults at this highest stage are willing and able to examine moral problems in free, open, and mutually respectful discussion with others and to forego the use of all force except the unforced force of the better argument. They understand that valid norms are those that stand up under critical examination by all affected by 12

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the norm. Discourse ethics works best negatively. If we want to dispute the validity of a norm, all we need to do is look at the discursive procedure that supports it. All bets are off as to the validity of a norm—for example, of the Catholic rule that forbids women priests—when we see that a sizeable segment of the affected population—women—has been excluded from the deciding body.10 However, as I have argued, communication does not happen when I speak, then you speak, unless, when I speak you listen, and when you speak I listen. Each interval of communication consists of someone speaking and another listening. It follows that the equal distribution of the opportunity to speak one’s mind without fear of retribution is a necessary but not sufficient condition for an ideal discourse. I can say anything I want, but I accomplish nothing if no one gives me a fair hearing. When I speak, I place my communicative project in the custody of the listener. My communicative project can succeed only if an other is disposed to understand what I am saying. Similarly, the fate of a writer’s communicative project is in the hands of the reader. The writer’s project fails unless the reader is willing and able to undertake a careful and just understanding of what the writer has written.11 Habermas’s discourse ethics owes much of its plausibility to the confirmation, within its framework, of the widely held view that the basis of morality is mutual respect, understood as the symmetrical reciprocity of self and other. Unfortunately, this satisfying result stems from the erroneous reduction of communicative action to speaking. The obligation to give others a fair hearing or reading cannot be articulated within Habermas’s discourse ethics. A moral theory elaborated within the framework of communicative reason should show that the symmetrical reciprocity we look for in all moral relationships, like the apparent symmetry of speakers, is actually built on a more basic asymmetrical relationship between two subjects in different roles.

The Caring Relation as a Model for Reading Nel Noddings’s account of the caring relation offers a model of an asymmetrical relationship between two subjects in different roles. According to Noddings, caring is a relationship between a “one-caring” and a “one cared-for.” The one-caring acts to enable the project of the cared-for; the cared-for acknowledges the offered care, accepts it, and uses it to carry out her project. Two people in a caring relationship may alternate in the roles of one-caring and one cared-for. But Noddings insists that caring is essentially asymmetrical; the interval of care is completed when the one cared-for accepts and uses the service offered by the one-caring. People need to know how to be one-caring and how to be one cared-for. Responding to the offer of care by trying immediately to return the favor, like responding to another’s need to be cared-for by demanding care for oneself, will inhibit the completion of an interval of care. Understanding an Other

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The caring relation is usually exemplified by the relationship of a mother to her child, a teacher to a student, or a therapist, nurse, or doctor to a patient. In all of these cases, the one caring is presumed to be in the superior position of being capable and authorized to help the cared-for, who is placed in an inferior position by virtue of her dependency and vulnerability. Critics of Noddings object to her use of these asymmetrical relations as the basis for moral theory. They argue that the roles of parent, teacher, nurse, and patient have moral dimensions worth exploring, but ideally, the goal of good parenting, teaching, or caregiving is to abolish the inequality and restore the one in need to the normative condition of autonomy and self-sufficiency. Of course, it is good to be caring, but caring relations are special cases. Using them as the basis for moral theory suggests that inequality and asymmetry are morally ideal conditions.12 In response, I would point out that asymmetrical relationships even between equally competent adults are ubiquitous in everyday life. One person usually needs something—information, an object, a service—that someone else is in a position to give. If, in addition, we recognize that communication—the form of interaction that generally accompanies and enables human interaction—is an inherently asymmetrical relation, then we see that, far from being a special case, asymmetry is the condition of all human relationships and that comprehending relations like the caring relation ought to be the first task of moral theory. The role of one-caring is of particular interest to me because it is analogous to the role of the reader. According to Noddings, the role of one-caring has three features: engrossment, motivational displacement, and the cultivation of a duality of perspective (30–58). “Engrossment” refers to open, unrestricted receptivity toward the cared-for. Noddings gives the familiar example of the attentive attitude of a mother responding to a crying child, but she insists that this is also part of caring interactions among adult peers. In addition, caring requires motivational displacement. In caring, “I allow my motive energy to be shared; I put it at the service of the other” (33). Finally, caring is inhibited when one-caring is absorbed in the other without reservation. Competent caring requires the duplication of self, so that one part of the one-caring can be devoted to receiving the cared-for and the other part reserved for maintaining her own perspective. The quality of engrossment is evident in the openness that is often associated with good listening (Fiumara; Ratcliffe). It also recalls Keats’s “negative capability” and Coleridge’s “willing suspension of disbelief.” Motivational displacement is a good name for the intellectual, moral, and emotional work undertaken by a reader in the service of the author’s project and for the personal resources she uses to animate the subjectivities she is called to understand. Reading literature is sometimes described as a giving of self or a losing of self in another, often with erotic or religious connotations. Noddings’s model offers a different picture—reading, understanding another, requires work comparable to the mundane, prosaic work care-givers do for those they care-for. 14

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The cultivation of the dual perspective Noddings attributes to competent caring is analogous to the skills Booth associates with critical understanding. If the role of one-caring is analogous to that of the reader, then the role of the one cared-for is analogous to that of the writer. In a face-to-face oral situation, the speaker can receive the benefits of being understood, in all of its senses—cognitive, psychological, moral, emotional, personal.13 But, given that the writer is typically absent, and often deceased, how does she receive any benefit from the service the reader renders? The full answer to this question is beyond the scope of this essay. I will only point out that the reading situation accentuates the asymmetry of the communicative relationship. The interval of communication is completed by the reader reading what the writer wrote. The writer’s presence is not necessary to the work of understanding that the reader undertakes in behalf of the writer’s communicative project. Noddings’s idea of expanding chains of circles of care suggests another applicable analogy. In the reading scenario described earlier, C reads Lawrence’s Women in Love. This completes one circle of care. Subsequently, C writes and publishes an essay offering her reading of Lawrence’s work. D, E, and F read C’s essay, completing additional circles of care that link C’s work to Lawrence’s. Then D, E, and F write essays drawing from their reading of Lawrence and of C, and so on. Each link in the critical chain is an asymmetrical relationship analogous to a circle of care. The writer’s communicative project—the continuing vitality of his work—is fostered by a critical reception consisting of expanding chains of readings. Works that do not survive the so-called test of time are works that have ceased to be cared-for.

Conclusion Habermas’s theory of communicative action is seriously hampered by the reductive account of communication as something that happens between speakers. His model of ideal discourse is built on the intuitions of competent speakers and foregrounds their expectations—first, that they can exercise their right to speak freely without fear of penalty, and second, that their claims will be understood and evaluated on their merits. Whereas the first expectation requires only the mutual forbearance of members of the discourse community, the second expectation can be met only if discourse partners are willing and able to undertake the work of understanding each other’s utterance. Unfortunately, Habermas’s account of communicative action forecloses the elaboration of the receptive competencies that would enable listeners and readers to undertake the work of meeting a speaker’s and writer’s expectation of being understood. The model I have put forth portrays communication as an asymmetrical relationship between two subjects in different roles: the expressive role of the speaker or writer, and the receptive role of the listener or reader. Although Understanding an Other

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I have taken listener and reader to be analogous with regard to their receptive role, it is worthwhile briefly to discuss Krista Ratcliffe’s idea of “rhetorical listening.” According to Ratcliffe, “when listening, we do not read simply for what we can agree with or challenge as is the habit of academic reading (in its multiple guises).” Instead, we choose to listen also for the exiled excess and contemplate its relation to our culture and ourselves. Such listening does not presume a naive, relativistic empathy, such as “I’m OK, you’re OK” but rather to argue for what we deem fair and just while questioning that which we deem fair and just. Such listening, I argue, may help people invent, interpret, and ultimately judge differently in that perhaps we can hear things we cannot see. (25) Emphasizing listening rather than reading as the model for the receptive mode of communicative action has the advantage of foregrounding the intersubjectivity that is obscured by the model of a reader reading a text: One hears the voice of another person, while one might only see black marks on paper or ideas and positions one might agree or disagree with. In addition, the trope of listening facilitates Ratcliffe’s conception of understanding, as “standing under . . . discourses that surround us and others while consciously acknowledging all particular—and very fluid—standpoints. Standing under discourses means letting discourse wash over, through, and around us and then letting them lie there to inform our politics and ethics” (28). I want to point out that the quality Ratcliffe specifically values—“fluidity”—is conditioned on the suspension of writing and speaking. Through the trope of listening, Ratcliffe tries to counter the habit, perhaps engendered by our system of education (and reproduced in Habermas’s model), of regarding reading primarily as a way of gathering material for speaking and writing. In literary criticism, a similar tendency is evident in the practice of conflating the activity of reading with the various “readings” on offer, and the process of interpreting with the process of composing defensible interpretations. One might also recall Roland Barthes’s famous elevation of active, creative “writerly” reading over passive “readerly” consumption. Obviously, the process of reading can be apprehended only to the extent that one talks or writes about it. Nonetheless, it matters to keep in mind that the experience of reading is more fluid and heterogeneous than anything and everything one might be able to say or write, that the reader’s communicative agency is exercised not in the composition of an interpretation or a response, but in the readerly (nonspeakerly and nonwriterly) work of understanding the utterance of an other. Much of the model of reading I am proposing resonates with Ratcliffe’s “rhetorical listening.” Nevertheless, there is a tendency in accounts of listening to overvalue the intimacy, immediacy, and identification associated with the process Noddings calls “engrossement.” My choice to explore the receptive function primarily in terms of reading counters this tendency by emphasizing 16

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the necessity of motivational displacement, the cognitive, moral, and emotional labor the reader must undertake in the service of the communicative project of another. Ratcliffe offers “rhetorical listening” as a “code of cross-cultural conduct” (34–40). In a similar vein, I offer my model of communication as an asymmetrical relationship, analogous to the caring relation, between two subjects in different roles as a framework for figuring out how people can understand each other across race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, and other categories of social difference. Let me return briefly to the question of the validity of interpretation. Habermas wants to protect the communicative, claim-making, claim-testing, problem-solving function of language from the encroachments of the worldcreating function privileged in literature. A key element in this argument is the distinction between the world of objective states of affairs, which is the referent of truth claims, and the fictional worlds created by literature, which is the referent of interpretive claims. Habermas’s fallibilistic stance about all claims implies that the real world, no less than literature, calls for interpretation. All claims, until they are vindicated, are interpretations. However, although he concedes that it is not necessary to come to agreement about fictional worlds, he thinks that it is both possible and desirable to agree about the real world. One might question the presupposition that there is something about the real world that allows for the resolution of interpretive disputes, but Habermas insists on the possibility of agreement only because he thinks that “ideas like truth and the unconditional with their transcending power are a necessary condition of humane forms of collective life” (“Philosopher as Stand-In” 3). We need to agree on some basic cognitive and moral level, in Habermas’s view, to coordinate our action plans. Rational agreement—on the basis only of what is true and what is right apart from all contingent interests—is the ideal goal of democratic decision making. Rorty argues that Habermas’s notion of “truth” overestimates the necessity of agreement to “democratic politics.” On my view, truth . . . is too sublime, so to speak, to be either recognized or aimed at. Justification is merely beautiful, but it is recognizable, and therefore capable of being systematically worked for. Sometimes, with luck, justification is even achieved. But that achievement is usually temporary, since sooner or later, some new objections to the temporarily justified belief will be developed. As I see it, the yearning for unconditionality—the yearning which leads philosophers to insist that we need to avoid “contextualism” and “relativism” . . . is unhealthy, because the price of unconditionality is irrelevance in practice. So I think the topic of truth cannot be made relevant to democratic politics, and that philosophers devoted to that politics should stick to that of justification. (2) I think that the emphasis on agreement has two additional undesirable consequences. First, it obscures what actually happens when, in negotiations Understanding an Other

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with others about various courses of action, a person decides reasonably to go along with what others want even if she is not convinced by their arguments: because she is moved by their plea, she wants to accommodate their needs, what they want is reasonably priced, she already has more than she needs and can afford to be generous, she is returning the favor for times when the others gave in to her, she wants to cultivate relationships, the damage that would be caused by continuing opposition is more than what could be gained by going along, she is laying the groundwork for future occasions when she would need to ask others to accommodate her, and/or because the terms of the agreement can be phrased in vague general principles that allow her to stand her ground while moving the group project forward. Second, in Habermas’s model, discourse communities achieve something only when they come to agreement; failing this, nothing is accomplished. Aside from the fact that instances of agreement are few and far between, the experience of literary criticism (and of work in academic or political organizations) indicates that we can work together productively in spite of disagreements, and that often, by restraining the argumentative drive to compel agreement, we achieve something more valuable—the mutual understanding that is the key to collegiality and to getting things done. The understanding that allows us to appreciate the merits of positions other than our own is actually the achievement that promotes solidarity and humane forms of collective life. Habermas’s theory has the advantage of moving the discussion from the question of the validity of a specific claim to the condition—domination-free discourse—for a valid knowledge project. My account of communication as an intersubjective relationship involving expressive and receptive modes of communicative action revises the conditions for the validity of a knowledge project. We need to be able to speak our minds freely and openly, but we also need to be willing and able to undertake the work of a careful and just understanding of each other’s oral and written utterances. All ethical theories put forth some idea for restraining the unwholesome human impulses and for cultivating the good ones. Instead of rules, Noddings identifies the desire to nurture the “ideal of oneself as one caring” as the motivating principle of an ethic of care. Something similar, I think, is at work, if largely taken for granted, in literary criticism. Our sense of literary criticism as a worthy knowledge project, our confidence that we are doing meaningful work, depends to a large degree on whether we can relate what we do to the cultivation of the ideal of oneself as an intelligent, careful, fair, responsible reader of the works of others.

Acknowledgment Work on this essay was supported by a fellowship at the Purdue College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for Humanistic Studies.

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Notes 1. Habermas contrasts communicative action to “strategic action,” which is oriented toward the successful achievement of a specific goal. Strategic use of language may include lying and various degrees of manipulation, and they are organized according to the principle of efficacy rather than validity (“Moral Consciousness” 133–34). Habermas says little about the sincerity claim and practically nothing about the intelligibility claim. In his most recent works, the intelligibility claim is not included in the list of validity claims. 2. The word “ideal” in Habermas’s early term “ideal speech situation” has been the target of critical attention. Habermas acknowledges that his earlier use of “ideal” may be somewhat unfortunate—but he maintains that the conception of validity as the product of domination-free discourse is substantially correct (“Discourse Ethics” 88). 3. E. D. Hirsch argued that there is a verbal meaning in the text against which all interpretations can be measured. This claim was problematical when it was advanced in 1969 because it ran counter to the practical experience of enduring interpretive disputes among expert readers. The metaphysical premise of an objective verbal meaning has been rendered untenable by deconstruction. 4. It is interesting that Habermas pursues his argument not by addressing Derrida, “who does not belong to those philosophers who like to argue,” but by examining the account of Derrida’s position given by Jonathan Culler, a “disciple of Derrida who works within the Anglo-Saxon climate of argument” (“Excursus on Leveling” 193). 5. This assumption is evident in the fact that charges of sexism and racism have been met either with vigorous denials that these have had a significant effect in shaping the critical tradition, or with efforts to disclose and correct the conditions that support such attitudes. One might also point out the discussion of the connection between “power” and “knowledge”—all of which indicate the suspicion that “power” somehow undermines the claim to “knowledge.” 6. Gemma Corradi Fiumara explores how the overestimation of the expressive function of language has caused “the capacity for attentive listening” to drop out of the purview of Western philosophy. She attempts to recover a philosophy of listening from the interstices of the philosophical tradition. Krista Ratcliffe undertakes a similar project in the discipline of rhetoric and composition. 7. For recent accounts of “reading like a woman,” see Berggren; Berg. 8. See Schweickart and Flynn 11–18. For other accounts that make finer distinctions, see Buell; Schwarz. 9. I agree with Levinas’s argument for the philosophical priority of ethics over ontology, and I appreciate his insight regarding the asymmetrical relationship with the other as interlocutor. However, I disagree that “understanding carries out an act of violence and of negation” (9). Perhaps the potential for violence in relations with others should always be considered by ethical theory. But I think it is misleading to characterize any reduction of independence or singularity that might come from “understanding” as violence. Levinas’s concern with issues of singularity, totality, and infinity pulls the center of gravity of his thought away from my more pragmatic interests.

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10. My thanks to James Machor for citing rules regulating the behavior of children— for example, those that prescribe a minimum age for drinking, driving, and voting—as counterexamples to the view that norms are necessarily invalidated by the exclusion of people affected by the norm from the deciding body. From Habermas’s point of view, pointing out such exclusions does not necessarily invalidate a norm, but it makes the claim to validity questionable. To vindicate the norm, proponents have to give good reasons for the exclusions (e.g., children are dependent and lacking in the relevant competencies) and explain how the interests of the excluded people are accounted for by the presence of parents and other legitimate representatives. The asymmetrical relationship of children and parents is a special case that can be addressed, with proper adjustments, within the framework of a moral theory based on the symmetrical reciprocity of mature, competent adults (see Habermas’s response to Carol Gilligan, “Moral Consciousness” 175–80). I argue, to the contrary, that asymmetry is the basic condition of all human interactions. 11. Concretely, a writer’s project is in the hands of readers who decide whether or not it is worthy of publication, reviewers who evaluate the book, readers who buy it, teachers who teach it, scholars and critics who write about it, students who read it in class, and so on. The “test of time” that great works have supposedly passed convincingly is really an abstraction for the energy and time generations of readers have devoted to the careful understanding of such works. 12. Of course, caring is problematical. Caring can be vicious as well as virtuous; power imbalances can interact badly with caring relations. Although it is a virtue to be “caring,” one should probably be judicious about who and what to care for. And under certain circumstances, one probably should refuse to be cared-for. The ethic of care is the framework for the elaboration of the problematic of caring. The strongest objections to the ethics of care have come from feminist critics. Claudia Card rejects the ethic of care for its “conservative gynocentricism” and for not being “feisty” enough (Feminist Ethics, introduction). Sara Hoagland criticizes the use of an “unequal relationship” as the basis for moral theory. She objects, particularly, to the service component of caring, associating “motivational displacement” with enslavement. On the other side of the debate are Annette Baier, Eva Feder Kittay, and Alasdair McIntyre. For a fuller account, see Held; Koehn. 13. Literature on caregiving draws a crucial connection between listening and caring and describes the benefits the cared-for—child, patient, partner, friend—derives from being carefully listened to. See also Ratcliffe’s account of pedagogical listening.

References Attridge, Derek. “Innovation, Literature, Ethics: Relating to the Other.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 144 (1999): 20–31. Baier, Annette. Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morality. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Berg, Temma. “Eighteenth-Century Reading Sites.” Reader 55 (2006): 15–35.

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Berggren, Anne G. “Reading Like a Woman.” Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response. Ed. Patrocinio P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn. New York: Modern Language Association, 2004. 166–88. Booth, Wayne. The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. ———. Critical Understanding: The Powers and Limits of Pluralism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. ———. “Why Ethical Criticism Can Never Be Simple.” Mapping the Ethical Domain: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Ed. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. Buell, Lawrence. “In Pursuit of Ethics.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 144 (1999): 7–19. Card, Claudia, ed. Feminist Ethics. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991. Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. Fiumara, Gemma Corradi. The Other Side of Language: A Philosophy of Listening. Trans. Charles Lambert. New York: Routledge, 1990. Flynn, Elizabeth A., and Patrocinio P. Schweickart, eds. Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986. Habermas, Jürgen. “An Alternative Way out of the Philosophy of the Subject: Communicative versus Subject-Centered Reason.” The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Fredrick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. 294–96. ———. “Discourse Ethics: Notes on a Program of Philosophical Justification.” Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christina Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. 43–115. ———. “Excursus on Leveling the Genre Distinction between Philosophy and Literature.” The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Trans. Fredrick G. Lawrence. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1991. 185–210. ———. “Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action.” Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christina Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. 116–94. ———. “Philosophy as Stand-in Interpreter.” Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christina Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1990. 1–20. Held, Virginia. The Ethics of Care: Personal, Political, and Global. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hirsch, E. D. The Validity of Interpretation. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967. Hoagland, Sara. “Some Thoughts about Caring.” Feminist Ethics. Ed. Claudia Card. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991. 246–63. Holland, Norman N. The Dynamics of Literary Response. New York: Oxford University Press, 1968.

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Kittay, Eva Feder. Love’s Labor: Essays on Women, Equality, and Dependency. New York: Routledge, 1999. Koehn, Daryl. Rethinking Feminist Ethics: Care, Trust and Empathy. New York: Routledge, 1998. Levinas, Emmanuel. Entre-Nous: Thinking of the Other. Trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. MacIntyre, Alasdair. Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need Virtues. Chicago: Open Court, 1999. Newton, Adam Zachary. “Humanism with a (Post) Social Face: A Reply to Daniel R. Schwarz.” Narrative 5 (1997): 207–21. ———. Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995. Noddings, Nel. Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Nussbaum, Martha. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Phelan, James. Narrative as Rhetoric: Technique, Audiences, Ethics, Ideology. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1996. Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998. Ratcliffe, Krista. Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005. Rayner, Alice. “The Audience: Subjectivity, Community, and the Ethics of Listening.” Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism 7.2 (1993): 3–14. Rorty, Richard. “Universality and Truth.” Rorty and His Critics. Ed. Robert B. Brandon. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000. 1–30. Schwarz, Daniel R. “A Humanistic Ethics of Reading.” Mapping the Ethical Domain: A Reader in Ethics, Culture, and Literary Theory. Ed. Todd F. Davis and Kenneth Womack. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001. 3–15. ———. “The Hum and Buzz of Implication: Or, You Can’t Always Get What You Want, But If You Try Sometimes, You Just Might Find You Get What You Need.” Narrative 5 (1997): 223–25. Schweickart, Patrocinio P., and Elizabeth A. Flynn, eds. Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response. New York: Modern Language Association, 2004.

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Judging and Hoping Rhetorical Effects of Reading about Reading STEVEN MAILLOUX

Reserving judgments is a matter of infinite hope. . . . And, after boasting this way of my tolerance, I come to the admission that it has a limit. —Nick Carraway, in F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran vividly stages Iranian receptions of novels by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James, and Austen. This “memoir in books” itself became a popular object of reception as a 2003 best-seller in the United States, a reception demonstrating the rhetorical effects of reading about reading in a globalized culture that is always local. American reviewers and academic critics of Reading Lolita not only testify to the power of these effects but also interpret and evaluate the acts of reading represented in the book they are reviewing. Specifically, they judge the hope offered by a book about college students reading and judging classic novels of “Western secular values” within a political context dominated by a theological autocracy—the Islamic Republic of Iran.

In what follows, I focus especially on the section of Reading Lolita that most dramatically represents judging and hoping: the scene in which the author’s Iranian students put The Great Gatsby and “the American Dream” on trial in their classroom at the University of Tehran. I am guided in this reception study by three interrelated questions: What kinds of thinking take place through reading? How does thinking develop rhetorically in reading novels? What rhetorical paths of thought can be traced through the reading of a text and its reception? In the receptions it represents and in its own reception, Reading Lolita in Tehran illustrates the effects of getting people to think about thinking through or because of reading. One of the first academic treatments of the book underlines this aspect of the reception. In “Women and Reading,” Kate Flint writes, “From the start Nafisi felt passionately about the importance of getting her students to think about the value of reading fiction” (511). Flint then quotes a passage from the book in which Nafisi says, I wrote on the board one of my favorite lines from the German thinker Theodor Adorno: “The highest form of morality is not to feel at home in one’s own home.” I explained that most great works of the imagination were meant to make you feel like a stranger in your own home. The best fiction always forced us to question what we took for granted. It questioned traditions and expectations when they seemed too immutable. I told my students I wanted them in their readings to consider in what ways these works unsettled them, made them a little uneasy, made them look around and consider the world, like Alice in Wonderland, through different eyes. (Nafisi, Reading 94, qtd. in Flint 511–12) That is, Nafisi wished her students to think in the sense elaborated by Hannah Arendt, another writer about totalitarian regimes. In “Thinking and Moral Considerations,” Arendt ponders the question “Is our ability to judge, to tell right from wrong, beautiful from ugly, dependent upon our faculty of thought?” She defines thinking as “the habit of examining and reflecting upon whatever happens to come to pass,” and she ends up claiming that thinking does condition people against evildoing (160). This effect of thinking occurs primarily because it is the nature of thought to undo, unfreeze as it were, what language, the medium of thinking, has frozen into thought—words (concepts, sentences, definitions, doctrines). . . . The consequence of this peculiarity is that thinking 24

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inevitably has a destructive, undermining effect on all established criteria, values, measurements for good and evil, in short on those customs and rules of conduct we treat of in morals and ethics. (175–76) We might add that thinking precedes but also follows from judging, which works through rhetorical phronesis (practical wisdom) in specific times and places.1 Flint underlines the importance of these geopolitical conditions of phronetic judgment in another of her own judgments about Reading Lolita. After quoting Nafisi quoting Adorno, Flint comments that Reading Lolita in Tehran is remarkable for the ways it lends new eyes to those of us who take the reading privileges of a Western democracy more or less for granted. Reading—presented, to be sure, by someone whose experience has made her a fervent advocate of Western liberalism—becomes simultaneously an escape from oppression, especially gender oppression; an intellectual transgression; and a promise that life might and can be otherwise. Reading provides liberation through the imagination. (512) As we will see, Flint appears to be an example of Nafisi’s ideal reader, though it is important for my argument that she parenthetically notes Nafisi’s ideological position as a “fervent advocate of Western liberalism.” In late 2003 to early 2004, the reviews of Reading Lolita in Tehran in United States newspapers and magazines were overwhelmingly positive in their evaluations of the book’s form and content. Sonja Ostrow, a college junior, wrote the following in the Yale Review of Books, an undergraduate publication: “Chilling, exciting, stimulating: Reading Lolita in Tehran is all of these, and thus has the power to enlighten and inspire readers on a political, historical, literary, and even personal level.” Ostrow picks out the memoir’s representation of reading The Great Gatsby for special attention: In one particularly telling passage, Nafisi observes, “My students were slightly baffled by Gatsby. The story of an idealistic guy, so much in love with this beautiful rich girl who betrays him, could not be satisfying to those for whom sacrifice was defined by words such as masses, revolution and Islam. Passion and betrayal were for them political emotions, and love far removed from the stirrings of Jay Gatsby for Mrs. Tom Buchanan.” Ostrow then suggests how alien she found the Iranian students’ responses: “To a reader who takes the idea of romantic love for granted, who accepted Gatsby’s unrequited love without question, such a response is chilling, intellectually exciting, and stimulating in its strangeness.” Here Ostrow registers a Judging and Hoping

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troubling of her own assumptions, and thus we can say that this undergraduate found Nafisi’s book a spur to thinking. But there were other receptions by (I presume) older readers that seem harder to judge. Writing in the Christian Science Monitor, Heather Hewett praises Reading Lolita as a “stirring testament to the power of Western literature to cultivate democratic change and open-mindness.” Hewett goes on to say, “Drawing from vivid anecdotes (including an unforgettable scene when her university students put The Great Gatsby on trial), [Nafisi] reveals how literature can offer readers a valuable way of understanding the world.” But Hewett introduces her evaluation of the book with the following statement: “Azar Nafisi’s memoir makes a good case for reading the classics of Western literature no matter where you are” (my emphasis). Hewett is right that this is probably Nafisi’s intended argument, but such a statement of the case foregrounds that argument’s problems. A very different lesson might in fact be taken from Fitzgerald’s novel, its reception in Nafisi’s memoir, and the reception of that memoir: Where you are does matter in reading Western classics, indeed, in reading anything. And so, too, in thinking about judging and hoping: It is all about where (and how) you are.2 In the Middle East Journal, Cameron Kamran, an Iranian American, wrote admiringly about the way Nafisi relates great Western classics and their themes to life in the Islamic Republic. . . . Literature for Nafisi is a universal language that bridges cultures and instills a form of democracy by teaching us empathy for the complexities of the human condition. According to Nafisi, the principal sin of the Islamic regime is its unyielding judgment, its inability to feel compassion. (505) It is this dogmatic, absolutist, ideological form of judgment that is judged wanting in the Gatsby trial scene. Kamran takes the trial somewhat allegorically: “Gatsby, a character who ends up destroying himself by trying to re-imagine his past, is an apt metaphor for the Islamic Regime—a cabal of Ayatollahs that sacrificed the present by enforcing their own dream of a collective past on Iran” (505). While this figurative meaning is certainly part of the book’s staging of Gatsby’s reception, it is in no way all or perhaps even the most important aspect of that staging. Rather, as Kamran himself notes at the end of his review, the main question is how universal are the Western values of universality, rationality, and humanism. “Nafisi, through her love of Western literature and the values of empathy and choice that it holds universal and sacred, wages a . . . crusade in modern Iran, and one that is critical to its prosperity and indeed the future of greater Muslim society” (506). Nafisi’s teaching and writing are based on the hope that her judgment of value in Western literature can prevail in her native land. How she judges these values determines, in turn, what will count as hope.

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It is the judgment of both hope and judgment itself that is put on trial in the Gatsby section of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Nafisi arms her readers with something like a rhetorical hermeneutics to view thinking, judging, and hoping in the scene.3 “All through the week before the trial, [in] whatever I did . . . part of my mind was constantly occupied on shaping my arguments for the trial. This after all was not merely a defense of Gatsby but of a whole way of looking at and appraising literature—and reality, for that matter” (122). That is, interpreting and arguing, hermeneutics and rhetoric, are inseparable in Nafisi’s run-up to the trial of Gatsby: In planning her case for making a certain sense of and positing a particular value for the novel, Nafisi shapes an argument that would simultaneously defend the novel and advocate a way of interpreting and evaluating not only literature but sociopolitical reality more generally. As the trial unfolds, the reader hears various interpretive arguments mounted by both sides in the case. First there is the prosecution’s simplistic ideological reading of literature: Gatsby is immoral because its hero is an adulterer and a criminal and the novel values an American crass materialism that Islam rejects. The Islamist judgment that the book should be censored is ironically mirrored by a leftist reading that defends the book because at least it represents the failures of the capitalist American Dream. Both ideological judgments evaluate the book on the basis of its perceived political views. In contrast, the designated student defense attorney (and Nafisi, who plays the role of the defendant) judges the book according to what is presented as a nonideological view of literature: The defense argues that the prosecutor is unable to “read a novel on its own terms. All he knows is judgment, crude and simplistic exaltation of right and wrong.” A novel, she continues, “is not moral in the usual sense of the word. It can be called moral when it shakes us out of our stupor and makes us confront the absolutes we believe in. If that is true, then Gatsby has succeeded brilliantly. This is the first time in class that a book has created such controversy” (128–29). The lesson the defense attorney takes from the novel is that “it teaches you to value your dreams but to be wary of them also” (135). This is a judgment about judgment that leads to thinking. But the same thinking turns back on the supposed nonideologues even as it applies to their opponents. In fact, we might ask, are the defenders of The Great Gatsby just as dogmatic, absolutist, and ideological about reading and Western values as the Islamists and leftists are about their religious and political views? To answer this question, we need to distinguish among dogmatic attitude, absolutist belief, and ideological thinking.4 You can, for example, be dogmatic or flexible in your absolutism, as my final example will show. But we can ask further questions: In seeing the American ideology of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” (341) as the hope for Iran, has Nafisi failed to see the United States as unthinking in its hope, as acting in another ideology with its own blindnesses when performed in another time

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and place? Is the rhetorical effect of Nafisi’s teaching Gatsby in Iran different from that of her teaching it in the United States, say, at the Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies, where she was hired while neoconservative Paul Wolfowitz was dean, before he became deputy secretary of defense under President George W. Bush? Has Reading Lolita been used by neoconservatives to make sense of Iran as a tyrannical oppressor of women, “while the United States is at the height of its war on terror and Iran has been [singled] out by the US president as a member of an ‘axis of evil’ ”? (Bahramitash 230).5 These rhetorical and interpretive questions emerge from thinking geopolitically about the judgments and hopes represented in the trial of The Great Gatsby and throughout Reading Lolita in Tehran and its reception. Such questions become all the more pressing as Nafisi positions herself within current U.S. debates over nuclear proliferation and terrorism: “While Western governments are confused and obsessed with the threat of Iran’s potential weapons of mass destruction, the Islamic regime is dealing with threats of its own and increasing its repressive measures against workers, women, students, gays, minorities and, now, publishers and writers.” In defending publishers and writers, Nafisi condemns literary censorship, arguing for “the importance of books as channels for communication and creation of open spaces and genuine exchanges.” Consistent with her earlier rhetorical stance, Nafisi still sees these books as “transcending the limitations of politics, nationality, race, gender, religion or geography” (“It’s Literature”). In July 2005, Nafisi contributed to the National Public Radio series This I Believe by reading her essay “Mysterious Connections That Link Us Together.”6 She again takes up the topic of reading literature, citing the reception of still another book about judgment and hope, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to make her points. “I believe in empathy,” she begins. “It is the urge to know more about ourselves and others that creates empathy. Through imagination and our desire for rapport, we transcend our limitations, freshen our eyes, and are able to look at ourselves and the world through a new and alternative lens.” She continues with a favorite literary example: “Whenever I think of the word empathy, I think of a small boy named Huckleberry Finn contemplating his friend and runaway slave, Jim.” Nafisi refers to the famous scene in which Huck struggles to decide whether to give Jim up and return him to slavery. His religious training says stealing a slave, someone else’s private property, is a grievous sin deserving of “everlasting fire.” But, in Nafisi’s words, Huck “imagines Jim not as a slave but as a human being and he decides that, ‘alright, then, I’ll go to hell.’ ” She comments that “what Huck rejects is not religion but an attitude of self-righteousness and inflexibility.” Nafisi goes on to relate an example of reception that she sees as confirming her argument: In the early 1980s when I taught at the University of Tehran, I, like many others, was expelled. I was very surprised to discover that my staunchest allies were two students who were very active at the Univer28

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sity’s powerful Muslim Students’ Association. These young men and I had engaged in very passionate and heated arguments [described in Reading Lolita]. I had fiercely opposed their ideological stances. But that didn’t stop them from defending me. When I ran into one of them after my expulsion, I thanked him for his support. “We are not as rigid as you imagine us to be, Professor Nafisi,” he responded. “Remember your own lectures on Huck Finn? Let’s just say, he is not the only one who can risk going to hell!” What lesson might we take from this reception anecdote, especially the final sentence, “Let’s just say, he is not the only one who can risk going to hell”? Nafisi most likely sees the student’s statement as an ironic confirmation of the universality of the values she taught, and she is probably right that, at the very least, her teaching a particular reading of Twain’s novel has encouraged this student to think about his religious beliefs. But what else might we say about religious belief (or any belief for that matter) in relation to this famous episode of Huck Finn’s decision to go to hell rather than betray his friend? The lesson certainly is not that Huck has given up his racist beliefs; their lingering presence is evident in his words and actions later in the novel. Rather, he has at one particular moment allowed one set of feelings and beliefs, his friendship with Jim, to trump another set, those of a slave society’s political theology. He has phronetically—from Twain’s and our perspectives—judged the situation, rhetorically deliberated his options, and chosen to act in favor of his friend and at a certain cost to himself. Some of us might claim that the author has simply represented Huck as beginning to trade one ideology— call it proslavery or religious racism—for another—call it abolition or liberal humanism. Still, there is no doubt that we—in our time and place—prefer the latter to the former. Similar to Huck, the Muslim students who defended Nafisi were willing to take a risk in opposing—at least temporarily and in this specific instance—a certain ideological belief or perhaps simply the dogmatic application of that belief. To point out the rhetorical specificity of their phronetic decision is to take nothing away from our admiration for it. But such thinking about their judgment does qualify a bit the hope Nafisi offers by citing it. That is, we have not moved from an “ideological stance” to a “nonideological stance” in judging literature or anything else but from one ideology (or attitude toward it) to another, one Nafisi and most of us today admire. Judgment cannot be depoliticized in the way Nafisi assumes. Rather, our hope depends very much on understanding the political nature of our judgment and the rhetorical process through which our thinking can change.

Acknowledgment I would like to thank Phil Goldstein and Jim Machor for all their suggestions, questions, and editorial help. Judging and Hoping

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Notes 1. See Hariman; Mailloux, Disciplinary Identities 43–66. 2. Some reviewers of Reading Lolita point toward this lesson. For example, Darlene Erickson claims that the book represents “an unusual environment” where “the cultural context within which one reads the novel becomes an integral part of the reading experience itself ” (144). 3. On rhetorical hermeneutics, see Mailloux, Reception Histories and Disciplinary Identities. 4. We can begin to make these distinctions by viewing attitude as a “stance toward something” and suggesting that one can have various stances toward a certain belief. Ideologies are particular kinds of beliefs (and practices) that serve specific sociopolitical interests at specific times and places (Mailloux, Reception Histories 100). 5. See also Dabashi; Byrne. I am grateful to John Carlos Rowe for bringing these two references to my attention; see his provocative “Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran in Idaho.” 6. I thank Vivian Folkenflik for bringing Nafisi’s essay to my attention.

References Arendt, Hannah. “Thinking and Moral Considerations.” Responsibility and Judgment. Ed. Jerome Kohn. New York: Schocken, 2003. 159–89. Bahramitash, Roksana. “The War on Terror, Feminist Orientalism and Orientalist Feminism: Case Studies of Two North American Bestsellers.” Critique: Critical Middle Eastern Studies 14 (2005): 221–35. Byrne, Richard. “A Collision of Prose and Politics.” Chronicle of Higher Education, 13 Oct. 2006, A12. Dabashi, Hamid. “Native Informers and the Making of the American Empire.” Al-Ahram, 1–7 June 2006, http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/797/special.htm. Erickson, Darlene E. Review of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi. Christianity and Literature 55 (2005): 144–48. Flint, Kate. “Women and Reading.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 31 (2006): 511–36. Hariman, Robert, ed. Prudence: Classical Virtue, Postmodern Practice. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2003. Hewett, Heather. “ ‘Bad’ Books Hidden under the Veil of Revolution: Iranian Women Resist Oppression by Reading Forbidden Novels.” Christian Science Monitor, 27 Mar. 2003, 21. Kamran, Cameron. Review of Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, by Azar Nafisi. Middle East Journal 57 (2003): 505–6. Mailloux, Steven. Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition. New York: Modern Language Association, 2006. ———. Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998.

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Nafisi, Azar. “It’s Literature That Tehran Really Fears.” Los Angeles Times, 4 Dec. 2006, A21. ———. “Mysterious Connections That Link Us Together.” This I Believe, National Public Radio, 18 July 2005. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story .php?storyId=4753976. ———. Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. New York: Random House, 2003. Ostrow, Sonja. “Literature as Freedom: Seven Women Read through a Revolution.” Yale Review of Books 6.3 (Summer 2003) http://yalereviewofbooks.com/archive/ summer03/Review02.shtml.htm. Rowe, John Carlos. “Reading Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books in Idaho.” American Quarterly 59 (2007): 253–75.

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Activating the Multitude Audience Powers and Cultural Studies JACK BRATICH

To speak of active audiences today is an act that runs the risk of selfde-activation. What branch of media cultural studies has been so thoroughly pilloried as active audience studies? With the pendulum swing toward economic analyses over the last ten years, what does it mean to revisit reception, especially one as “excessive” as active audience studies? I turn to the “active audience” moment in reception and cultural studies (exemplified by Stuart Hall’s encoding/decoding model and the Gramscian culmination in John Fiske’s work) as a way of rethinking audience powers and of inquiring into an ontology of media subjects.1 I will argue that, while the active audience moment recognized the ontological level of audience powers, it took on a number of theoretical and political burdens that stopped it short of developing its own radical findings. These discursive and conjunctural limits included overemphasizing decoding (language, reading), inheriting the equation audience = consumer, and working within a constraining hegemonic politics of Gramscian power/resistance. Finally, I evaluate the backlash against active audiences, or the de-activation moment. Via this autonomist reading of active

audience studies, I point to a perspective that is neither a proponent of consumer freedom nor a critical return to “active industry studies.”

Audience Studies as a Matter of Ontology and Constituent Powers Elsewhere, I have examined early problematizations of the audience in communication studies (Bratich). Using an autonomist concept of the “multitude,” I have argued that the audience is a product of discursive constructions but that these constructions themselves draw on the ontological domain of what may be called “audience powers” or “mediated multitudes.”2 I have examined three major discourses (propaganda, marketing, and moral panics) as they problematized the mediated multitude as a “mass.” Early audience research was forced to come to terms with audience powers, seeking either to pacify them or to activate them for particular ends. The major binary involved was not active/passive, but active/reactive. Ultimately, these early discourses sought to contain active audience powers in a reactive power. These discourses sought to split audience power from itself, dividing constituent power into two constituted powers (“media” and “audience”).3 The intersection of audience and reception studies could benefit from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s call for a shift in perspective. This shift could be characterized as one from epistemology to ontology. As I use it here, the autonomist “ontological turn” primarily refers to Negri’s writings (with and without Hardt). Negri looks primarily to the work of Spinoza to develop his notion of being as a political metaphysics. Ontology refers to the way being is constituted by subjects-in-action; it is “a theory about our immersion in being and about being’s continual construction” (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus 287; for more on their reasons for a revival of ontology see 286–90). As Jason Read notes, ontology does not mean seeking first principles or a foundation of the nature of being. Ontology is immanent, recognizing “the manner in which being is constituted through desires, affects, and relations. . . . Ontology does not refer to any fixed essence of the world or of being, but to the process by which the world and being are continually produced by activities and practices” (28). Negri calls it “the ontological terrain”: “that experience of the common (that requires neither command nor exploitation), which is posited as ground and presupposition of any human productive and/or reproductive expression” (“Approximations”). Negri traces this terrain (as does Paolo Virno) to language and its creative capacity: to the moment of ontological community—or the ontological “common” that is revealed by language (Negri on Negri 104). Along with language, the autonomists turn to Marx’s notion of “living labor” to characterize the constitution of being.4 In this way we can call it a materialist ontology (Murphy; Negri, Subversive Spinoza). One effect of this turn is to 34

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displace a Hegelian ontology based on the dialectic and its deadening effects (see Hardt, “Anatomy of Power” 114). More important, for Negri, Spinoza’s “claim that being is material, revolutionary, ethically constructed being” is a necessary corrective to the crisis of Marxism, allowing for a renewal of revolutionary praxis (Subversive Spinoza 95). What would an ontological turn do for audience studies? As a first step, it would mean studying audiences, even studying audience studies, from the perspective of what Negri calls “constituent power” (Insurgencies). Constituent power is the immense pool of desire and action, the res gestae of subjective forces, that is the motor of history. Constituent power is an absolute process, unfinalized and unlimited, which, on the one hand, “bursts apart, breaks, interrupts, unhinges any preexisting equilibrium and possible continuity” (11). At the same time, it establishes or constitutes events: It is originary, commissionary, foundational, and generative. This milieu of subjectivity spurs dominant codes to create their problematizations in the first place. Rather than give priority to the series of problematizations, the ontological-constructive perspective begins with the notion that any hegemonic discourse “selects, limits, and constricts the possibilities of a more expansive field of social practices” (Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx 176). This expansive field of potentialities produces meaning and is only partially captured in representation, or what Negri calls “constituted power” (“Insurgencies”). Constituted power is the name given to the forms and arrangements that constituent forces take, which make them sensible and manageable. The processes become absorbed in political representation, in categories and administrative routines (3). But this absorption does not completely negate constituent power, which as absolute capacity and process is irreducible to the forms and procedures. Constituted power in this way is reactive. There is thus a lack of synthesis between the two types of power, producing a constant crisis.5 The important things to remember here are that (1) constituted power comes after constituent power, and (2) constituted power often gets conflated with constituent power, or the relationship is inverted, as if somehow constituent power is the result rather than the cause of constituted power. Within this perspectival shift, the audience is no longer tied to its problematized representation, as in early twentieth-century conceptions of the audience as “mass” (the desiring audience in marketing research, the vulnerable yet dangerous audience within moral panics, and the reactive audience of propaganda research). Rather than focus on these problematizations, an analysis working with constituent power turns to the milieu of immanent creative forces. This sphere of audience powers motors those problematizations in the first place, as well as offers the site and resource for new potentials of collectivity. The representations in these reactive discourses are responses to the immanence of creative powers. While early audience research could only acknowledge this milieu as threat and seek to defuse or harness it, in the following pages I will argue Activating the Multitude

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that the active audience moment directly recognized this milieu. Returning to active audience studies is designed not to rehabilitate a previous moment in cultural studies/audience studies, but to genealogically evoke the crisis it names. What can still be revived from that crisis? My argument is thus not about what audiences do but about the range of discourses that attempt to know and mobilize them. In this way it is an update in the spirit of John Hartley’s claim that the audience itself is a fiction, produced by discourses (industry, critics, regulatory bodies, researchers). Yet there is more to this than an assertion of social constructionism. Yes, there is no empirical audience, only techniques of audiencing, but the capacity to act (even as audience) does not belong to those techniques. Techne itself is a procedure, an arrangement of powers, a constituted power. It cannot account for the processes of subjectivation. I depart from Hartley on what we are left with when we move back to the discourses that call audiences into being. I do not think we simply end up with a series of discourses, or constituted powers. Inventing concepts (such as audience, active audience) is not done ex nihilo. They are creations and selections from a milieu. The constituted powers’ relation to that milieu needs to be addressed. The discourses are not active but reactive: They respond by capturing, appropriating, and diminishing the processes of constituting being. In other words, “the discourses that call them into being” are involved in an ontological intervention.6 What does a concept capacitate and incapacitate? How does it attach to ongoing processes of subjectivation? What follows is not an exhaustive account of the active audience (A:A) literature. It will concentrate mostly on the work of John Fiske, especially his theoretical reliance on Antonio Gramsci. I will also address the backlash against this strain of work. My selectivity in the choice of authors is designed to tease out a thread, a set of affinities (relations as well as limits). These tendencies allow us to reconsider the active audience moment for what it can tell us about constitutive activity more broadly.

Becoming-Active as Decoding and Reading As many have noted, the cultural studies turn to the audience was done as a way of displacing a number of models of communications research. Foremost among them was what gets abbreviated as the “Frankfurt School” (or the “cultural dope” model), in which audiences are victims of an overwhelmingly powerful ideology machine. For more mainstream researchers, Adorno and others are considered the premier proponents of the hypodermic needle or silver bullet model of media.7 Turning to an active audience was a response to a very specific target: those who fetishized the text and its operations. Within a critical tradition, this target meant the Frankfurt School but also screen theory, Althusserian ideology critique, psychoanalytic structuralism, as well as 36

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institutional determinations studied by political economy. As Jon Cruz and Justin Lewis argue, this moment was designed to give audience a specificity: a “distinct degree of agency and identity” (10).8 Stuart Hall’s groundbreaking essay “Encoding/Decoding” sought to specify this “distinct degree,” and in this touchstone work we can begin to see the limitations in the active audience moment from the perspective of constituent power. Hall does give the points in the communication chain separate conditions of determination and a nonnecessary relationship (in other words, forms of decoding do not necessarily follow those of encoding). This move is close to what Negri calls an antagonistic relationship, in which a structure cannot fully contain the separate constitution of subjects, and thus a split is always possible (labor does not necessarily follow the commands and determinations of capital) (Marx Beyond Marx). The autonomist emphasis on composition examines antagonistic subjects insofar as they attempt to defuse and reconstitute the powers of themselves and others. This is a nondialectical process involving separate principles and forces. While any technology of power/constituted power seeks to reconsolidate its own effectiveness through dividing and reorganizing constituent power, it does so as a result of constituent power’s own active composition of a world. In other words, any consolidation (or incorporation) is also a reconfiguration of the strategies of contestation. The encoding/decoding circuit approximated a constituted power that recognized the fragility of the circuit in terms of the subjects composing it. However, a few characteristics hampered the encoding/decoding model. Numerous cultural studies practitioners noted Hall’s reliance on an abstract notion of the audience as “decoders” or readers. This abstraction of reading practices from material contexts pushed a number of researchers (pioneered by David Morley) to break from an abstract hermeneutic model toward an ethnographic approach to practices. More important, relying on the model of decoding (as linguistic and hermeneutic practice) meant that Hall did not substantially modify the mainstream transmission model of sender and receiver. This model was inherited from the early days of audience research (especially in propaganda studies) and is perhaps the epitome of constituted power. Ien Ang most concisely presents this inheritance when she describes the encoding/decoding model as one where the “sender’s sphere is opposed by receiver’s sphere” (Living 20). She recognizes that a common structure is composed only of isolated, separated, even opposed elements. At the same time, that antagonism is instituted via the transmission model’s form of constituted power and its reactive subject. The “activity” that distinguished the separate spheres was a thin notion of interpretation, one that adhered to a notion of reception that was both secondary and abstract. The encoding/decoding model also relied on language to make its argument by highlighting the inherent polysemy of the “messages.” Texts, abstracted from subjective practices, were the condition for activity (which was then reduced to decoding). The openness that allowed activity came from the Activating the Multitude

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semiotic structures of meaning-making rather than from subjective forces. In other words, constituted power was taken to be an initiator, a type of constituent power. From the ontological perspective, we can ask “What if this relation were reversed?” Subjective practices (powers of transformation, capacity for innovation, ability to create effects) make meaning-making an open process, because semiotic structures are one elaboration/mediation of these powers. To put it succinctly, a linguistic system itself is a constituted power. In this formulation, productive capacities are the conditions for polysemy, not vice versa. Decoding thus depended on an already existing notion of “audience” as a recipient, responding to a set of productions that precede it. Encoding/ decoding-inspired active audience studies can be seen as conjunctural. While important from the standpoint of correcting the overemphasis on media power and pacified audiences, from the standpoint of the conceptual structure, the encoding/decoding model merely reinforced a reactive model of audience research. “Activity” became “nonpassivity.” In that sense, activity itself was de-activated, as it merely functioned to grant something (a positivity) to an assumed void (the lack-dope). Understanding the main binary to be active/reactive and not active/passive, we can say the encoding/decoding model allowed the audience to re-act more vigorously. If we take Negri’s distinction of a split constitutional power seriously, then the audience has always been a constituted category, target, and sphere that was a result of capturing audience power into a manageable form. “Audience” is a decompositional conceptual strategy: It seeks to isolate, separate, and represent audience constituent power. If we begin with the audience, we are already in constituted power and are faced with these preestablished pitfalls. The audience, even when made sovereign (perhaps especially then), is a diminishment of the strength of audience power, the renewable praxis of a free and constitutive act. A “degree of freedom” was given to the audience, but only within a given structure that forms the audience as recipient in a chain. Activating those audiences simply modified constituted power. What if we would pose, instead of degrees of freedom (variations within a structure), a level of capacity and potentiality that could even be considered prestructure? Such a move would mean delving into constituent power, and to do so we need to turn to that lightning rod of active audience studies, John Fiske. For Fiske, a sense of constituent power emerges when he makes a claim that there are “neither texts nor audiences” but reading practices. “Audiencing,” as he calls it, can refer to popular decodings as well as the negotiation of social interests (Fiske and Dawson). Rather than the constituted power of separate moments in a chain, Fiske evokes constituent power with his turn to practices, which do not find any necessary form for their processes.9 More important, Fiske’s populism places him in affinity with autonomist analyses when he prioritizes bottom-up forces. Drawing significantly from Michel de Certeau’s emphasis on poaching, guerrilla warfare, tactics of the weak, and everyday operations of innovation, Fiske tips the balance toward constituent power.10 In response to those cultural researchers that privilege 38

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the moment of domination and determination, Fiske wants to focus on the “popular vitality and creativity that makes incorporation such a necessity . . . the everyday resistances and evasions that make that ideology work so hard and insistently to maintain itself and its values” (Understanding 20–21). This focus does not mean, as many of his critics contended, that those popular forces are inherently radical, but neither does it lapse into a celebratory acceptance of the status quo.11 Fiske notes this shift in focus as a methodological perspective: “analysis has to pay less attention to the textual strategies of preference or closure and more to the gaps and spaces that open television up to meanings not preferred by the textual structure,” meanings “that result from the social experience of the reader” (Television 64). This method was infused with a political commitment toward a counterhegemonic project founded not on a lack among the masses (of desire, consciousness, action) but on an abundance that was routed into particular forms. He even notes how difficult it is to study this tactical consumption, as the products are “scattered, dispersed through our televised, urbanized, bureaucratized experience” (35). I will take up Fiske’s own cul-de-sacs later in the essay, but for now it is worth noting that his emphasis on audience activity was situated firmly in a Marxian analysis of culture, one that allocates a vitality to audience production missing in the encoding/decoding model. Audience power can also be found in John Hartley’s argument about “Power Viewing.” For Hartley, the audience is not a group in society but a process by which society creates itself in a sense-making mode. The audience, as a mode of gazing, constitutes society. Television viewing, with its pervasiveness and its style of glancing-as-apprehension, is a model of social power. It is this abstraction from any particular, concrete group of viewers that I am exploring ontologically. Instead of thinking of a social form via media, we open with a field of creative action and production of affect that exists prior to mass media and even tries to ward off media power. Owing to spatial constraints, I cannot pursue the range of works in the A:A tradition more carefully, but it is worth briefly mentioning what Pertti Alasuutari calls the “second generation” of cultural studies reception research, audience ethnography. The early wave of this moment, comprised of works by Janice Radway, Tony Bennett, Jacqueline Bobo, and David Morley (among others), made a significant leap into the material constitution of decoding by specifying the identities of the readers (race, class, gender, sexuality) as well as the spaces and times of reading practices. Even while breaking from the encoding/decoding model, however, these studies retained the fundamental constituted circuit whereby what they were studying were readers-as-receivers. Displacing the passive receiver from the field, these ethnographic projects nevertheless retained the reactive subject, even if this subject gained a new specificity and concreteness. The next wave of ethnography immersed itself in audience constituent power even more. We can think here of the work of the later David Morley, Ien Ang, Roger Silverstone, Ann Gray, James Hay, and others, in which the Activating the Multitude

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object of audience ethnography is not the audience per se but a set of domestic relations and practices, a zone of everyday processes and interactions, and a moral economy of the home. The convergence of media technologies (and other domestic appliances) has dispersed any easily locatable audience subject (especially its humanistic qualities). The audience as such vanishes as an object of a discourse, to reappear as a composition within the technological, economic, moral, and cultural networks that comprise everyday life. Finally, the most recent work by Henry Jenkins on convergence culture as a practice of popular democracy radically prioritizes subjective activity in a way that challenges its own categorization as audience studies.12 In sum, then, the formation of active audience studies was conditioned by a series of conjunctural responses. The activity promoted by encoding/ decoding and its legacies was housed within a reactive subject. Constituent audience power was transformed into the result of constituted power (the “audience”) rather than its cause. But this move is not enough to account for the significance of A:A or the hostility with which it was eventually met. For that we need to turn to another discursive predecessor to A:A: the marketing discourse on audiences.

Marketing Audiences, De-Activating Audiences When Jim McGuigan claims that Fiske’s uncritical populism ultimately results in a celebratory model of consumer sovereignty, he is only partially right.13 Fiske takes great pains to distinguish his approach from this kind of pluralism, and to any serious reader he is obviously not affirming the status quo or erasing oppression (as if reader pleasure meant acceptance of circumstances). He is a committed Gramscian and thus is involved in a counterhegemonic project. But McGuigan correctly points out a tendency in Fiske and others that eventually gets taken up by “critical consumer studies”; namely, taking A:A as a way of understanding the intricacies of consumer behavior (see Storey 202–3). What McGuigan and others might be responding to is the depoliticization of A:A, which took audience activity as a sign that consumers wanted their consumer society. In effect, these approaches took Fiske’s insights and gave them the opposite political outcome: that A:A demonstrated an acceptance of capitalism, even an active desire for it. How could two such disparate conclusions result from the “same” analysis? I want to argue here that it is not just a political choice that determines the varying uptakes of active audience but the conceptual structure held over from marketing discourse that equated audience power with consumer power. Elsewhere, I have argued that early marketing discourse was one of the first audience studies projects to take audience power seriously (Bratich). The fusion of selling and communication that came to define advertising agencies 40

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in the early 1900s meant creating an amalgam of two subjects: the audience (of advertising media) and the consumer (of goods) (Leiss, Kline, Jhally, and Botterill). As others have noted, advertising and marketing have not operated primarily via an external manipulation but have studied audiences in their concrete specificity (Balnaves and O’Regan; Jhally; Marchand; Lears). Audiences were problematized as a set of desires (e.g., aspirations for self, family, society; imagination of the good life, an optimistic future) and the capacities to satisfy them. These desires and wills existed prior to the marketing “audience,” being bound, for instance, to traditional institutions such as church, family, state, communal mores, ethnic rituals, and customs. The advertising and public relations industries, rather than imposing their will on passive audiences, sought to cultivate, tap into, and redirect audience powers to their own ends. Recognizing the creative capacities of human/media hybrids, they strove to enhance those capacities through particular media strategies in order to turn producers into consumers and to channel desires toward commodified solutions. Cultural studies, especially in its active audience moment, took on this historically produced equation of audience power with consumer power wholesale. While noting the similar acknowledgment of the mediate multitudes, this equation also framed activity within a consumer model. Essentially, the production-consumption circuit overlaid the encoding-decoding circuit, placing the audience at both ends of the chain.14 Any attempt at activating these audience powers was limited to the doubly layered reactive position of receiver/consumer. Fiske’s two economies attempted to redress this bind. The split into a financial economy and a semiotic economy established separate spheres of activity, which gave a nonnecessary correspondence to the classic economic circuit. This split was a version of the autonomists’ antagonistic method rather than the dialectical method that would always subordinate the subjects to the structure. Fiske made the semiotic economy more of an anthropological process, emphasizing goods, commodities, and resources (citing de Certeau and Marcel Mauss on how this economy was based more on gift-giving than on exchange). The limitation here, from the autonomist perspective, is that cultural economy was reduced to semiotic economy. Audiences, as producers of meanings and pleasures, were part of a separate process, but one whose autonomy was removed from the very capacity to generate value (left to the financial economy).15 To make this version of Marxist economic analysis clearer, a brief discussion of autonomist notions of affect, value, and labor is warranted.

Value and Affective Production For Negri, an ontological project involves understanding the material basis for value-production. Negri (and other autonomists) continue the MarxActivating the Multitude

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ist tradition of labor analysis, but one in which, significantly, labor finds its value in affect, defined as primarily the power to act. Rather than thinking of capital as the maker of value (even as extraction from labor power), Negri argues for an analysis from below, from the base of life (“Value and Affect”). This method shifts from deduction (where value was assumed abstractly as an element of the unity of calculation) to induction (from affect to value as the concrete line of construction).16 Four powers comprise affective production and its ontological qualities: the power of action (to produce effects), the power of transformation (to combine activities, to connect to what is common), the power of appropriation (where every obstacle overcome determines a greater force of action—where action absorbs the conditions of its own realization), and power as expansive (an omnilateral diffusion whose transvaluations can sustain the shocks and resist external commands). Affect refers to such processes as (1) small-scale circulation (link to earth, gifts), (2) cooperation as surplus, and (3) “historical and moral values” (“Value and Affect” 80). Taken together, these comprise a living labor that “expresses—through all the pores of singular and collective bodies—its power of self-valorization” (80). For Michael Hardt, affective labor is itself and directly the constitution of communities and collective subjectivities (“Affective Labor” 89). Drawing from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, he notes this labor as desiring production, which produces collective subjectivities, sociality, and ultimately society itself. Affect gets us to acknowledge an autonomous circuit for the constitution of subjectivity, one whose primacy is met with the processes of capitalist valorization. Ron Day argues that “capital’s measured capture and exploitation of desire imposes a restrictive, structural value on that which always-already ontologically gives the possibility of value to capital” (1079). Affect (as ontological constitution) is tied closely with Marx’s notion of species-being, which has been devalued in much of post-Althusserian cultural research, but as Nick Dyer-Witheford notes, we may be witnessing a species-being resurgence.17 What is needed, then, is an analysis of a material economy of desire and affect, one that comes from the perspective of the value-producers. Social reproduction precedes capital production. And social labor, the power of generation and transformation through the commonality of communication and affect, now gives the field of culture newfound importance (though one could trace this sense of culture as generative back to Raymond Williams).18 Culture exists not as a separate economy but as a source of value for the financial economy, which can, through a persistent increase in self-valorizing activities, autonomize itself. For the autonomists, this version of a cultural economy has increasingly become the norm in post-Fordism.19 The question of value-production has also been raised in cultural studies, as when John Hartley argues that “the source of value is no longer to be found only in the scale and organization of manufacturing industry alone; it is also to be found among the uses and creativity of consumers themselves” (“Value Chain” 131). It is not surprising then 42

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that corporate-friendly consumer studies could also use Fiskean approaches to study the elusive and active subject known as the audience/consumer. For consumer studies, the Fiskean recomposed active audience is a post-Fordist subject par excellence. This desiring subject is a desired subject of capital. Recognizing the complexity and activity of audiences is the first step toward incorporating that activity into value-production for capital. We can now revisit Fiske’s two economies with an eye toward valueproduction. What would it mean, for instance, to distinguish semiotic from financial economy when cultural production is even more networked in immaterial labor, ever more subsumed into capitalist value extraction? Hartley, with the benefit of two decades of changes after Fiske’s model, argues that we cannot examine the new cultural economy with “inherited presumptions . . . about what consumption means” (“Value Chain” 139). In this new conjuncture, the consumer does not exist as the end point of a linear transaction. It is not just that Fiske’s two economies merged, but that audience power has for a long time been a producer of value and affect economically. The split of culture from the economy, along with the reduction of mediated multitudes to an endpoint of an economic/communication chain, was a historical process. This decomposition becomes clear to us only in a new conjuncture that is recomposing forces into new forms of constituted power. Fiske senses this rethinking of value and affect when he says, “production takes on a new dimension that delegates it away from the owners of capital” (313). In splitting a presumed uniform economy, he cracks open a doorway to this dimension of value-from-below. But by limiting this productive dimension to a separate economy, Fiske cannot recognize that it is this “new” production (affect) that is the source of value in the financial economy. Financial economy itself was reduced to capital investment and the commodity-form, not to labor. Perhaps in the world of cultural studies and audience research, “delegating it away from owners” makes sense, but that move presumes already-existing analytic commitments to studying commodification, power, and ideology (as the primary agents). In the material world of valueproduction, it was the owners who usurped, mined, and exploited this ontological dimension from the outset. In keeping with the conjunctural debates between political economy and cultural studies of his time, Fiske’s two economies easily slotted into the inherited positions. Political economists could claim the financial economy, while culturalists (defined by their orientation to language) would have the latter. While not automatically equating audience power with consumer power, Fiske left himself open to charges that his semiotic economy could only explain what consumers did (even as users of resources). Fiske’s inheritance prevented a full break from the historical suture of the audience to the consumer. In sum, active audience study was built on a particular economic circuit, which reduced both production to commodification and the creative social process of generating value to consumption. Constituent powers could operate only via the constituted power of the consumer. By defining audience Activating the Multitude

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power as a subject at the end of a chain, the entire field lapsed into a cul-de-sac about the levels of activity of that subject. This position was held in common by Fiske’s champions (rational choice consumer studies) as well as his critics (materialism’s palace guard). By leaving the production-distributionreception circuit intact, the opposed camps never left their common ground. They neatly took their positions on active audiences as proponents and detractors, while the potentials opened up by Fiske’s intervention were now safely contained in a structured opposition.

Gramsci: Active Incorporation Studies and the Need for Resistance The Gramscian turn in cultural studies is well established, and one could say that the active audience moment was both its apex and its limit case. It is easy to see why active audience research found in Gramsci the theoretical frame for understanding power. Essentially, hegemony theory countered the reigning Althusserian framework (so crucial for textual and ideological criticism), which had a mechanical, even functional, notion of power. Hegemony theory noted that any reigning power bloc is comprised of a contingent arrangement that requires negotiating with subaltern elements. This process needs to be continuously maintained via a continual winning of consent. A hegemonic political body is a provisional response to a variety of interests and desires, a temporary assemblage, a moving equilibrium that incorporates opposition into its workings. In other words, Gramscian theory gave resistance an active role in any composition. For audience studies, this reconceptualization translated into the following: Active reception now had a resistant role to play in political formations. And this translation was what many critics latched onto as the fatal flaw in active audience studies. “How could consumption equal resistance?” these critics asked of Fiske especially. Shopping as an act of resistance? Surely this was the “epitome of the uncritical drift to cultural populism” (McGuigan qtd. in Storey 203). There was certainly a backlash, primarily against overextended readings of resistance, and an overpoliticization of the trivial (Butsch 283). We could call this a de-activated audience moment. In fact, there were so many critics, one wonders if Fiske’s generativity was less for a new line of audience research and more for a paradigm repair via backlash. For John Corner, active audience research was a form of sociological quietism and an overemphasis on the micro (Morley 18). For James Curran, it was a “new revisionism,” “an act of revivalism—reverting to the discredited wisdom of the past” (Morley 22). Some, like Michael Schudson and Kevin Carragee, saw A:A as ignoring textual, historical, and material influences on audience interactions (Morley 30 and 39). Others, like William Evans and John Frow, questioned the very voice of the active audience analysts, claim44

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ing that their desire to see ideology resisted was then imputed to audiences (Morley 31). Even those who could be called active audience researchers distanced themselves from this purported Fiskean position, as when Ien Ang said, “it would be utterly out of perspective to cheerfully equate ‘active’ with ‘powerful’ ” (Desperately Seeking 247).20 For Tony Bennett, Fiske (especially his de Certeauian influence) was not conjunctural enough (Barker 400). Ang and Meaghan Morris took Fiske to task for conflating “making do” with “resistance.” McGuigan called this uncritical cultural populism a “drift away from neo-Gramscian hegemony theory” (qtd. in Storey 202–3). In Gramscian terms, there was not enough attention paid to incorporation. In an ironic twist, the very hallmark of Gramscian theory (hegemony that finds an active space for resistance) now became the threshold of excess that took analysis out of the Gramscian framework. Much of the criticism rested on sliding the definition of activity from “diversity of readings” to oppositional or resistant politics. Criticisms of this sort were partially deserved, as the more open-ended dynamics of de Certeau (strategy and tactics, place and space) were now overlaid with Gramscian power/resistance. But there is some question as to whether explorations of activity and counterpractices needed to be conceptualized as resistance. Here we must ask how resistance functioned as a normative concept for classifying cultural studies work. According to Chris Barker, resistance is a metaphor, a conceptual tool: “a matter not of truth or falsity, but of utility and value” (400). As a discursive strategy, “resistance is not a quality of an act, but a category of judgment about acts” (401). In a Bourdieuian sense, it is deployed as a judgment that reveals the values of the cultural studies critic who wields it. Ultimately, resistance is a “normative concept with ‘success’ measured strategically against normative criteria. . . . Resistance has to be in pursuit of named values” (400). We can put it this way: Within the antipopulist backlash, resistance was a kind of political use-value, a space outside of incorporability. Negri notes that globalization, for example, has been opposed by an affirmation of the local, a “use-value configured in terms of identity” (84). Resistance is thus a position of externality, a “being-against” that does not run the risk of supporting market logics. Thinking of the audience as resistant (not even as actually resistant, but as an ideal that was never met) was an attempt to recover a use-value in the field of media studies. While it may have originated in class identity, resistant audience activity as use-value was extended to other social identities. However, there is a question of whether this external position even exists. For Negri, this notion of use-value is based on an inside/outside dichotomy that cannot stand in an era marked by “real subsumption (“Value and Affect”; see also Hardt, “Affective Labor”). But more important than the explanatory power of resistance is the discursive effectiveness wielded through it. This search for a use-value external position for resistance against power was a source of measurement for a critical discourse. The binary power/resistance retained a Marxist telos and Activating the Multitude

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standard by which to judge proper politics. Active audiences were not providing a useful constituted power concept for a counterhegemonic project. Activity did not meet the standards for a revolutionary subject, and thus could not be legitimated within cultural studies. The backlash against activity, or de-activation, took the form of a call for more attention to determinants, to get away from interpretation and to the institutional constraints of power.21 Marx’s dictum about humans making history but not in conditions of their own making underwent a pendulum swing, perhaps even a dialectical leap. But while this image gives the dyad an equal pull or equivalent space on the dance floor, the antagonism could hardly be said to have taken place on similar terrain. As noted, the active audience moment was an interruption that countered decades of multiangled approaches to what we might call “active ideology studies.” The long history of studying determinations (which did not disappear with the active audience moment) was met with an intense flash of decoding/active audience studies, which itself produced a prominent backlash. We could even say that by 1992 (after about a decade of Fiske and two decades after encoding/decoding) active audience/ cultural studies was known more for its excesses than for its generative research agenda. We can see this in the turn to what Alasuutaari calls the third generation of audience studies, the social constructionist moment. Here, audiences are merely the products of the institutions, discourses, and research agendas that posit them. Activity is located squarely within the constituted determinants in the social field. For some critics, active audience research was not just an excess within Gramscianism (which could be corrected with a proper rebalancing). The failure to connect consumption with production was endemic to hegemony theory ever since it split with political economy (Storey 204). But this revival of political economy is only one possible path. One can agree that turning audience power into active resistance is both premature and wishful thinking. However, it does not have to be a claim that comes from the sober analysis of dominant power relations nor from a de-activating pessimism. To open up another path, we need to focus not on Fiske’s excesses, but on his limits, limits drawn from his very reliance on Gramsci. The Gramscian moment in social theory and cultural studies is what Richard Day calls the “hegemony of hegemony” (8). Hegemony theory examines how dominant forces have organized the cultural terrain and then finds leaks in the structure. Leaks can be reorganized as (articulated to) a counterhegemonic project. Cultural activity (these leaks) is recognized primarily to understand how hegemonic forms successfully organize those actions. This formula is dual: how actually existing dominant forms have secured their authority and how counterhegemonic forms (read: future hegemonic ones) can contest them and do the same. The kinds of activity that are valued and sought after are ones that could be channeled into a proper political form: a counterhegemonic class struggle organized from the outside by a party. This

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outsiderness is offset by a submersion in the quotidian, in going to “where people already are.” Ultimately mediation is routed into party representation. The “audience” is plugged into this formula.22 One could even say that this moment represented a battle over Gramsci. Fiske shifted the cultural studies focus to Gramscian notions of popular vitality and creativity as a question of counterhegemony. The antipopulists prefer the hegemonic moment proper, the achievement of a balance of forces. For some, Fiske’s Gramsci was a threat to a certain kind of Gramscian politics, which made Fiske’s work, as the pinnacle of this neo-Gramscian turn to cultural action, a renunciation. His Gramsci was not authorized, and thus this ghost had to be exorcised. Critics of an autonomist position might legitimately ask, “Without resistance, what are the political implications of this ‘description’ of constituent power?” Where is the struggle? How do we move from ontology to politics? Certainly these are serious questions, ones that cannot be directly answered here, not only because of spatial constraints but because political effects do not automatically emanate from the method. In fact, part of my argument here is that it was precisely the lack of predetermined political effects that got Fiske into so much hot water (by courting danger via affirming pleasure and activity). The main conceptual issue here is the distinction between power and resistance. Instead of this binary, the autonomist framework finds a split within power itself, where constituent/constituted power is privileged over power/resistance. Perhaps Fiske overstated the freedom and powers of readers, but freedom and power were only the constituted power of audience. What he opened up as constituent power was reduced to its constituted forms (decoding, reading, consumption, audience), characteristic of audience studies generally, but now with the added constitution of a resistant subject (as potential). Constituent power, as resistance, is reactive. Fiske does understand that “resistances are not just oppositions to power, but are sources of power in their own right” (Television 316). But he only belatedly notes this autonomy of resistance, as well as its primacy in provoking incorporation. Coming close to a notion of antagonism and autonomization, Fiske tried to fit all of these discoveries within the hegemony of hegemony and ended up turning this ontological priority into a political measure (resistance). In other words, he was conjuncturally embedded in a Gramscian dialectics organizing cultural studies’ politics. From the perspective of audience constituent power, one can certainly see the affinity with Fiske over what might be called “active industry studies.” The antipopulist de-activators prefer to accentuate capital and the dominant powers of acting, transforming, appropriating, and expanding. Subjective power is a form of latency to be uncovered and organized by intellectuals (and other moral leaders). Fiskean audience studies resisted these imperatives but still tried to remain within a Gramscian framework. This was a big burden to take on, one that stopped it short of exploring its own radical findings.

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Conclusion As Meaghan Morris asks in her famous critique of Fiskean audience studies, what can we learn from failure? I would frame this issue not as an internal deficiency within A:A, but as a discursive defeat and canonical crisis. What do we take from the activation and de-activation of audience power? Rather than returning to A:A as a way of resurrecting it wholesale or abandoning it as an extreme betrayal of Marxism, we can revise this question as an economic one. Only this time “economy” itself has changed from its canonical sense of political economy via what Mark Cote and Enda Brophy call “the autonomous school of communication” (qtd. in Richard Day 144) or what Dyer-Witheford and Greg de Peuter name “transversal media studies.” Reconfiguring this political economic perspective, we can say that the active audience, rather than being an extreme example of ideological freedom, pluralism, and individuality, is an example of affective value-production.23 This is an insight not lost on corporate cultural studies, which recognized this activity-as-value as a way of integrating “interactivity” into the circuits of capitalist value-production. We can also learn from this failure/defeat that activity does not need to be equated with active receivers. Active audience studies, linking power to measure (resistance), experimented with but could not fully embrace audience power. This was not a flaw but a limit, turned now into an obstacle to overcome. The audience, especially the active audience, is the threshold through which we had to pass to get to audience power. To transform passive into active was a necessary first step, but now that activity needs another transmutation: from reactive to active. “Audience” is a media subject that is embedded in a larger set of subjective processes, an extract out of an immense sea of practices. Instead of this constituted object, we can begin with an affective and media-making multitude, whose valueproduction was captured as “audience” at a certain historical moment.24 Perhaps the most succinct way of saying this is that while ultimately the industry needs audiences, audience power has no need of industries or their attempt to capture them as audiences. Active audience studies did not pass into the night with Fiske’s retirement/ exile. Part of it was taken in by “critical consumer studies” and their consumer sovereignty proponents. By abandoning its political implications as “uncritical populism,” cultural studies left active audience research to consumer studies, which could incorporate Fiskean insights into new means of marketing culture. Within critical cultural studies, it was hung as a sign of a decade of excesses and a warning to future researchers. But in a larger sense, we can say that active audience research simply went dormant. Audience/cultural studies, both in its active phase and as target of a de-activation backlash, can now revisit this moment with an autonomist lens as a way of reconstituting its own powers. 48

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Doing this autonomist analysis of active audience studies and its backlash foregrounds the logic of hegemony’s “auto-deconstruction” (Richard Day). One need not take a position either as proponent of consumer freedom or as critical de-activator, promoting either “reading as resistance” or “active industry studies.” This rupture around the audience marked a moment of crisis not just for cultural studies, but for broader political and ontological processes. In the early audience studies discourses, audience constituent power made itself known only as threat and as possibility. With the active audience moment, what was once a danger and a spur received a conceptual density: a research agenda that highlighted actual activities and powers. This ontological discovery could be expressed only through the conceptual tools most available at the time. With the conjunctural transformations, not primarily in cultural/audience research, but in value-production in the cultural economy, we can now reread that “discredited” avenue of critical research for its offerings.

Notes 1. Ontology here is being used both as the study of being and as the processes that compose being. Much like the word biological, ontological refers both to the study of a particular range of objects and their dynamics as well as to those objects/relations themselves. 2. For more on the autonomist notions of multitude, see Hardt and Dumm; Hardt and Negri, Empire and Multitude; and Virno. 3. As Richard Butsch notes, this split was predicated on another distinction that was forged historically (pre–mass media): audience and performer (7–9). 4. The question of Negri’s and other autonomists’ fidelity to Marx is an open one. Certainly, the selection of key texts (Grundrisse, the “lost” chapter of Kapital) is unorthodox. However, even a casual familiarity with the early work of Mario Tronti or with Negri’s Marx Beyond Marx or with Nicholas Dyer-Witheford’s more recent Cyber-Marx would make it obvious that autonomist Marxism is seriously engaged with Marx’s writings. The fact that Hardt and Negri’s Empire inspired an extensive double-issue response by the journal Rethinking Marxism clearly demonstrates that autonomism is a strain within Marxist discourse. 5.. The best example of this process is evident in the workings of revolutionary will or enthusiasm, the set of desires that sweep away restrictive forms and seek to compose better worlds. The forms they end up taking (contracts, codifications, constitutions, states, parties) are constituted power. 6. I use the word intervention to get away from a notion that we are dealing just with representations here (which could be judged in terms of degrees of fidelity to a sphere outside of it). Intervention is a more materialist act, dipping into the system to rearrange it. The term also highlights the splitting power of reactive forces (separating a body from what it can do). Hence, while even “audience power is a fiction,” we can ask what kind of concept it is (e.g., is it adequate, in the sense Michael Hardt discusses [“Anatomy of Power”]). Activating the Multitude

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7. This is an extreme caricature of even Adorno’s work. The audience for Horkheimer and Adorno are turned by the culture industry into passive listeners and conformist subjects (through psychical adjustment and rhythms of repetition). However, this transformation is a process rather than a fixed state of affairs (to affirm the latter would be fetishistic and nondialectical). The culture industries persistently and rationally deprive their audiences of imagination, negativity, and antagonism. By confirming the world as it is, the culture industries attempt to foreclose thought and fantasy of a world as it could be. If Horkheimer and Adorno were simply defining audiences as passive dupes, they, too, would be as complicitous in this totalizing logic that reifies current processes as permanent. 8. Audience activity was already part of the administrative research known as uses and gratifications. For concise and compelling analyses of the administrative versus critical approaches to active audiences, see Morley, especially ch. 1; and Ang, Desperately Seeking. 9. At times, this text-audience interaction still has a constituted power ring to it, as when it takes a dialectical form. 10. It is easy to see why Michel de Certeau, particularly via The Practice of Everyday Life and Heterologies, became a key figure for the active audience researchers. He lays out a series of binaries and reversals that significantly shift the question of power and agency to everyday life and the popular arts (Silverstone, “Let Us” and “Television”). More than just being two different moments in an economic circuit, for instance, de Certeau finds production and consumption to involve two entirely different logics, processes, temporalities, and spatialities. More significantly for active audience studies, this domain of scattered and unformalized practices is ontologically prior to any strategic operations that form structures and places. At certain moments in his work, popular practices come first. Distinguishing strategies from tactics as two heterogeneous ways of acting is a prime example: strategies bet on place to evade the erosion of time, and tactics on the clever utilization of time as way of survival (Practice 38–39). Finally, a key characteristic of de Certeau that gets taken up by later active audience analysts is his claim that tactics and popular culture belong to the weak. His polemological analysis uses a guerilla war model, where poaching and reappropriation are actions used by weaker forces. This de Certeauian element (often taken up by analysts as “making do”) ends up making practices a conservative coping strategy rather than an experimental domain for constituted forms and expansion of constituent power. 11. Fiske himself often calls these practices progressive, explicitly distinguishing them from radical (Understanding 21). 12. We can define this conceptual chain as part of what James Hay calls the “landscape of inquiry” within audience studies (“Afterword”). The space of audience refers both to the physical surroundings of reception (from social theater, to home, to mobile technologies) and to the metaphoric space of framing the audience (e.g., the end of a chain). 13. Others made similar criticisms, as when John Corner calls Fiskean analysis a “complacent relativism,” which romanticizes the reader improperly (qtd. in Morley 20) and which, Graham Murdock claims, can “easily collude with a system of media power which actually excludes or marginalizes most alternative perspectives” 50

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(qtd. in Morley 36). Most risky is Fiske’s tarrying with pleasure, since “valorization of audience pleasure . . . leads easily into a cultural relativism” that validates populist neoliberal ideology and market logic (Morley 26). 14. Obviously the production-consumption circuit does not emerge from marketing discourse itself but is an economic chain that for cultural studies is a crucial Marxian tool for understanding culture. I am arguing only that the fusion of audience with consumer as target subject comes from marketing (but not necessarily solely there). 15. It is not surprising, for instance, that Fiske turns to Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital to make sense of this process, rather than take seriously Marx’s claim that capital (even the cultural sort, at least in current assessments of post-Fordism) is grounded in productive labor. For an analysis of “value-added” cultural labor, see Andrejevic; Shimpach. 16. Others have worked via this induction of affect, according to Negri. He cites E. P. Thompson but claims that Thompson’s dynamic is too close to dialectical: Value from below is simply there to spur capitalist command (“Value and Affect”). 17. Species-being, another residue of the young Marx, situates creative capacities beyond the individual or even society (in the social constructionist sense) by affirming sociality as belonging to the species. It is thus easy to see why Negri’s ontological turn links production/living labor to what he calls a “faculty of humankind” (Insurgencies 35). 18. Williams’s notion of cultural materialism locates production in the heart of human practice, highlighting human capacity for creation. Later in his oeuvre (Marxism and Literature), Williams grounds this capacity in a humanist Marxism, highlighting the power of human agency in the materialism of species-being. This emphasis on the young Marx and away from the social determinations that capture productive processes finds overlap with autonomist commitments. At the same time, significant differences remain. Unlike the Italian autonomists, Williams did not emerge from within a Marxist tradition, which results in a different attachment to culture as a separate sphere. Williams begins with culture and seeks throughout his life to wrest it away from its Leavisite status and toward a grounding in the material, while the autonomists do not begin with a separation of culture from the economy (for instance the different conceptions of “value”). Negri and Hardt stress the role of real subsumption of use-value into capital, as well as equating production with living labor. They also go “beyond Marx” by turning to Spinoza to understand ontological processes. 19. As Maurizio Lazzarato argues, this audience becomes a cultural form of reorganized labor: participating in the production process (not just consumption) as a value-adding practice. The result of this participation is what has been called corporate interactivity and peer-to-peer marketing. 20. I would note that Ang’s statement contains much of the stakes here, as each term is undergoing a transformation (active/passive to active/reactive; power to constituent power/constituted power). 21. One way to trace this trajectory, as Aniko Bodroghkozy did, is to locate a split and antagonism at the University of Wisconsin in the early 1990s, embodied in the two leading figures of each camp: John Fiske and Bob McChesney. 22. While the emphasis on party representation-as-mediation is rarely explicitly stated, without an active disavowal it lingers in the importation of Gramscian analysis. Activating the Multitude

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Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s pivotal return to Gramsci, particularly in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, discarded some of this baggage (class-centrality, a necessary identification of hegemonic force) while keeping the party question (and mediation more generally) unaddressed. Richard Day looks to a later work by Laclau that makes more explicit this leadership function for one of the elements in the “chain of equivalence” (74–75). 23. For more on this perspective of audience labor, see Nick Dyer-Witheford’s discussion of Dallas Smythe’s famous article “On the Audience Commodity and Its Work” (Cyber-Marx 118–19) and Shawn Shimpach’s recent analysis of the work of watching. 24. In future research I would like to explore this concept of audience power and media-making multitude via concrete analysis. Included here would be audience power expressed at the point where production and consumption merge, in practices such as radical media, cyberactivism, indymedia, culture jamming, and DIY culture (see Klein; Critical Art Ensemble; Downing; Dyer-Witheford, Cyber-Marx; Campbell; McCaughey and Ayers; Van Meter, Holtzman, and Hughes; Juris; Kahn and Kellner). A broader perspective would include a history of media amateurs (defined as an affective practice involving the power to act in common and as act of love). Finally, future research would entail looking at the way audiences have become interactivated via new communications technologies and media formats (e.g., reality television, blogs, and social networking websites such as Facebook and MySpace.

References Alasuutari, Pertti. “Introduction: Three Phases of Reception.” Rethinking the Media Audience. Ed. Pertti Alasuutari. London: Sage, 1999. 1–21. Andrejevic, Mark. Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003. Ang, Ien. Desperately Seeking the Audience. London: Sage, 1991. ———. Living Room Wars. Routledge, 1996. Balnaves, Mark, and Tom O’Regan. “Governing Audiences.” Mobilising the Audience. Ed. Mark Balnaves, Tom O’Regan, and Jason Sternberg. St. Lucia, Queensland, Canada: University of Queensland Press, 2002. 10–28. Barker, Chris. Cultural Studies: Theory and Practice. London: Sage, 2002. Bennett, Tony. “Figuring Audiences and Readers.” The Audience and Its Landscape. Ed. James Hay, Lawrence Grossberg, and Ellen Wartella. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. 145–60. Bobo, Jacqueline. “The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers.” Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television. Ed. E. D. Pribram. London: Verso, 1988. 90–109. Bodroghkozy, Aniko. “Media Studies for the Hell of It? Second Thoughts on McChesney and Fiske.” Flow 2.5 (2005). http://jot.communication.utexas.edu/flow/ ?jot=view&id=790. Bratich, Jack. “Amassing the Multitude: Revisiting Early Audience Studies.” Communication Theory 15 (2005): 242–65.

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Butsch, Richard. The Making of American Audiences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Campbell, Colin. “The Craft Consumer: Culture, Craft and Consumption in a Postmodern Society.” Journal of Consumer Culture 5 (2005): 23–42. Critical Art Ensemble. Digital Resistance: Explorations in Tactical Media. New York: Autonomedia, 2001. Cruz, Jon, and Justin Lewis. Introduction. Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception. Ed. Jon Cruz and Justin Lewis. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994. 1–18. Damasio, Antonio. Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando, Fla.: Harcourt, 2003. Day, Richard. Gramsci Is Dead: Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements. London: Pluto, 2006. Day, Ron. “Social Capital, Value, and Measure: Antonio Negri’s Challenge to Capitalism.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 53 (2002): 1074–82. de Certeau, Michel. Heterologies: Discourses on the Other. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986. ———. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Downing, John. “Audiences and Readers of Alternative Media: The Absent Lure of the Virtually Unknown.” Media, Culture, and Society 25 (2003): 625–45. Dyer-Witheford, Nicholas. Cyber-Marx: Cycles and Struggles in High-Technology Capitalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999. ———. “Species-Being Resurgent.” Constellations 11 (2004): 476–91. Dyer-Witheford, Nicholas, and Greg de Peuter. “Games of Empire: A Transversal Media Inquiry.” Proceedings of the conference “Genealogies of Biopolitics,” October 2005. Sponsored by the Workshop in Radical Empiricism, Université de Montréal and The Sense Lab, Concordia University, 7–8 May 2005. http://www.radicalempiricism .org/biotextes/textes/witheford_peuter.pdf. Fiske, John. Television Culture. New York: Routledge, 1987. ———. Understanding Popular Culture. London: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Fiske, John, and Robert Dawson. “Audiencing Violence: Watching Homeless Men Watch Die Hard.” The Audience and Its Landscape. Ed. James Hay, Lawrence Grossberg, and Ellen Wartella. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. 297–316. Gray, Ann. “Audience and Reception Research in Retrospect.” Rethinking the Media Audience. Ed. Pertti Alasuutari. London: Sage, 1999. 22–37. Grossberg, Lawrence, Ellen Wartella, and Charles Whitney. MediaMaking. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1998. Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” The Cultural Studies Reader. Ed. Simon During. London: Routledge, 1993. 90–103. Hardt, Michael. “Affective Labor.” boundary 2 26.2 (1999): 89–100. ———. “Translator’s Foreword: The Anatomy of Power.” Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. ———. “The Withering of Civil Society.” Social Text 45 (1995): 27–44.

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Hardt, Michael, and Thomas Dumm. “Sovereignty, Multitudes, Absolute Democracy: A Discussion between Michael Hardt and Thomas Dumm about Hardt and Negri’s Empire.” Empire’s New Clothes. Ed. Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean. New York: Routledge, 2004. 163–74. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. ———. Labor of Dionysus. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. ———. Multitude. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Hartley, John. “Power Viewing: A Glance at Pervasion in the Postmodern Perplex.” The Audience and Its Landscape. Ed. James Hay, Lawrence Grossberg, and Ellen Wartella. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. 221–33. ———. Tele-ology: Studies in Television. London: Routledge, 1992. ———. “The ‘Value Chain of Meaning’ and the New Economy.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7 (2004): 129–41. Hay, James. “Unaided Virtues: The (Neo)Liberalization of the Domestic Sphere and the New Architecture of Community.” Foucault, Cultural Studies, and Governmentality. Ed. Jack Bratich, Jeremy Packer, and Cameron McCarthy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 165–206. ———. “Afterword: The Place of the Audience: Beyond Audience Studies.” The Audience and Its Landscape. Ed. James Hay, Lawrence Grossberg, and Ellen Wartella. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. 359–78. Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture. New York: New York University Press, 2006. Jhally, Sut. The Codes of Advertising: Fetishism and the Political Economy of Meaning in the Consumer Society. New York: St. Martin’s, 1987. Johnson, Steven. Emergence. New York: Touchstone, 2001. Juris, Jeffrey S. “The New Digital Media and Activist Networking within Anti-corporate Globalization Movements.” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 597 (2005): 189–208. Kahn, Richard, and Douglas Kellner. “New Media and Internet Activism: From the ‘Battle of Seattle’ to Blogging.” New Media and Society 6 (2004): 87–95. Klein, Naomi. No Logo. New York: Picador, 2002. Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics. London: Verso, 1985. Lazzarato, Maurizio. “Immaterial Labor.” Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics. Ed. Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. 133–47. Lears, T. J. Jackson. “From Salvation to Self-Realization: Advertising and the Therapeutic Roots of the Consumer Culture, 1880–1930.” The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980. Ed. R. Fox and T. J. Jackson Lears. New York: Pantheon, 1983. 1–38. Leiss, William, Stephen Kline, Sut Jhally, and Jacqueline Botterill. Social Communication in Advertising. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge, 2005. Marchand, Roland. Advertising the American Dream: Making Way for Modernity, 1920– 1940. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985. McCaughey, Martha, and Michael Ayers. Cyberactivism. New York: Routledge, 2003. 54

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McQuail, Dennis. Mass Communication Theory: An Introduction. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994. Morley, David. Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies. London: Routledge, 1992. Morris, Meaghan. “Banality in Cultural Studies.” Logics of Television. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 14–43. Murphy, Timothy S. “Ontology, Deconstruction, and Empire.” Rethinking Marxism 13.3–4 (2001): 16–23. Negri, Antonio. “Approximations: Towards an Ontological Definition of the Multitude.” Interactivist Info Exchange. Trans. Arianna Bove. http://slash.autonomedia .org/article.pl?sid=02/11/13/100202. ———. Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State. Trans. Maurizia Boscagli. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. ———. Marx beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse. Trans. H. Cleaver, M. Ryan, and M. Viano. Brooklyn: Autonomedia, 1991. ———. Negri on Negri. Trans. M. B. DeBevoise. London: Routledge, 2003. ———. Subversive Spinoza. Trans. and ed. Timothy S. Murphy. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 2004. ———. “Value and Affect.” boundary 2 26.2 (1999): 77–88. Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Read, Jason. “The Hidden Abode of Biopolitical Production: Empire and the Ontology of Production.” Rethinking Marxism 13.3–4 (2001): 24–30. Shimpach, Shawn. “Working Watching: The Creative and Cultural Labor of the Media Audience.” Social Semiotics 15 (2005): 343–60. Silverstone, Roger. “From Audiences to Consumers: The Household and the Consumption of Communication and Information Technologies.” The Audience and Its Landscape. Ed. James Hay, Lawrence Grossberg, and Ellen Wartella. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1996. 281–96. ———. “Let Us Now Return to the Murmuring of Everyday Practices: A Note on Michel de Certeau, Television, and Everyday Life.” Theory, Culture and Society 6 (1989): 77–94. ———. “Television and Everyday Life: Towards an Anthropology of the Television Audience.” Public Communication: The New Imperatives. Ed. M. Ferguson. London: Sage, 1990. 173–89. Smythe, Dallas. “On the Audience Commodity and Its Work.” Dependency Road: Communications, Capitalism, Consciousness, and Canada. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex, 1981. 22–51. Storey, John. An Introduction to Cultural Theory and Popular Culture. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1998. Tronti, Mario. “The Strategy of Refusal.” Italy, Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. Ed. Sylvère Lotringer and Christian Marazzi. New York: Columbia University Press, 1980. 36–61. Van Meter, Kevin, Benjamin Holtzman, and Craig Hughes. “DIY and the Movement beyond Capitalism.” Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigation, Collective Theorization. Ed. Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber. San Francisco: AK, 2006. Virno, Paolo. A Grammar of the Multitude. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004. Activating the Multitude

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Habitus Clivé Aesthetics and Politics in the Work of Pierre Bourdieu TONY BENNETT

Toward the end of the sketch for a self-analysis that he wrote shortly before his death, Pierre Bourdieu said that his was a divided habitus—a habitus clivé—as a consequence of the contradictions he experienced in coming from lowly social origins to achieve high scholarly distinction (Esquisse 127). This seems entirely plausible. Indeed, in this respect, Bourdieu might be seen as an ideal type for a generation that experienced similar kinds of social and cultural dislocation as the price of educational and occupational advancement. Yet the claim stands in sharp contrast to what Bourdieu had to say elsewhere about the concept of the habitus as a set of regulative principles organizing practices of cultural consumption. For here Bourdieu usually insisted on the unity of the habitus. This construction of the habitus is central to the analytical architecture of Bourdieu’s Distinction. It constitutes the key conceptual hinge through which analyses at the level of the individual and that of classes are integrated within the social space of lifestyles and through which the operation of cultural capital across different fields is mediated. If, therefore, the unity of the habitus is shown to be unsustainable, other aspects of Bourdieu’s approach in this study are also called into question.

In pursuing this line of inquiry, I subject Bourdieu’s concepts to an immanent critique and draw on two other bodies of work for the different kinds of critical purchase these offer on Bourdieu’s concepts and methods. These are, first, Bernard Lahire’s sociology of individuals and the different interpretation this offers of the habitus, and second, Jacques Rancière’s account of the aesthetic as a particular mode of the “distribution of the sensible.” I also contrast the implications of these accounts for the analysis of cultural consumption with Bourdieu’s approach to such questions by exploring some aspects of the data produced by a research inquiry into the relations between cultural capital and social inequality in contemporary Britain.1 In doing so, I shall be particularly concerned with the respects in which Bourdieu’s account of the habitus in Distinction is informed by his interpretation of the Kantian aesthetic and the divisions this account establishes between the bourgeois aesthetic ethos of disinterestedness and the working-class culture of the necessary. My contention here will be that Bourdieu’s position on this matter seriously disables an adequate understanding of the complex and contradictory ways in which the relationships between practices of cultural consumption and social classes have been affected by the variant forms in which postKantian aesthetic discourses have been inscribed within such relationships. I shall also argue that, appearances to the contrary, Bourdieu’s own position is best understood as a move within the tradition of Western aesthetic discourse, and one that repeats the terms in which this discourse has disqualified the working classes from full political entitlement and capacity.2

The Singular Unity of Class Habitus I look first at Bourdieu’s interpretation of the concept of habitus and the stress he places on its unity. In Practical Reason, for example, Bourdieu defines the habitus as a “generative and unifying principle which retranslates the intrinsic and relational characteristics of a position into a unitary lifestyle, that is, a unitary set of choices of persons, goods, practices” (8). And in Distinction, writing about the aesthetic disposition as an aspect of the system of dispositions comprising a class habitus, he could not be more emphatic: Being the product of the conditionings associated with a particular class of conditions of existence, it unites all those who are the product of similar conditions while distinguishing them from all others. And it distinguishes in an essential way, since taste is the basis of all that one has—people and things—and all that one is for others, whereby one classifies oneself and is classified by others. (56) There are places where Bourdieu does opt for more elastic interpretations. In Outline of a Theory of Practice, he commits only to the probabilistic 58

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expectation that members of the same class will share the same experiences, stressing that not all the members of a class—or even two of them—will ever do so entirely (85). Similarly, the regularity he prescribes for the habitus in In Other Words is one in which “the habitus goes hand in glove with a vagueness and indeterminacy”; it has “a generative spontaneity which asserts itself in an improvised confrontation with ever-renewed situations,” obeying “a practical logic, that of vagueness, of the more-or-less, which defines one’s ordinary relation to the world” (77–78). Bourdieu also usually allows for a tension, in the case of artists and intellectuals, between their class habitus and the habitus associated with their distinctive position in a specific artistic or intellectual field—a position he proposes in his account of the scientific habitus, for example (Science of Science). And in Pascalian Meditations, finally, the habitus emerges in an utterly transformed form as full of “mismatches, discordances and misfirings” such that those who occupy contradictory social positions often have “destabilised habitus, torn by contradiction and internal division, generating suffering” (160). However, these later qualifications and revisions do not alter the fact that, in Distinction, Bourdieu argues that the generative schemas of the habitus apply across different fields of consumption through a simple mechanism of transference so as to produce a unified set of dispositions. “The practices of the same agent,” he writes, “and, more generally, the practices of all agents of the same class, owe the stylistic affinity which makes each of them a metaphor of any of the others to the fact that they are the product of transfers of the same schemes of action from one field to another” (173). His account of the homology between positions in the space of lifestyles means that the principles underlying an individual’s or group’s tastes in the literary field also apply to that person’s or group’s tastes in all other fields. This mechanism, Bourdieu argues, is made manifest in the systematic unity that is to be found across all aspects of an individual’s or group’s tastes: It is to be found in all the properties—and property—with which individuals and groups surround themselves, houses, furniture, paintings, books, cars, spirits, cigarettes, perfume, clothes, and in the practices in which they manifest their distinction, sports, games, entertainments only because it is in the synthetic unity of the habitus, the unifying, generative principle of all practices. Taste, the propensity and capacity to appropriate (materially or symbolically) a given class of classified, classifying objects or practices, is the generative formula of life-style, a unitary set of distinctive preferences which express the same expressive intention in the specific logic of each of the symbolic sub-spaces, furniture, clothing, language or bodily hexis. (Distinction 173) The possibility of exceptions is largely ruled out through the operation of a mechanism of structural causality through which deviations from the ideal-type of a class habitus are understood as variants of its underlying Habitus Clivé

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structure. Exceptions to the rule merely confirm the rule—as, Lahire notes, in the case of Bourdieu’s remarks on the phenomenon of “slumming it” according to which, when intellectuals or artists read popular novels, watch westerns, or read comics, they transform such popular works into props of distinction through distancing or ironic readings governed by the organizing principles of the bourgeois aesthetic habitus (La culture). This account of the habitus comprises a key hinge in the analytical architecture of Distinction. It comes immediately after Bourdieu’s account of the organization of the social space of lifestyles, in which cultural practices are placed close to or distant from one another and are connected to particular classes and disconnected from others, depending on where they are placed along the twin axes (of capital volume and the ratio of economic to cultural capital) that govern the organization of that space. This account sets the stage, in the chapters that follow, for his discussion of three distinct and internally unified class habitus: the bourgeois sense of distinction, variants of the “cultural goodwill” of the petit-bourgeois, and the workingclass choice of the necessary. The kinds of explanation of the processes of person formation that are elaborated in these chapters are often difficult to pin down, not least because the emphasis Bourdieu places on the different aspects of the habitus often varies. There are, however, usually three components in play: first, the notion that a person’s habitus is shaped by social position and trajectory; second, the respects in which forms of conduct are shaped by particular institutionalized trainings (the role of art institutions in training the pure gaze, for example); and third, the role of social position in determining access to particular kinds of institutionalized trainings and discourses. In Distinction, however, all of these aspects are subordinated to the operation of class in the construction of the habitus as “the internalised form of class condition and of the conditionings it entails” (101). The conditionings a person is subjected to are thus construed as the necessary effect of the class condition that supplies the habitus with a unifying principle: One must therefore construct the objective class, the set of agents who are placed in homogeneous conditions of existence imposing homogenous conditionings and trainings and producing homogeneous systems of dispositions capable of generating similar practices; and who possess a set of common properties, objectified properties, sometime legally guaranteed (as possessions of goods and power) or properties embodied as class habitus (and, in particular, systems of classificatory schemes). (Distinction 101)3 In Bourdieu’s assessment, the virtue of his concept of habitus is that, by accounting for how the agent (individual or class) acts on the determinations that structure it so as to make the habitus a mobile, structured-yet-structuring structure, it overcomes a series of dualities—between inside and outside, structure and agency, body and mind—while simultaneously offering an ac60

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count of how past moments of the shaping of the habitus are retained in the present. While these virtues are endorsed by some, although usually with reservations (see, e.g., Crossley, ch. 6), Lahire (“De la théorie”) offers a more full-fronted assault, raising three main objections. First, he shows how, in Distinction, the requirement needed to support the view of the habitus as unified—that is, that dispositions should be related to the habitus in a constant manner—is breached by the multitude of different and often conflicting formulations Bourdieu proposes for this purpose. Second, Lahire argues that Bourdieu’s view of the habitus as a “structured and structuring structure” serves as a purely rhetorical means of accounting for the interiorization of exteriority and the exteriorization of interiority. As such, it functions as a barrier to ethnographic and historical analysis of the different ways in which the relations between “inside” and “outside” are organized in different systems and practices of personhood. Third, he disputes Bourdieu’s contentions regarding the necessary unity of the habitus through time—or for the limited forms of discontinuity that result from social trajectory—viewing these as arbitrary assertions that minimize the respects in which changing life circumstances might result in earlier aspects of the habitus being sloughed off as “bad habits.” These perspectives lead Lahire to propose an alternative view of the habitus as a more or less fractious disunity, a congeries of disparately formed dispositions: Rather than presuppose that the systematic influence of an incorporated past necessarily acts in a coherent manner on the behaviors of individuals in the present . . . sociology must interrogate the extent to which it is or is not activated, is put to work or on hold, through diverse contexts of action, dispositions, and incorporated competencies. The plurality of dispositions and competencies on the one hand, the variety of contexts in which they are actualised on the other are what make sociological sense of the variation of behavior of the same individual, or of the same group of individuals, as a function of different fields of practice, the properties of the contexts of action, or the more singular circumstances of practice. (La culture 14, my translation) He also offers, in his account of consonant and dissonant taste profiles, a framework for considering the implications of this rival construction of the habitus for the analysis of cultural consumption data of the kind Bourdieu examines in Distinction. It is to this matter that I therefore now turn.

Consonant and Dissonant Taste Profiles Lahire’s general argument is that jettisoning Bourdieu’s a priori assumptions regarding the unity of the habitus requires analytical procedures that are as Habitus Clivé

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alert to possible differences and fractures—or dissonances—in the taste profiles of individuals, groups, or classes as they are to shared tastes and practices.4 Lahire contends that Bourdieu’s approach to cultural consumption minimizes the significance of such dissonances because it focuses attention almost exclusively on those aspects of the tastes or patterns of cultural participation that most distinguish a particular class from other classes at the expense of other tastes or practices its members share with members of those other classes. The consequence is the construction of ideal-typical class figures, which focus disproportionately on activities that, while they might pinpoint tastes that most specifically distinguish the class concerned in relation to other classes and thus most clearly identify (or dramatize) the relative positioning of classes in social space, are often of quite minor significance in the activities of that class as a whole. Commenting on 1997 French data, Lahire thus notes that while higher level managers and professionals might be most distinctly different from the working classes in their preferences for opera, classical music, jazz, and classical literature, such activities account for only a tiny fraction of the cultural preferences of these classes. Only 3 percent of senior managers and professionals identified opera as their preferred music, with 9 percent doing so for jazz, and 22 percent for classical music. When compared with the 56 percent who had never been to either the opera or a jazz concert and the 41 percent who had never been to a classical music concert, these figures suggest a class fraction with a somewhat distanced relation to legitimate culture rather than one immersed in it (La culture 160–65). In the sample for the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project, 33 percent of professionals similarly indicated action, thriller, or adventure movies as their favorite film genre; 32 percent said they would make a point of watching a Steven Spielberg movie compared to 3 percent for a Pedro Almodóvar film; 45 percent had read and liked John Grisham’s novel The Firm compared to 62 percent for Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; 44 percent liked rock music and 33 percent country music, compared with 75 percent who liked classical music; and 41 percent described landscapes as their favorite genre of painting, compared with 21 percent for impressionism (table 1). By reverse, working-class respondents showed significant levels of involvement in some aspects of legitimate culture: 22 percent of semi- and unskilled workers had read Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; 3 percent had read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary; 35 percent liked classical music; 42 percent had listened to and liked Vivaldi; and 39 percent had seen and liked Picasso (table 2). To follow Bourdieu in interpreting figures such as these would mean focusing our attention on what are often the minority aspects of specific class practices: for example, the contrast between the 21 percent of professionals who most prefer impressionism versus the 6 percent of semi- and unskilled workers who do so, or the 8 percent of professionals who most prefer alternative or art cinema to the 2 percent of semi- and unskilled workers who do so. Yet such a focus would overlook the 33 percent of professionals who like action, thriller, and adventure movies (a higher ratio than for skilled workers, 62

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Table 1 Aspects of Class Taste: Professionals Most preferred action, thriller, adventure films

33 percent

Would make a point of watching a Steven Spielberg film

32 percent

Would make a point of watching a Pedro Almodóvar film

3 percent

Most preferred alternative or art cinema

8 percent

Had read John Grisham’s The Firm

45 percent

Had read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

62 percent

Liked rock music

44 percent

Liked country and western music

33 percent

Liked classical music, including opera

75 percent

Most preferred landscapes

41 percent

Most preferred impressionism

21 percent

at 29 percent) or the 41 percent of professionals who preferred landscapes, a figure little short of the 44 percent of semi- and unskilled workers who expressed the same preference. The results are equally telling if, in a variant of an exercise Lahire undertakes to assess the extent to which tastes are transferable across different fields (La culture 175–207), we group the different practices we asked about in our survey into different legitimacies and examine the degree to which tastes are consonant—as Bourdieu’s account requires—or dissonant across these. Table 3 allocates the different types of film, television, and art we asked our respondents about to different levels of legitimacy. It does so on the basis of correlation analyses identifying statistically significant connections between different first-preference choices for these genres and the strength of their association with different levels of education.5 Table 2 Aspects of Class Taste: Semi- and Unskilled Workers Most preferred action, thriller, adventure films Most preferred alternative or art cinema Had read Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice Had read Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

29 percent 2 percent 22 percent 3 percent

Liked classical music

35 percent

Had listened to and liked Vivaldi

42 percent

Had seen and liked Picasso

39 percent

Most preferred landscapes

44 percent

Most preferred impressionism

6 percent Habitus Clivé

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Table 3 Legitimacy Classifications of Film, Television, and Visual Art Genres Film Genres Low legitimacy: Musicals, war movies, westerns, romance, horror, cartoons, Bollywood Medium legitimacy: Action/adventure/thriller, comedy, crime, fantasy, science fiction High legitimacy: Alternative/art cinema, costume drama/literary adaptations, film noir, documentary TV Genres Low legitimacy: Quizzes/game shows, soaps, reality, variety/chat shows Medium legitimacy: Comedy, sport, police/detective, films, cookery/gardening/DIY High legitimacy: News and current affairs, arts television, natural and history documentaries, drama Art Genres Low legitimacy: Portraits, none Medium legitimacy: Performance art, still lifes, landscapes, modern art High legitimacy: Impressionism, Renaissance art

How far, for the members of our main sample, are tastes consonant across these three fields? Not very: Only 1.5 percent have consonant low-legitimacy tastes; 20 percent have consonant medium-legitimacy tastes, and 3 percent have consonant high-legitimacy tastes. When all those with consonant profiles across the film, television, and art subfields are combined, those with consonant taste profiles account for 24.5 percent of the sample, with the rest having dissonant profiles of one kind or another, mainly between low and medium and medium and high combinations, which jointly account for 60 percent of the sample (table 4). When we relate these different profiles to different occupational classes (table 5), it becomes clear that, for all classes, dissonant taste profiles are more common than consonant ones. A case for a simple mechanism of transference operating across fields is difficult to sustain on the basis of these figures. Similar issues arise if we look at the space of lifestyles that, following Bourdieu, we have constructed for the Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion project by means of multiple correspondence analysis.6 Figure 1 summarizes the distribution of those tastes and forms of cultural participation (or nonparticipation) that are the most statistically significant outcomes of this analysis. The positioning of these modalities within this space tells us about the distribution of tastes and practices relative to one another, the degree of interconnection being stronger for modalities that are coadjacent to one another and weakest for practices that are distant from one another. The place of occupational 64

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Table 4 Consonant/Dissonant Profiles: Film, Television, and Art Consonant: high legitimacy

3 percent

Dissonant: medium/high combinations

32 percent

Consonant: medium legitimacy

20 percent

Dissonant: low/medium combinations

28 percent

Consonant: low legitimacy

1.5 percent

Dissonant: low/high combinations Dissonant: low/medium/high combinations Not watch/other Total

3 percent 9 percent 3.5 percent 100 percent

classes relative to one another within this space is shown, alongside other demographic variables, in figure 2.7 It will be useful to look briefly at the practices, likes, and dislikes located in each quadrant of figure 1 and note the positioning of the classes shown in figure 2 relative to these. The lower left quadrant shows clustering of likes of a kind usually associated with traditional forms of high cultural capital: impressionism, modern literature, opera, visiting museums, art galleries, and stately homes. The high-legitimacy genres of film (literary adaptations and costume dramas) and television (news and current affairs, and documentaries) also appear here, as does classical music. High culinary tastes (French restaurants) and sports (squash and tennis) are also here. The main dislikes are of horror films, reality television, and fish-and-chip restaurants. The classes these likes and dislikes are most strongly associated with are large employers, higher level managers, and professionals, but we also find those in higher supervisory and intermediate occupations toward the right side of this quadrant. In the upper left quadrant, we find a more even balance of likes and dislikes, with some indifference in relation to a fairly wide range of items. Likes include rock music, heavy metal, electronic music, urban music (including hip-hop and R & B), modern art, football and rugby, and going to the cinema, pubs, night clubs, and Indian restaurants. The main dislikes are for country and western music and film musicals. Lower level managers are congregated within this quadrant. The upper right quadrant is most strongly characterized by dislikes or “never do’s,” particularly for genres or activities that feature positively in the lower left quadrant: classical music, museums, stately homes, modern literature, and French restaurants, for example. Likings are restricted to soaps on television and horror films, the latter figuring as a dislike in the lower left quadrant. Those who have never worked, lower level technicians, and those in routine and semiroutine occupations are located in this sector. Habitus Clivé

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Table 5 Consonant and Dissonant Taste Profiles/Occupational Class (percent) Low/ High Med/ Med Low/ Low Low/ High/ NumCons High Cons Med Cons High Med Other bers NSEC1

2

58

17

11

1

2

3

6

125

NSEC2

4

35

19

24

1

4

10

3

385

NSEC3

2

38

18

30

2

2

9

2

186

NSEC4

4

37

25

19

0

2

11

3

111

NSEC5

0.5

30

27

24

2

6

7

4

186

NSEC6

3

25

17

38

2

2

11

2

323

NSEC7

0.5

20

23

35

4

4

12

2

202

NSEC8

0

21

18

44

0

3

3

13

39

Key NSEC1: Large employers, higher managers, and professionals NSEC2: Lower professionals, higher technicians, lower managers, and higher supervisors NSEC3: Intermediate occupations NCEC4: Small employers and own-account workers NCEC5: Lower supervisory and technical workers NSEC6: Semiroutine occupations NCEC7: Routine occupations NSEC8: Never worked

In the lower right quadrant are a lot of dislikes, too, mostly of genres and activities that are featured positively in the upper left quadrant: science fiction, modern art, electronic music, urban music, horror films, and going to the cinema, night clubs, or rock concerts. The main likes are for westerns and musicals as film choices, country and western music, and fish-and-chip restaurants. Lower level supervisory workers and small employers are located in this quadrant. There is here, then, plenty of evidence that different modalities of cultural taste and practice are indeed distinguishable from one another in terms of their distribution within the space of lifestyles and that different tastes are more strongly associated with some class positions than with others. It is, however, important to be clear that such visualizations of the distribution of cultural practices statistically “salami slice” the tastes and practices of individuals and disperse these through the space of lifestyles depending on where the statistical nucleus for each choice or practice is located. We cannot therefore assume that likes and dislikes that are close to each other within this space are necessarily—as the notion of a unified habitus would require—shared aspects 66

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Figure 1. T he space of lifestyles—most active modalities.

of the taste profiles of individuals. If we look at the degree to which tastes are consonant for individuals across modalities relating to three areas of cultural practice—reading, visual art, and leisure activities outside the home—we find significant variations. The degree of consonance between these is highest in the lower right quadrant, with 71 percent of those who dislike modern art also not liking sci-fi movies and never going to rock concerts. But if we look at the related trio in the upper right quadrant—not liking any of the types of art we asked about, not reading any books over the past twelve months, and never visiting stately homes—the figure is only 26 percent. And in the upper-left quadrant, the degree of consonance relating to going to the cinema several times a year or more, preferring modern art, and most liking science fiction, fantasy, or horror literary genres is only 20 percent. Similarly, we find, in the lower left quadrant, that only 33 percent of those who like impressionism most and who go to stately homes several times a year or more also like modern literature. As with modalities of taste, each class position shown in this space is the nucleating center for classes whose individual members’ tastes might be dispersed throughout the four quadrants and have much in common with other classes. These are matters, however, that fall below the threshold of visibility, given that what this figure enables us to see are those aspects of the cultural practices that are most distinctively connected to particular classes relative to others. These are not necessarily the majority aspects of particular class tastes. As we have already seen, higher level professionals are, statistically, more prone to like landscapes than impressionism, for which their preference is highest relative to all other classes. Similarly, if, from the upper right quadrant, we group routine and semiroutine workers together with lower supervisory workers and lower technicians as the working class, we find a fair amount of “crossover” traffic to the tastes and practices located in the lower left quadrant that are most strongly associated with the higher managerial and professional classes. To give some examples: 44 percent of the working class like to read biographies and autobiographies; 15 percent like modern literature; 35 percent like classical music; 13 percent prefer news and current affairs programs on television; and 31 percent go to art galleries sometimes. To generalize the point, figure 3 plots the result of amalgamating the occupational class positions charted in figure 2 into three classes: the professional and large employers/upper managerial classes; an intermediate class comprising the lower managerial, higher supervisory, intermediate, and small employers groups; and the working classes, as already described. The three large dots indicate the location within the space of the means for each of these classes: the left-hand dot for the working class (the cloud of individuals encompassed by the left-hand ellipse for which it is the center), the middle dot for the intermediate class (the center of the cloud of individuals encompassed by the ellipse in the center of the space), and the right-hand dot for the professional/upper management class (the center of the cloud of individuals encompassed by the right-hand ellipse). While these three points 68

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Figure 2. T he distribution of occupational class, level of education, and age.

Figure 3. Overlapping class boundaries. occupy clearly distinct points in the space, there is clearly considerable overlap in the distribution of their members, and not just between the intermediate class and the two classes on either side of it; a good deal of space is shared between the working classes and higher level professionals and managers, too. It is clear that one thing we are not entitled to conclude from such constructions of the social space of lifestyles is that the tastes of either individuals or classes are homologous across different fields in the manner or to the degree that is required to suggest that classes constitute—in their relations to one another—the bases for unified habitus that are expressed, in the form of consonant taste profiles, as unified lifestyles.8 Yet this is precisely the conclusion Bourdieu reaches in Distinction. This is partly a reflection of the ways multiple correspondence analysis converts cultural data into binary opposites that do not allow finely graded distinctions to be taken into account and that, if not guarded against, exaggerate differences at the expense of shared tastes.9 However, it is also because Bourdieu focuses on those aspects of class practices that are most distinct from one another and discusses each class habitus separately. Shared tastes are interpreted as misleading appearances that are to be discounted as the results of different modes of appropriation arising from different class habitus (bourgeois cultural slumming or the arid scholasticism of the petite-bourgeois). Tastes, practices, and forms of cultural knowledge that might be the sources of dissonance within either individual or class habitus are thus visually and statistically disappeared. 70

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With considerations of this kind in mind, Rancière argues that Bourdieu’s procedures have a polarizing logic built into them such that they “produce inevitably what is required by the sociologist: the suppression of intermediaries, of points of meeting and exchange between the people of reproduction and the elite of distinction. . . . There must be no mixing, no imitation” (Philosopher 189). This suppression translates for Rancière into a missed opportunity with regard to the kinds of relations Bourdieu’s visualization of fields brings into view. “The fields whose interactions should define the thousand games of social mobility,” he writes, “are ever only redoubled mirrors where the simple law of distinction gets pulverized in a thousand reflections” (194–95). The source of this difficulty, Rancière suggests, lies in Bourdieu’s use of Kant to construct the cultural field in the form of a polarized opposition between the bourgeois aesthetic ethos of disinterestedness and the working-class taste for the necessary with all the related antinomies that this division brings in tow. It is to this matter that I therefore now turn.

The Contradictory Social Inscriptions of Aesthetic Discourse I begin here with a little-noted difference between the postscripts to Distinction and Bourdieu’s Rules of Art. In the first, Kant’s Critique of Judgment is explicitly center stage, its advocacy of disinterestedness—of the “purposiveness without purpose” of aesthetic judgment—serving as the very emblem of the denied social relationship that is at the heart of both the processes of purification through which refined taste is distinguished from the vulgar and the barbarous and of the social processes through which the bourgeoisie symbolically marks and legitimates its distinction from the working classes. But Kant is equally present, albeit entirely backstage, in the postscript to The Rules of Art, in which the commitment of writers, artists, and intellectuals to art as an end in itself, a form of “purposiveness without purpose,” is validated as a means of securing the autonomy of art against the dual encroachments of the market and the state. In developing this argument, Bourdieu urges intellectuals to accept responsibility for a project of historical anamnesis as part of a politics of freedom through which writers, artists, and intellectuals will seek, first, to recover the history of the struggle for a collective universal that is implicated in past struggles for artistic and intellectual autonomy, and second, to defend that autonomy against the state and market while simultaneously seeking to extend its social reach. In short, he proposes a version of the politics of freedom that is unimaginable without the role Kant envisaged for aesthetic judgment as itself a practice of freedom whose exercise involved the historical projection of a sensus communis. I point to this tension between the two postscripts to foreground two quite different “takes” on Kant’s account of disinterestedness: first, as the emblem of Bourdieu’s critique of the respects in which claims to disinterestedness in Habitus Clivé

71

aesthetic judgment serve as a cover for a class interest in distancing bourgeois taste from the interestedness manifest in working-class taste for the necessary, and second, as the precursor for his concern, evident in such later work as Pascalian Meditations, to mobilize a progressive account of art’s autonomy and of a disinterested interest in the universal as an aspect of his struggle for the Enlightenment. It is equally important to note that the stress Bourdieu places on both these aspects of Kantian and post-Kantian aesthetics occludes a third aspect of this legacy in which aesthetics was, and remains, connected to the state through cultural technologies of liberal government. As both Rancière and Jean-Phillippe Uzel have noted, this occlusion is fostered by Bourdieu’s failure to take account of the date of publication of Kant’s Critique of Judgment (1790) and of the contemporary political and cultural controversies with which it engaged. Consequently, Bourdieu evinces little appreciation of how Kant constructed his account of the aesthetic by writing against, and seeking to mediate the relations between, two earlier traditions of aesthetic theory: first, the role played by the eighteenth-century British civic humanist literature on taste, particularly as represented by Shaftesbury, in relation to the development of market society (see Barrell; Klein; Paulson; Poovey, “Aesthetics” and History), and second, the connections that had been forged between aesthetics and poliziewissenschaften in the context of the Prussian state. In his brief sketch of a genealogy of aesthetic theory in The Rules of Art (294–95), Bourdieu, while including Kant’s relation to the civic humanist tradition, overlooks Kant’s engagement with Christian Wolff (1750), who, by legitimating the subordination of the lower faculty of judgment to the higher one of reason (and, thereby, of the people to philosopher bureaucrats) had served as the philosophical high priest of the Prussian state. Bourdieu thereby misses the significance of the ways Kant refashioned the stress that Shaftesbury had placed on aesthetics as a practice of self-formation to formulate a program for the exercise of aesthetic judgment that would disconnect it from the directive programs of social management of the Prussian state and transform it into a liberal practice of the self that was subsequently, in the Rechstaat introduced by the reforms of 1806, connected to the programs of Bildung (see Caygill; Chytry; Guyer). Rancière’s conception of the role of aesthetics in effecting a “distribution of the sensible” offers a helpful framework for understanding the consequences of these developments. In this conception, aesthetics is placed at the core of politics through the role the distribution of the sensible (that is, the capacity for sensory perception) plays in establishing a division between on the one hand those who are deemed to be a part of the community of citizens because their occupations grant them both the time and capacities to care and thus to take responsibility for what the community has in common—that is, to govern as well as be governed—and on the other those who are judged to be fit only to be governed because they lack such capacities. The example Rancière cites is Plato’s contention that artisans cannot play an active part in government because they do not have the time to devote themselves 72

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to anything other than their occupations. However, the “distribution of the sensible” operates similarly in the relations between liberal and mechanical occupations within the discourse of eighteenth-century civic humanism—in Joshua Reynolds’s theory of painting, for example (see Barrell). In this discourse, civic entitlements, just as much as the capacity to appreciate beauty disinterestedly, were restricted to those whose ownership of the land and/or pursuit of liberal occupations both freed them from the possibility of being subjected to the will of others and freed their minds from the routine drudgery of mechanical occupations so as to be able to take a “disinterested” interest in the common good. What matters from this perspective is less disinterestedness as a means of establishing a distance in social space from those whose horizons are limited to necessity by dint of their occupations than the role of disinterestedness in producing a position in political space that confers on those who can exercise command over and control of the self the capacity to direct the conduct of others. I shall return to this point. For now, though, we need to take account of the further distinction Rancière makes between two different regimes for the “distribution of the sensible”—the poetic or representative regime of the arts and the aesthetic regime of the arts—and of the different ways these construe the relationships between different ways of doing and making. In the first of these regimes—the “fine art” system of the classical age is the case Rancière mentions—art is distinguished from other ways of doing and making, those of mechanical occupations for example, and is organized into hierarchies conceived in terms of the representative capacities of different genres: the dignity of their subject matter, for example. These hierarchies function as analogies for social and political hierarchies and, thereby, as a means for the distribution of unequal civic capacities and entitlements. By contrast, the aesthetic regime of the arts does not establish a division between art and other ways of doing and making as such but “is based on distinguishing a sensible mode of being specific to artistic products” (Rancière, Politics 22). This mode disconnects the sensible from its ordinary associations and connections by subjecting it to the power of a form of thought that renders the sensible foreign or strange to itself. This conception of the aesthetic frees art from any specific rule, such as that of particular artistic hierarchies or genres. Rancière’s contention that the aesthetic regime of the arts aims to effect a redistribution of the sensible to the extent that it promises both a new life for art and a new life for individuals and the community is equally important. For this construction produces an orientation that is concerned both to secure the autonomy of art and to ground that autonomy “to the extent that it connects it to the hope of ‘changing life’ ” (“Aesthetic” 134). In contrast to Bourdieu’s account of the relations between autonomy and heteronomy as opposing principles defined in a relationship of simple antagonism to one another, Rancière argues that the aesthetic regime of the arts generates a series of different “emplotments” of the relations between autonomy and heteronomy. Flaubert’s l’art pour l’art, the educative Habitus Clivé

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mission of museums and libraries, early industrial workers’ search for freedom through literature, Adorno’s negative aesthetics, and the commercialization of art as a means of bridging the division between the art of the beautiful and the art of living are all different “emplotments” of the possible courses of action that are generated by the “and” that derives from “the same knot binding together autonomy and heteronomy” but which the emplotments operate differently (134). This framework makes it possible to take account of the multiple and often contradictory social inscriptions of aesthetic practices in the aesthetic regime of the arts. To the extent that it is no longer necessarily attached to a division between different ways of doing and making, art no longer necessarily functions as a means of marking divisions in the order of social occupations. The experience of the autonomy of art as the moment when the orders of the sensible are suspended becomes a moment and space, an opportunity, for free self-shaping that is, in principle, available to all. It becomes, in Schiller’s conception, a “specific mode of living in the sensible world that must be developed by ‘aesthetic education’ in order to train men susceptible to live in a free community” (Rancière, Politics 27). It is therefore easy to see how, as one of its social inscriptions, this conception of the aesthetic came to be connected to the programs of Bildung that were concerned, beyond the ethical training of state bureaucrats and the private cultivation of the bourgeois, to translate culture, in its Kantian conception, into programs of pubic education through which the governed were to be drawn into the orbit of practices of selfgovernment (Kosellek). This is not a role performed by aesthetic discourse in its pure forms. It rather concerns the respects in which—in Linda Dowling’s telling observation—aesthetics came to be vulgarized as, by being connected to programs of government intended to incorporate new constituencies into liberal techniques of self-rule, it was connected to socially utilitarian conceptions of art and its function. But this “muddying” of the relations between art and life is precisely what the aesthetic regime of the arts makes possible in its concern to connect art to the task of changing life. This remains a continuing aspect of the social inscription of aesthetic discourses, one of the ways relations of autonomy and heteronomy have been “emplotted” in the aesthetic regime of the arts. Bourdieu’s neglect of these considerations means that he ignores what has been and remains a tension within the rhetorics and practices of the public cultural institutions developed in the nineteenth century—art galleries, libraries, concert halls—to the extent that these have operated both as key sites for the operation of practices of distinction while also, and often at the same time, aspiring to function as institutions of civic governance committed to spreading the reach of art.10 Bourdieu is no doubt right to call attention to the role of the art gallery in producing the pure gaze of aesthetic contemplation. But this needs to be complemented by accounts of the parallel attempts to train the eye of the visitor in a civically utilitarian fashion that also formed—and still forms—an important aspect of the practices of public art galleries (Bennett, “Multiplication” and “Civic Seeing”). 74

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Rancière’s sense of the different ways the “and” is operated in the knot that binds autonomy and heteronomy together in the aesthetic regime of the arts helps to make sense of the relations between consonant and dissonant profiles discussed in the previous section. The degree of dissonance we saw here is probably best accounted for in terms of the operation of commercial forms of cultural production in spreading cultural practices across class boundaries in the interests of audience maximization. It is, however, also important to stress the degree to which the kinds of governmental inscription of aesthetic discourses discussed above have also—alongside traditions of working-class self-improvement—led to significant forms of working-class participation in the forms of high culture associated with the institutions of legitimate culture. This development is something Rancière set out to show in a project of historical recovery that, in a revision of cultural forms of ouvrièrism, aimed not to give back to forgotten traditions of working-class writing and reading their lost voice but to show how the literary activities of significant cohorts of nineteenth-century workers undermined the distinction associated with the earlier poetic regime of the arts between those who performed useful labor and those who aspired to freedom through the disinterested pursuit of aesthetics.11 Jonathan Rose similarly shows, for a range of periods from the early nineteenth century to the immediate post–World War II years, how far, for significant sections of the British working class, literary and musical tastes and practices were shaped both by governmental and commercial initiatives aimed at the diffusion of high culture and by working-class forms of autodidacticism shaped by institutional initiatives connected to the development of the labor movement within which the ethos of disinterestedness—mediated via Matthew Arnold—was much in evidence. When introducing the working-class aesthetic in Distinction, Bourdieu argues that it is “constantly obliged to define itself in terms of the dominant aesthetics” (41). Yet, a little later, he suggests that the sole function of the working classes in the system of aesthetic positions is “to serve as a foil, a negative reference point, in relation to which all aesthetics define themselves, by successive negations” (57). This is to conduct definitional work in a mirror structure in which the bourgeois and working-class aesthetic dispositions are constructed by serving as each other’s antithesis. Yet the five principles Bourdieu attributes to the working-class aesthetic—the taste for the necessary, carnivalesque excess, settling for the agreeable rather than stretching for the beautiful, confusing the beautiful with the good in the tendency to compound ethical and aesthetic judgments, and a failure to recognize the Kantian separation of content and form—will not serve this purpose when account is taken of muddied histories of the kind outlined above. The confusion of the good and the beautiful is rampant in post-Kantian aesthetics (Ruskin and Morris, for example); studies of subcultures have shown that a preference for form over content is by no means an exclusive feature of Kantian high aesthetics (Thornton); and not all high modernist aesthetics are premised on the disinterested appreciation of form—there is a strong utilitarian strain in Habitus Clivé

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early twentieth-century American modernism, reflecting its Puritan foundations (de la Fuente; Levine 146–60). Let us grant, then, that the antithetical structure informing Bourdieu’s conception of the aesthetic is unsustainable. The question I now turn to concerns the consequences of this point for his conception of the working class and its relations to intellectuals.

The Culture of the Necessary: Disqualifying the Working Class From Rancière’s perspective, Bourdieu’s analysis in Distinction is historically out of step in describing an articulation of culture to classes that conforms to the logic of the earlier poetic or representative regime of the arts in which some ways of doing and making are differentiated from others as art and connected to status groups on the basis of rigid and hierarchically organized divisions of genres. The analytical structure of Distinction is similarly informed by the discursive coordinates of the aesthetic traditions Kant wrote against, in which the link between aesthetic practices and social differentiation forms part of a broader set of practices that qualified some for citizenship while simultaneously disqualifying others. This pattern is evident in eighteenthcentury civic humanist aesthetics, in which the capacities to judge art and to govern are linked together as products of the freedom from toil and from political interference that the gentry derived from their ownership of land. The pursuit of liberal occupations also facilitated the development of an intellectual capacity to abstract from particulars so as to have regard for the civic good of the whole body politic that found its aesthetic complement in the disinterested appreciation of form. Both of these capacities were denied those in mechanical occupations, to the extent that their horizons were judged to be limited to the performance of routine functions. There are echoes of these earlier positions in Distinction, particularly in Bourdieu’s approach to the working-class culture of the necessary. This differs from his approach to other habitus. In his discussion of the relations between habitus and the space of lifestyles, Bourdieu identifies two factors structuring the habitus: first, the intrinsic properties that derive from the conditions of existence of the class concerned, and second, the relational properties each class derives from its position relative to other classes such that the whole system of such differential relations is inscribed within each habitus. However, the balance between these two factors is uneven, since the working class is assigned the role of functioning as a fixed point of reference in relation to which other positions differentiate themselves. The working-class habitus is therefore not itself a site of differentiating activity except purely negatively as, in the very process of rejecting the dominant culture, the working class is thrown back on its own pure class conditioning. Here the unmediated force of necessity speaks to and through the intrinsic conditions of class existence without any question of relationality entering into the matter. This has the 76

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further consequence of making the working-class habitus more singularly unified and fixed than those of other classes. As we have seen, Bourdieu allows exceptions to the unity of the habitus where tensions are generated by the contradictory location of individuals or groups across different fields—between the class positions of artists and their positions in the artistic field, for example, or, as in his own habitus clivé, where mobility trajectories open up a significant distance between class of origin and class of destination. And in later work (Social), Bourdieu’s account of the role of “technical capital” in organizing working-class choice in the housing market suggests a more open and differentiating approach to working-class habitus. For members of the working class in Distinction, however, the dire weight of necessity permits not the slightest chink of differentiation. They are not players in the field in which the game of distinction takes place; rather, they provide the setting against which that game is played, but only by others. As Rancière puts it: As for the poor, they do not play. Indeed, their habitus discloses to them only the semblance of a game where the anticipated future is not what is possible but simply the impossible: “a social environment” with “its ‘closed doors,’ ‘dead ends’ and ‘limited prospects’ ” where “the ‘art of assessing likelihoods’ ” cannot euphemise the virtue of necessity. Only those who are chosen have the possibility of choosing. (Politics 183) We can see the consequences of this exclusion in the following passages from Distinction, which deny the working class, evoked in the form of a proletarian sublime, any capacity for aesthetic judgment of form disconnected from the choice of the necessary. Nothing is more alien to working-class women than the typically bourgeois idea of making each object in the home the occasion for an aesthetic choice . . . or of involving specifically aesthetic criteria in the choice of a saucepan or cupboards. (379) Rooms socially designated for “decoration,” the sitting room, dining room or living room . . . are decorated in accordance with established conventions, with knick-knacks on the mantelpiece, a forest scene over the sideboard, flowers on the table, without any of these obligatory choices implying decisions or a search for effects. (379) Perhaps the most ruthless call to order . . . stems from the closure effect of the homogeneity effect of the directly experienced social world. There is no other possible language, no other life-style, no other form of kinship relation; the universe of possibles is closed. (381) In the chapter immediately following his discussion of the choice of the necessary, Bourdieu discusses the working class’s relation to politics. Taking issue with those he variously described as populists or class racists practicing an inverted ethnocentrism that credits the common people with an innate Habitus Clivé

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knowledge of politics, Bourdieu addresses the processes through which the working classes are politically disqualified, and disqualify themselves, because they are denied access to the appropriate means of forming political opinions and judgments. There is not space here to go into this account, beyond noting how Bourdieu sets this topic up by referring to Marx and Engels’s projection of communist society as one in which it is only the generalization of freedom from necessity across all classes that, by making participation in aesthetic practice and judgment possible for all, also allows “everyone sufficient free time to take part in the general affairs of society—theoretical as well as practical” (qtd. in Distinction 397). Marx and Engels’s position here echoes the ways that, in civic humanist aesthetics, the connections between aesthetic judgment and the political qualification of the gentry had been defined against the political disqualification of the artisan classes. The difficulty here is that, pending the equalization in the distribution of free time that Marx and Engels anticipate, the working class is disqualified from political agency in their work, too. Or rather, as Rancière argues, the proletariat is called on to fulfill a form of political agency (the revolution) that, in its actual forms, the proletariat cannot discharge until it has acquired the capacity to do so. This, however, is not something the proletariat can accomplish itself but must rather receive in the form of a gift by being impregnated by philosophy and thus, in practical terms, being subordinated to the direction of intellectuals.12 In the meantime, in its actual empirical forms, the proletariat is disqualified from political action unless guided from without by the philosopher. In Bourdieu’s account, too, the working classes, while possessing formal political rights, remain subject to informal political disqualification, owing to their exclusion from the means of forming political opinions and judgment. This disqualification, in turn, is an effect of their exclusion from the education system and the consequent limitation of their horizons to a habitus shaped exclusively by the culture of the necessary. Bourdieu’s concern, of course, is to identify these informal mechanisms of political disqualification as ones that need to be counteracted by the equalization of educational opportunities as the only means of universalizing the conditions of access to the universal that he sees as a precondition for full and effective citizenship. The difficulties concern what is to happen in the meantime. Bourdieu throws some light on this in his account of the mechanisms that are needed to translate probable classes into actual ones. Probable classes are defined by their relations to one another within the relationally constituted space of positions and are occupied by agents who are “subject to similar conditions of existence and conditioning factors and, as a result, are endowed with similar dispositions which prompt them to develop similar practices” (“What Makes” 6). For a probable class to become an actual class, such that the way its projects potentially divide the space of positions prevails over other potential divisions of that space (those derived from relations of gender or ethnicity, for example), depends on whether or not a political process of class making (he cites E. P. Thompson’s 78

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work favorably here) is able to produce the class as “a well-founded artefact” (8–9) in the same sense that Durkheim spoke of religion as a “well-founded illusion.” But this can only be the result of a process of delegation that is simultaneously one of dispossession: A “class,” social, sexual, ethnic, or otherwise, exists when there are agents capable of imposing themselves, as authorised to speak and act officially in its place and in its name, upon those who, by recognising themselves in these plenipotentiaries, by recognising them as endowed with full power to speak and act in their name, recognise themselves as members of the class, and in doing so, confer upon it the only form of existence a group can possess. (15) In Bourdieu’s work, from Distinction (where it needs a little digging to unearth) to his later writings (where it is quite explicit), the working class’s cultural deprivation both requires such delegation and leads to its subordination to a cadre of universal intellectuals. This cadre, by virtue of its interest in the pursuit of disinterestedness, is charged with the responsibility for distilling the universal from the past struggles of artists and intellectuals and of representing it in the present. Yet, as Ben Singer notes, the logic of such a claim to universality requires that this cadre of intellectuals must somehow include the excluded through a relation of “representational substitution” if they are to be able to claim to speak for the interests of humanity in the making. But how then, Singer asks, can this representational substitution “overcome the divisions it decries when the division between representatives and represented is so great that the represented appear totally incapable of representing themselves (because they lack the dispositions and aptitudes, not to mention the socially validated competencies)”? The solution implicit in Bourdieu’s work, he argues, is “a pedagogical utopia wherein the logic of substitution is gradually replaced by a logic of representational absorption such that everyone is able to speak the language of the universal” (294). In the meantime, though, the system for disqualifying those who labor from an entitlement to a full place in the polis, which was associated with the poetic regime of the arts, remains in place. There are good reasons to value Bourdieu’s work for the issues it has opened up around the relationships among cultural capital, the education system, and contemporary processes of class formation and differentiation. There are, though, equally good reasons for wanting to detach such concerns from the coordinates supplied by the conception of the relations between aesthetics and politics within which Bourdieu’s analyses of cultural consumption are set. This reconsideration involves, as I have tried to show, careful examination not just of Bourdieu’s central theoretical categories but also of the procedures—of questionnaire design, techniques of visualization, and the interpretation of statistical data—through which such categories are operationalized in empirical analysis. It also requires a more nuanced account Habitus Clivé

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of the relations between aesthetics and the social than Bourdieu’s “take” on Kant gives us. Rancière’s perspective on the aesthetic regime of the arts, I have suggested, meets this need by the more pluriform set of relations between autonomy and heteronomy that are opened up by its account of the varied organization of the “and” that binds the relations between the life of art and the art of life.

Acknowledgment I thank Philip Goldstein for his comments on earlier versions of this essay and Jim Machor for his detailed editorial work on the text: The argument is considerably improved as a consequence. My thanks to them, too, for inviting me to first present the ideas from which this essay has developed at the American Reception Studies conference they organized at the University of Delaware, in Newark, Delaware, 25–27 September 2005. Thanks are due, too, to the members of the CCSE project (Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion: A Critical Investigation, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council from 2003 to 2006) team for comments on earlier drafts, and to John Frow, Arturo Morato, and Marcel Fournier for the opportunity to present earlier versions of the essay as a public lecture at the University of Melbourne and as a plenary lecture at the World Congress of the International Sociological Association in Durban in 2006.

Notes 1. I refer here to the project Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion: A Critical Investigation (CCSE), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council from 2003 to 2006. This examined the relationships between cultural practices and social differentiation on the basis of a questionnaire applied to a main sample of 1,564 respondents and a minority ethnic boost sample of 227 (Indian, Pakistani, and Afro-Caribbean), as well as an accompanying program of focus group discussions and household interviews. This inquiry was conducted by a team comprised of Tony Bennett (principal applicant), Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde (coapplicants), David Wright, and Modesto Gayo-Cal (research fellows). The applicants were jointly responsible for the design of the national survey and the focus groups and household interviews that generated the quantitative and qualitative data for the project. Elizabeth Silva, assisted by David Wright, coordinated the analyses of the qualitative data from the focus groups and household interviews. Mike Savage and Alan Warde, assisted by Modesto Gayo-Cal, coordinated the analyses of the quantitative data produced by the survey. Tony Bennett was responsible for the overall direction and coordination of the project. 2. These aspects of my discussion develop further a vein of criticism begun in Bennett, “Historical Universal.” 3. This aspect of Bourdieu’s approach is made clear in his diagrammatic representation of the relations between habitus, which anchors each habitus in different 80

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conditions of existence (Distinction 171). These condition the operations of each habitus so that, as a “structured and structuring structure” (171), it is only able to rework the conditions that structure it in ways that guarantee the production of a unified lifestyle that is the expression of those conditions of existence. 4. Bourdieu’s work is most vulnerable to criticism here by feminist challenges to the centrality he accords class as the source of the unity of the habitus (see, for example, Adkins; Silva). However, my aim is to show that class will not serve this purpose, even discounting the complicating effects of gender or ethnicity. 5. The allocation of particular genres to different legitimacy categories here is also based on the results of correlation analyses identifying statistically significant connections between different choices. A liking for news and current affairs on television thus correlated positively with a liking for costume drama and literary adaptations in the cinema and negatively with a liking for romance, which, in its turn and reflecting the operation of gender, correlated strongly with a liking for soap operas. Across the relations between television and art, a strong liking for Renaissance art correlated negatively with liking soaps, whereas a strong liking for portraiture—which is strongly gender driven, in that nearly twice as many women as men prefer portraits—correlated positively with a strong liking for soaps. This is not to suggest that these classifications are without their difficulties, especially for genres that stand at the intersections of hierarchies of genres articulated in relation to class or level of education and those articulated in relation to gender. In the case of film, for example, correlation analysis showed strong connections between preferences for action, thriller, adventure, and war movies and westerns on the one hand and between romance and musicals on the other, as two genre sets differentiated from each other primarily in terms of gender. Preferences for genres within each of these genre sets also correlated negatively with genres that have a higher cultural legitimacy. This was true of the relations between preferences for war movies and art cinema, for example, and for those between romances and film noir. Yet, in spite of these similarities, I have classified action, thriller, and adventure movies as medium-legitimacy genres and romances as low-legitimacy genres mainly in view of the different ways class and gender operate in relation to them: 21 percent of women expressed their first preference for action, adventure, and thriller movies, and of these, approximately a third were from the professional and intermediate classes, whereas only five men in total indicated a preference for romances, with two of these located in the intermediate classes and none in the professional class. My differential classification of these two genres thus reflects the greater weight of male in relation to female hierarchies and their role in structuring both women’s and men’s viewing preferences. It should also be noted that I have interpreted the “none” category in the art subfield as the equivalent of low-legitimacy choices in film and television. I have done so in view of the far greater number of respondents who answered “none” in relation to the list of genres given: 137 in contrast to 26 for film and 6 for television. Since 74 percent of this figure was made up of those with no or lower secondary educational qualifications, I have interpreted this as denoting a situation outside the art field and therefore an inability or reluctance to make judgments within it. It is worth adding that these legitimacy classifications also fit well with available accounts of the organization of the British art field. Brandon Taylor discusses the downward social trajectory of portraiture since the eighteenth century as a consequence of its subordination of artist to patron Habitus Clivé

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and of form to referent. M. Grenfell and C. Hardy include Renaissance art and impressionism among what they characterize as a rearguard formation (yesterday’s most consecrated art) and the consecrated avant-garde, respectively, while classifying examples of what we defined as modern art as an avant-garde still struggling for legitimacy. 6. For a full account of the methods used to construct this space, see Gayo-Cal, Savage, and Warde. 7. Figures 1, 2, and 3 were prepared by Alan Warde with the assistance of Modesto Gayo-Cal. Their assistance in this matter is gratefully acknowledged. 8. It might seem that the literature on omniverousness initiated by R. A. Peterson and by Peterson and A. Simkus is also concerned with dissonance, at least for the omnivore who is said to “graze” across legitimacy divisions. But this is not so. As Lahire notes in relation to Peterson’s work and later studies modeled on it, the omnivore thesis depends on being able to demonstrate omniverousness on the part of individual members of elite groups. However, owing to the nature of the data he works with and the methods of analysis he deploys, all Peterson is able to demonstrate is omniverousness at the group level. But all this establishes are variations between individuals rather than variations within the taste profiles of individuals, as the omnivore thesis requires. Work on our own data suggests that “the omnivore” is a mythic construction, which, when considered more closely, breaks down into a number of different omnivore types—a position closer to Lahire’s than to Peterson’s (see Warde and Wright). 9. The procedures of correspondence analysis exaggerate the degree of polarization of tastes by converting responses to questions into binary yes-or-no options even in circumstances where this is not warranted by the phrasing of the question—as, for example, when not expressing a liking for a particular film or television genre is converted, statistically, into not liking it. 10. Lawrence Levine (206–10) offers a more detailed elaboration of this point. 11. I draw here on Andrew Parker’s editorial introduction to Rancière’s Philosopher and His Poor and Donald Reid’s introduction to Rancière’s Nights of Labor. 12. Nicholas Thoburn suggests a helpful qualification to this position by showing how, when Marx does allow the working class to act in its own right, this is only via the production of the lumpenproletariat as a position of absolute negation from which the working class can distinguish itself.

References Adkins, Lisa. “Reflexivity: Freedom or Habit of Gender?” Feminism after Bourdieu. Ed. Lisa Adkins and Beverley Skeggs. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 191–210. Barrell, John. The Political Theory of Painting from Reynolds to Hazlitt: “The Body of the Public.” New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986. Bennett, Tony. “Civic Seeing: Museums and the Organisation of Vision.” Companion to Museum Studies. Ed. S. MacDonald. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. 263–81. ———. “The Historical Universal: The Role of Cultural Value in the Historical Sociology of Pierre Bourdieu.” British Journal of Sociology 56 (2005): 141–64. 82

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———. “The Multiplication of Culture’s Utility.” Critical Inquiry 21 (1995): 859–89. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984. ———. Esquisse pour une auto-analyse. Paris: Éditions Raisons D’Agir, 2004. ———. In Other Words: Essays towards a Reflexive Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 1990. ———. On Television and Journalism. London: Pluto, 1998. ———. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977. ———. Pascalian Meditations. Cambridge: Polity, 2000. ———. Practical Reason. Cambridge: Blackwell, 1998. ———. The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field. Cambridge: Polity, 1994. ———. Science of Science and Reflexivity. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. ———. The Social Structures of the Economy. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. ———. “What Makes a Social Class? On the Theoretical and Practical Existence of Groups.” Berkeley Journal of Sociology 32 (1987): 1–17. Bourdieu, Pierre, and Haans Haacke. Free Exchange. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Caygill, Howard. Art of Judgement. Oxford: Blackwell, 1989. Chytry, Josef. The Aesthetic State: A Quest in Modern German Thought. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Crossley, Nick. The Social Body: Habit, Identity and Desire. London: Sage, 2001. De la Fuente, Eduardo. “Max Weber and Charles Ives: The Puritan as Cultural Modernist.” Journal of Classical Sociology 4 (2004): 191–214. Dowling, Linda. The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996. Gayo-Cal, Modesto, Mike Savage, and Alan Warde. “A Cultural Map of the United Kingdom, 2003.” Cultural Trends 15 (2006): 213–38. Grenfell, M., and C. Hardy. “Field Manoeuvres: Bourdieu and Young British Artists.” Space and Culture 6 (2003): 19–34. Guyer, Paul. Values of Beauty: Historical Essays in Aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Klein, Lawrence E. Shaftesbury and the Culture of Politenesss: Moral Discourse and Cultural Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Koselleck, Reinhart. The Practice of Conceptual History: Timing History, Spacing Concepts. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002. Lahire, Bernard. La culture des individus: Dissonances culturelles et distinctions de soi. Paris: Découverte, 2004. ———. “De la théorie de l’habitus à une sociologie psychologique.” Le travail sociologique de Pierre Bourdieu: Dettes et critique. Ed. Bernard Lahire. Paris: Découverte, 2001. 121–52. ———. “From the Habitus to an Individual Heritage of Dispositions: Towards a Sociology at the Level of the Individual.” Poetics 31 (2003): 329–55. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Mauss, Marcel. Sociology and Psychology: Essays. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1979. Habitus Clivé

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Paulson, Ronald. The Beautiful, Novel and Strange: Aesthetics and Heterodoxy. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1996. Peterson, R. A. “Understanding Audience Segmentation: From Elite and Mass to Omnivore and Univore.” Poetics 21 (1992): 243–58. Peterson, R. A., and A. Simkus. “How Musical Tastes Mark Occupational Status Groups.” Cultivating Differences: Symbolic Boundaries and the Making of Inequality. Ed. Michelle Lamont and Marciel Fournier. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 152–86. Poovey, Mary. “Aesthetics and Political Economy in the Eighteenth Century: The Place of Gender in the Social Constitution of Knowledge.” Aesthetics and Ideology. Ed. George Levine. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1994. 79–105. ———. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Rancière, Jacques. “The Aesthetic Revolution and Its Outcomes: Emplotments of Autonomy and Heteronomy.” New Left Review 14 (2002): 133–51. ———. Malaise dans l’esthétique. Paris: Éditions Galilée, 2004. ———. The Nights of Labor: The Workers’ Dream in Nineteenth-Century France. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989. ———. The Philosopher and His Poor. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004. ———. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum, 2004. Rose, Jonathan. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Class. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001. Silva, Elizabeth. “Distinction through Visual Art.” Cultural Trends 15 (2005): 175–92. Singer, Brian C. J. “Méditations Pascaliennes: The Skholè and Democracy.” European Journal of Social Theory 2 (1999): 282–97. Taylor, Brandon. Art for the Nation: Exhibitions and the London Public. Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1999. Thoburn, Nicholas. “Difference in Marx: The Lumpenproletariat and the Proletarian Unnamable.” Economy and Society 31 (2002): 434–60. Thornton, Sarah. Club Cultures: Music, Media and Subcultural Capital. Cambridge: Polity, 1995. Uzel, Jean-Phillipe. “Kant et la socialite du gout.” Sociologie et Société 36 (2004): 1–12. Warde, Alan, and David Wright. “Understanding Cultural Omniverousness, of the Myth of the Cultural Omnivore.” Internal working paper for the project Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion: A Critical Investigation. Wolffe, Christian. The Real Happiness of a People under a Philosophical King. London: Cooper, 1750.

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The American Reception of Melville’s Short Fiction in the 1850s JAMES L. MACHOR

Melville’s career as a short story writer was a brief but productive one. In the wake of a steady decline in both his reputation and the sales of his novels— from the initial stunning success of Typee in 1846 to the disastrous reception of Pierre, his seventh novel—Melville in the spring of 1853 first tried his hand at short fiction, producing four stories by the summer, including one of his most remarkable, “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” In a brief span of three years, he would write a total of sixteen stories and would publish all but one, “The Two Temples.” Financially, his foray into short fiction was comparatively successful, since he was paid the unusually high sum of $5 per page (the customary fee was $3) by both Putnam’s Monthly and Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, the two periodicals in which all but one of his published short stories appeared. Besides earning nearly $1,000 for his fourteen magazine tales, which was substantially more than his royalties for Moby-Dick and Pierre combined, he produced at least four stories that modern Melville critics have come to regard as some of the best fictions in his entire oeuvre, after Moby-Dick: “Bartleby,” “The Encantadas,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” and “Benito Cereno.”1

Why Melville turned to the short story form after working exclusively in the novel is difficult to say with any certainty. In all likelihood, economic necessity and his damaged reputation after Pierre were factors. Following the disappointing sales of Moby-Dick, Pierre had sold a mere 283 copies by March 1853, causing Melville to make so little from the two novels that he was actually in debt to Harpers, his American publisher (Leyda 1:468).2 Not only did the low sales signal a further drop in Melville’s already sinking popular reputation; the widespread disdain heaped on Pierre in the periodical press had reached a point where several reviewers had put before the novel-reading public the proposition that Melville himself might have gone insane.3 Melville needed to do something to address both problems, and when George P. Putnam invited him, as one of seventy authors, to contribute to the new monthly magazine Putnam was about to commence, an avenue opened. Certainly the genre of short fiction possessed several attractive possibilities for Melville. Writing tales would tax him far less than novel writing—no small benefit for a man for whom the physical act of writing and revising had become a strain because of problems with his vision (Renker 115–16, 119). In addition, short stories would appear in venues Melville may have believed would provide him with a specific sense of the audience he would be addressing, since the contents of an individual periodical might serve as an index to the interests and tastes of its readers. Indeed, several Melville scholars have argued that Melville successfully curbed his writing excesses to pitch his stories to the specific readerships of Harper’s and Putnam’s (e.g., Charvat 57; Post-Lauria 165–96; Rowland 153–54; Sealts 513). There are, however, some problems with such claims. No evidence exists to indicate that Melville was attuned to the audiences of these two magazines when he began writing short stories. Such knowledge, in fact, would have been impossible to come by for Putnam’s, which was debuting in 1853 and consequently had not yet established an audience demographic or clear profile of its projected readership on which Melville could have drawn for orienting his stories. But even if Melville did not know much about the demographics of magazine audiences, the advantages he may have anticipated from the activity of short story writing itself were augmented by potential benefits intrinsic to the periodical medium in the mid-1850s. Putnam’s was one of new “paying” magazines, which offered him a flat fee per page irrespective of sales, and Melville managed to convince Harper’s to remunerate him at the same rate. He could thus count his royalties as a certainty on acceptance of a story rather than worry, as he had with his last five novels, about whether sales would even match his advances. Publishing in Harper’s also presented him with a fairly secure, straightforward way of paying off the debt he had incurred with his American publisher because of previous gaps between sales and advances. Just as important, the anonymous publication format of the two periodicals offered him some fresh at bats with a blank scorecard by providing him with opportunities to engage readers outside of the horizon of expectations they had for the now (supposedly) unstable author of Pierre and without 88

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the risk of further damaging his reputation if the stories were not well received.4 Melville’s reception by his contemporary audience is, indeed, particularly relevant to his brief career as a short story writer, but it is a relevance that has yet to be recognized. To be sure, over the last twenty years, Melville’s relation to the antebellum audience has become an area of trenchant commentary in Melville studies, as several critics have explored his fiction through the tools of reader-response criticism.5 However, while critical attention has focused on Melville’s conceptions of his audience and the ways his works seek to define the roles of their implied readers, few have followed up the work of Hugh Hetherington to examine the actual reception Melville’s fictions received in the mid–nineteenth century. Moreover, virtually no attention has been paid to the antebellum reception of Melville’s short fiction—a curious omission, given the modern perception among Melvillians of the importance of such works as “Bartleby” and “Benito Cereno” to the Melville canon.6 This gap is significant because that reception is both interesting and important to an understanding of Melville’s position and reputation in the antebellum marketplace for fiction. An underexplored area within the study of Melville’s reception, the antebellum response to his short stories provides not only an additional window on what it meant to read Melville in the mid–nineteenth century but also a clue as to why he abandoned short fiction to take one more crack at novel writing in the mid-1850s. A fully developed discussion of the antebellum response to all fifteen of Melville’s published stories is, however, not only beyond the scope of this essay but also virtually impossible, since only nine of Melville’s stories received any commentary in the antebellum press.7 Furthermore, of those nine stories, four received the bulk of the attention: “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” “The Bell-Tower,” and “The Encantadas.” Of these I want to concentrate on the first three, in part because of the significant differences between antebellum responses and the commentary on those stories by twentieth-century critics. These differences obtained, interestingly enough, despite the way antebellum reviewers anticipated the modern view of Melville as a writer linked to one of his contemporaries by virtue of a shared “dark” romanticism. The reviews and magazine notices of Melville’s stories, particularly as they appeared individually in Harper’s and Putnam’s, were on the whole few, though that paucity was not necessarily a function of his diminished reputation in 1853. In the conventions of reviewing, individual short stories simply were not ordinarily occasions for reviews. This was true even for the four stories that received the most attention. Consequently, reviewer comments on these tales came primarily as part of reviews of his 1856 collection The Piazza Tales, which consisted of the aforementioned four stories, as well as “The Lightening-Rod Man” and “The Piazza,” the last of which Melville wrote expressly for the collection. One of the most frequent responses in the periodical press consisted of a reviewer’s finding “Bartelby” and “The Bell Tower” hauntingly reminiscent of The American Reception of Melville’s Short Fiction in the 1850s

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Edgar Allan Poe’s short fiction. The link came through what reviewers saw as a genre resemblance: what modern critics call gothic but antebellum reviewers termed “Germanic mysticism” or simply the “Germanic.”8 “Admirers of Edgar Poe will see . . . an imitation of his concentrated gloom in the wild, weird tale, called ‘Bartleby,’ ” said the United States Magazine, adding, “in the ‘Bell Tower,’ as well, there is a broad tinge of German mysticism, not free from some resemblance to Poe.” The Morning Courier and New York Enquirer likewise found that “The Bell Tower is a happy emulation, though not an imitation, of the style of poe,” a linkage repeated in the Salem Gazette.9 Such a comparison provided readers not only with a vehicle for making two of Melville’s stories comprehensible via a generic category but also with a touchstone for judging their quality. For the Literary World, the comparison was favorable, since “Mr. Melville’s ‘Bartleby, the Scrivener’ [is] a Poeish tale, with an infusion of more natural sentiment” in the form of the lawyer-narrator’s compassion (3 Dec. 1853, Inge 32). The National Aegis, by contrast, responded more ambivalently. On the one hand, the Aegis reviewer found that the “weird, fantastic fancy of Poe, extreme in the writings of that unhappy, distraught man, is . . . shared by Melville” in “Bartleby” and “The Bell-Tower,” but this reviewer also felt that Melville “manages to infuse a mellowing sympathy in his composition” and is “more natural than his rival.” Hence, Melville “wears the palm of superiority” in handling the “strange commingling of humor and horror” in his Germanic tales (4 June 1856, Higgins and Parker 474–75). The connection reviewers made between Melville’s and Poe’s stories was, however, a mixed boon, even when it was couched in favorable terms. To Melville’s benefit, Poe certainly had achieved substantial notoriety and even some fame through his short fiction, magazine journalism, and poetry—particularly with the publication of “The Raven”—and critical approbation had grown in some circles since his death in 1849. However, Poe’s reputation as a magazinist and short story writer was mixed, especially after the appearance of his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. Reviewers objected to the “gloomy exhibition of passion” in the tales of Poe “belonging almost peculiarly to . . . the German school” (Georgia Chronicle, qtd. in Thomas and Jackson 156). Others remonstrated, as the Southern Literary Messenger had, that there was “too much German horror in his subject” (“Literary Notices”). Anticipating one of the charges that would later be leveled against Poe himself, a reviewer in the Boston Evening Gazette went so far as to claim, “The wilder and more impassioned tales of Mr. Poe, are of a dark, mystic German character, . . . shadowy and strange, like the phantasmagoric dream of an opium-eater” (qtd. in Ljungquist 45). Further troubling this dark side of Poe’s reputation were the posthumous fabrications and distortions spread by his ill-chosen literary executor, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, in his infamous “Ludwig” article and his “Memoir,” which traduced Poe with innuendoes of drunkenness, moral turpitude, and mental instability (Quinn 645–46, 668–76). In linking Melville with Poe, reviewers were thereby doing the author of “Bartleby” and “The Bell-Tower” as much harm as good by obliquely 90

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reinforcing implications about Melville’s questionable sanity raised in responses to Pierre. When it came to deciphering the characters and meaning of “Bartleby,” however, reviewers were guided less by authorial affinities or generic assumptions and more by what Peter Rabinowitz has called structural “rules of notice”—that is, interpretive codes that privilege certain elements, such as the beginning and end of a narrative, as cues to textual significance (43–44). For some antebellum readers of “Bartleby,” one cue came from the lawyernarrator’s opening comment that he “could relate divers histories” about the law-copyists he has known, “at which good-natured gentlemen might smile, and sentimental souls might weep,” but that he would “waive the biographies of all other scriveners for a few passages in the life of Bartleby, who was . . . the strangest I ever saw or heard of ” (Piazza 13). Focusing on the last part of this comment, a reviewer in the New York Tribune interpreted both the story and the character of Bartleby as a “curious study of human nature” (23 June 1856, Higgins and Parker 479), while the New Hampshire Patriot grounded its interpretation in the first part of the narrator’s comment and called “Bartleby [sic] a story we hardly know whether most sad or most laughable” (4 June 1856, Higgins and Parker 473). In trying to get a fix on Bartleby, the Boston Evening Traveller found the key at the close of the tale: “The quaint explanation of his extraordinary silence comes at length: he had spent nearly all his former life in the Dead Letter Office at Washington” (3 June 1856, Higgins and Parker 473). A noteworthy feature of these responses is that they uniformly interpreted the character of Bartleby within the perspective of the lawyer-narrator, whose point of view and reliability many modern Melville critics have come to question. That is, antebellum readers assumed that the lawyer-narrator offered an authoritative and trustworthy perspective for information and implications about Bartleby. Such a reading was not a result of reviewer obtuseness or interpretive error, however; it was a response constituted by the particular interpretive assumptions of the time regarding narrators in fiction and their relation to a text’s author. As Nina Baym has pointed out, antebellum reviewers viewed fiction as a narrative mode that “was expected to be delivered in a single, conventional voice from a conventional stance,” which was in turn associated with that of the author himself or herself. Hence, when thinking about the “vision of the narrator, reviewers assumed that they were talking about the real author” (119, 146). This was even the case for what reviewers called “autobiographical” novels (i.e., first-person fictional narratives), since such a form was not interpreted as an index to epistemological questions about a narrator’s reliability but was, instead, viewed as a means for strengthening reader identification and sympathy with a narrator who was supposedly telling his or her own story (147). Within such assumptions, it is not at all surprising that reviewer response to Melville’s lawyer-narrator took the shape it did. What makes the antebellum response somewhat surprising, however, is that by 1853 the concept of an unreliable narrator in autobiographical fiction The American Reception of Melville’s Short Fiction in the 1850s

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had started to appear among reviews in several of the leading periodicals, including the Southern Literary Messenger, Graham’s Magazine, and the American Whig Review (Machor, “Poetics” 56–58). Since “Bartleby” was published in late 1853 and again in the 1856 Piazza Tales, it could have been a candidate for this interpretive move. That no such move was made suggests one of two things. Either the strategy of doubt about autobiographical narrators was seen as relevant to full-length fictions but not to the shorter, more personal tale, or the strategy was simply still too new to be available for reviewers coming on a tale such as “Bartleby,” whose narrator struck them as conventionally sincere and congenial. In either case, “Bartleby” remained meaningful for reviewers within the standard interpretive protocol for autobiographical fictions, which equated narrative and authorial perspectives. If a striking distinction exists between antebellum and twentieth-century academic responses to “Bartleby,” an even larger difference between the two obtains for “Benito Cereno.” Modern Melville criticism on this tale has tended to take one of two forms. One camp has read it as a symbolic meditation on the nature of human nature, good and evil, innocence and experience, superficial beatitude and the “blackness of darkness” beneath it all (e.g., Matthiessen 507–8; Howard 218–22). The other common reading, which has become dominant over the last twenty-five years, sees “Benito Cereno” as a powerful representation and indictment of Western colonialism and American slavery, racism, and imperialism (e.g., Karcher 127–43; Post-Lauria 201; Emery; Sundquist; Nelson; Mackenthun 113–25). Certainly antebellum readers would have had reason to take hold of “Benito Cereno” through either of these interpretive paradigms, especially the second. Slavery was, after all, a highly topical issue in the mid-1850s, and concerns about slave revolts were widespread, particularly in the South. The newspaper coverage of the Denmark Vessey insurrection plot in Charleston in 1822, the bloody Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in 1831, and the Amistad “mutiny” in 1839 had been extensive enough to cause those slave revolts to remain very much alive in the memories of white readers—a cultural frisson intensified by the dramatic productions The Long Low Black Schooner and The Black Schooner or the Pirate Slaver, both based on the Amistad case and both reportedly performed before packed audiences in the Boston area (Mackenthun 119).10 Moreover, as Marvin Fisher has pointed out, “Melville’s audience . . . might also have recognized some similarity between Alexandro Aranda’s benevolence toward his slaves” in Melville’s story and “the case of Nat Turner, who turned the opportunities offered by a ‘generous’ master into the staging ground for massive insurrection” (109). Then, too, when “Benito Cereno” appeared in Putnam’s in late 1855, that periodical had already established a reputation as an organ of “Black Republicanism” because of the antislavery views expressed in its pages. However, only two reviewers offered comments that even leaned in such a direction, and both were brief. The New York Sun gave the story a onesentence identification: “ ‘Benito Cereno’ is a strangely conceived story of a negro mutiny on board a Spanish vessel” (9 Jan. 1856, Higgins and Parker 478). 92

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The Sun reviewer made no broader connection between Melville’s tale and slavery in the United States. By contrast, the New York Evening Post did include such an allusion, but only as an indirect analogy, in noting Cereno’s ingratitude following Delano’s actions to retake the San Dominick at the end of the story. The reviewer explained that Cereno failed to treat Delano fairly for “having enforced a sort of fugitive slave law on so grand a scale” (9 Oct. 1855, Higgins and Parker 469). Why did the public response to “Benito Cereno” not include any discussion of it as an indictment of U.S. slavery or even any commentary on it, beyond a few sentences, as a story about black slavery? Perhaps one reason for the silence was tactical: Reviewers sought to avoid any discussion of the treatment of such a controversial subject in a short story at a time when national and regional tensions about slavery were so volatile. Such a concern seems unlikely, however, given the fact that it had not stopped reviewers from extended, heated discussions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin only a few years earlier, when tensions were just as high over the recent passage of the Fugitive Slave Law. What seem to have been at work, instead, for “Benito Cereno” were reader assumptions about Melville’s profile as an author. If reviewers did not respond to “Cereno” as a story about black slavery, the reason was that Melville simply had never been read as a writer dealing with political issues, at least not such a highly contentious, national one as slavery. Such a view of Melville may seem surprising today, not only in light of our view of “Benito Cereno” but also in the wake of Melville’s criticism of Westerners’ treatment of native peoples in Typee and Omoo, as well as his indictment of flogging and the naval penal code in White-Jacket. Nor were antebellum reviewers oblivious to these elements in those three novels. It is just that reviewers noticed them differently or, more precisely, constituted those features as having a different kind of import. Regarding the former, Hetherington’s discussion of the reviews of Typee and Omoo reveal that Melville’s critiques of the treatment of South Sea peoples, especially by white missionaries, were viewed not as a political act but as a form of legitimate or misguided ethical criticism that resulted from what reviewers saw as Melville’s own primitivist inclinations or, according to some, his personal moral failings (Hetherington 32–65, 77–95).11 The situation with White-Jacket was a bit different, in that responses to that novel did focus on its indictment of naval law. But the exposé of flogging in White-Jacket was directed at a practice of limited significance and one that reviewers took to be directly within a realm of social commentary intrinsic to Melville’s position as a “sailor-author,” a term by which he was frequently identified at the time. More important, as Charles Anderson, Hennig Cohen, and other scholars have demonstrated, Melville’s critique of naval discipline was largely an echo of what was already the dominant sentiment in the popular press and in most political circles by early 1850 (Anderson 430–31, Cohen xxvi).12 The combination of those factors made White-Jacket, in the eyes of reviewers, anything but a politically charged novel embroiled in a dispute of broad social import. In the wake of such responses, there simply was no interpretive framework The American Reception of Melville’s Short Fiction in the 1850s

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at the time for reading anything by Melville—including “Benito Cereno”— as controversial political fiction, much less a specific indictment of slavery, racism, or imperialism. To say this is not to deny that some antebellum readers somewhere might have made a sustained interpretive connection between these politically explosive issues and “Benito Cereno.” However, no records have survived, either in public or private forms, of such interpretive formulations. Hence, even if a few readers somewhere did respond along these lines, we simply have no idea whether they read “Benito Cereno” as an attack on slavery in general, as a critique of American (and Southern) slavery in particular, as a denunciation of past and present Latin American slavery, or as a cautionary tale warning of the need for vigilance against slave revolts. What we do know is that “Benito Cereno” was read as another Poesque story, in part because of its Germanic effect. “Benito Cereno,” asserted the New York Dispatch, “opens with a mysticism which reminds us of Edgar Poe’s prose tales” (8 June 1856, Higgins and Parker 477), while the New Hampshire Patriot and State Gazette called “Benito Cereno” a “narrative that one reads with the same creeping horror” experienced in a Poe tale or in “Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner” (21 June 1856, Higgins and Parker 473). What these reviewers pointed to was something others emphasized even when they did not connect “Benito Cereno” to Poe and Germanic fiction: that Melville’s story succeeded by keeping readers enthralled through its plot and limited point of view. According to a reviewer in the Knickerbocker, who placed “Benito Cereno” by invoking an interpretive version of what Roland Barthes would later call the “hermeneutic code” of mystery-and-solution (17), Melville’s tale was interesting because “in reading it we became nervously anxious for the solution of the mystery it involves” (Sept. 1856, Higgins and Parker 482). Just as reviewers found “Benito Cereno” and “Bartleby” fascinating stories, so was the public response to the Piazza Tales generally positive. It simply was not particularly enthusiastic. Reviewers found Melville’s stories entertaining but hardly noteworthy or particularly original, at least in comparison to what had impressed them in Typee, Omoo, and Redburn, his popular early novels. Even the parallels reviewers found with Poe helped contribute to the idea that “Bartleby,” “Benito Cereno,” “The Bell-Tower,” and other Melville tales, while engaging, were also somewhat suspect. Nor were the responses to The Piazza Tales very extensive in terms of either sales or reviewer commentary. Although Dix and Edwards, which published the collection, distributed 260 copies for review, few took up the opportunity to offer comments. With forty-nine reviews and notices, The Piazza Tales received the least amount of commentary of Melville’s books to that date. Perhaps even more disappointing, of the 2,500 copies of the volume that Dix and Edwards printed, fewer than 1,100 were sold (Melville, Correspondence 649).13 Ironically, just before its publication, George Curtis, the editor of Putnam’s, had warned John Dix about the collection: “I don’t think Melville’s book will sell a great deal. . . . He has lost his prestige,—& I don’t believe the 94

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Putnam stories will bring it up” (qtd. in Leyda 2:510). Curtis was right on both counts. In light of the modest-to-slight reception of his stories, Melville’s foray into the literary marketplace of short fiction was disappointing, not only because of the poor sales of The Piazza Tales but, more important, because his stories, both individually and in that collection, failed to rehabilitate his reputation. It is no surprise, therefore, that Melville decided to try to restore both by returning to the genre that had gained him some substantial successes in 1846 and 1847. It was, however, a short-lived return via a single work, his 1857 novel The Confidence-Man. But while Melville would come back to fiction once more, near the end of his life, with the unpublished manuscript of “Billy Budd,” it would not be until the second half of the twentieth century that his short fiction would come to be seen as an important component of the Melville canon and would become the occasion for substantial and significant commentary as part of the ongoing history of Melville’s reception.

Notes 1. For the figures on Melville’s income from his short fiction and from his magazine fiction in general, which included the serialized version of his eighth novel, Israel Potter, see Sealts 490–94; Parker 2:232. 2. For further information on the sale of Moby-Dick, Pierre, and Melville’s other novels, see Tanselle. On Melville’s debt to the Harper brothers in early to mid-1853, see Parker 1:163. 3. Reviewers in at least six American periodicals or newspapers questioned Melville’s sanity on the basis of Pierre: the Boston Post (4 Aug. 1852), the New York Commercial Advertiser (11 Aug. 1852), the Charleston Mercury (23 Aug. 1852), the New York Day Book (7 Sept. 1852), the Southern Quarterly Review (22 Oct. 1852), and the American Whig Review (16 Nov. 1852) (Higgins and Parker 419, 424, 433, 436, 440, and 447, respectively). 4. Eleven of the fourteen stories Melville published in Harper’s and Putnam’s appeared either anonymously or under a pseudonym: “Bartleby,” “Cock-a-Doodle-Doo!” “The Encantadas,” “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” “The Happy Failure,” “The Lightening-Rod Man,” “The Fiddler,” “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” “The Bell-Tower,” “Benito Cereno,” and “Jimmy Rose” (Sealts 458). 5. See, for instance, Norman; Bryant; Swann; Dimock; Post-Lauria; Kearns; Dauber 192–228; Railton 152–89. 6. Besides Hetherington, others who have attended to Melville’s antebellum reception include Parker and Person. In addition, the historical introductions to Melville’s novels in the authoritative Northwestern-Newberry Writings of Herman Melville contain a brief section summarizing reviewer responses to each novel. However, regarding the short fiction, Hetherington says nothing about reviewer comments, while Parker makes only two passing, half-sentence references to the stories’ receptions (270, 272). A similar absence of discussion or analysis of the nineteenth-century responses to The American Reception of Melville’s Short Fiction in the 1850s

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the short fiction also characterizes the five book-length treatments of Melville’s short stories: Fogle; Bickley; Dillingham; Fisher; and Newman. The only attention of any substance to the antebellum reception of Melville’s short fiction consists of several pages of general overview by Sealts (501–9). 7. The six that appear to have received no commentary are “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” “The Happy Failure,” “The Fiddler,” “Jimmy Rose,” “The Gees,” and (perhaps surprisingly) “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids.” 8. On the absence of the term “gothic” as a genre marker in discussions of fiction in the antebellum era, see Baym 201. 9. United States Magazine, Sept. 1856, Higgins and Parker 482; Morning Courier, 6 June 1856, Higgins and Parker 476; Salem Gazette, 24 June 1856, Inge 47–48. 10. Another slave revolt that may have been on the minds of U.S. readers in the mid1850s was the (today) lesser known revolt aboard the ship Creole during its voyage from Hampton, Virginia, to New Orleans in 1841. Gesa Mackenthun has asserted that the incident “caused a great stir in the United States” at the time (90). The insurrection and the court case it spawned continued to receive press coverage until the case was resolved in 1855. For an account of the Creole revolt, let by Madison Washington, see Jones. Frederick Douglass in part based his fictional narrative “The Heroic Slave” on the Creole incident. 11. For a discussion of the antebellum response to Omoo, see also Machor, “Reading.” 12. On this point about White-Jacket, see also Hetherington 183–84; Post-Lauria 95. 13. A factor in the disappointing sales and low profits of The Piazza Tales probably was the fact that, with the exception of “The Piazza,” the collection reprinted stories many readers had encountered in their magazine appearances. As a gathering of “twice-told” tales, the volume experienced the same difficulties Hawthorne had encountered with his Twice-Told Tales.

References Anderson, Charles Roberts. Melville in the South Seas. 1939. New York: Dover, 1966. Barthes, Roland. S/Z. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill and Wang, 1974. Baym, Nina. Novels, Readers, and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. Bickley, Bruce R., Jr. The Method of Melville’s Short Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1975. Bryant, John. “Allegory and Breakdown in The Confidence-Man: Melville’s Comedy of Doubt.” Philological Quarterly 65 (1986): 113–30. Charvat, William. The Profession of Authorship in America, 1800–1870. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. New York: Columbia University Press, 1958. Cohen, Hennig. Introduction. Herman Melville, White-Jacket. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1967. Dauber, Kenneth. The Idea of Authorship in America. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.

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Dillingham, William B. Melville’s Short Fiction, 1853–1856. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1977. Dimock, Wai-chee. Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Politics of Individualism. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989. Emery, Allan Moore. “ ‘Benito Cereno’ and Manifest Destiny.” Nineteenth-Century Fiction 39 (1984): 48–68. Fisher, Marvin. Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction and the American 1850s. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. Fogle, Richard Harter. Melville’s Shorter Tales. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960. Hetherington, Hugh. Melville’s Reviewers: British and American, 1846–1891. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961. Higgins, Brian, and Hershel Parker, eds. Herman Melville: The Contemporary Reviews. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Howard, Leon. Herman Melville: A Biography. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1951. Inge, M. Thomas, comp. Bartleby the Inscrutable: A Collection of Commentary on Herman Melville’s Tale “Bartleby, the Scrivener.” Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1979. Jones, Howard. “The Peculiar Institution and National Honor: The Case of the Creole Slave Revolt.” Civil War History 21 (1975): 28–50. Karcher, Carolyn. Shadow over the Promised Land: Slavery, Race, and Violence in Melville’s America. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980. Kearns, Michael. “The Student and the Whale: Reading the Two Moby-Dicks.” Reader 40 (1998): 1–27. Leyda, Jay. The Melville Log: A Documentary Life of Herman Melville. 2nd ed. 2 vols. New York: Gordian, 1969. “Literary Notices.” Southern Literary Messenger, Mar. 1835, 387. Ljungquist, Kent P. “Poe in the Boston Newspapers: Three More Reviews.” English Language Notes 31.2 (1993): 43–46. Machor, James L. “Poetics as Ideological Hermeneutics.” Reader 25 (1991): 49–64. ———. “Reading the ‘Rinsings of the Cup’: The Antebellum Reception of Melville’s Omoo.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 59 (2004): 53–77. Mackenthun, Gesa. Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature. London: Routledge, 2004. Mathiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. 1941. London: Oxford University Press, 1974. Melville, Herman. Correspondence. Ed. Lynn Horth. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1993. Vol. 14 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. 15 vols. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1968–93. ———. “The Piazza Tales” and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1987. Vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. 15 vols. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1968–93.

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Nelson, Dana. The World in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Newman, Lea Bertani Vozar. A Reader’s Guide to the Short Stories of Herman Melville. Boston: Hall, 1986. Norman, Liane. “Bartleby and the Reader.” New England Quarterly 44 (1971): 22–39. Parker, Hershel. Herman Melville: A Biography. 2 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996–2002. Person, Leland, Jr. “Mardi and the Reviewers: The Irony of (Mis)reading.” Melville Society Extracts 72 (1988): 3–5. Post-Lauria, Sheila. Correspondent Colorings: Melville and the Marketplace. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. 1941. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Rabinowitz, Peter. Before Reading: Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987. Railton, Stephen. Authorship and Audience: Literary Performance in the American Renaissance. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991. Renker, Elizabeth. Strike through the Mask: Herman Melville and the Scene of Writing. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Rowland, William G., Jr. Literature and the Marketplace: Romantic Writers and Their Audiences in Great Britain and the United States. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996. Sealts, Merton R., Jr. Historical Note. Herman Melville, “The Piazza Tales” and Other Prose Pieces, 1839–1860 . Ed. Harrison Hayford, Alma A. MacDougall, and G. Thomas Tanselle. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1987. Vol. 9 of The Writings of Herman Melville. Ed. Harrison Hayford, Hershel Parker, and G. Thomas Tanselle. 15 vols. Evanston: Northwestern University Press and Newberry Library, 1968–93. 457–533. Sundquist, Eric. “ ‘Benito Cereno’ and New World Slavery.” Reconstructing American Literary History. Ed. Sacvan Bercovitch. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. 93–122. Swann, Charles. “ ‘Benito Cereno’: Melville’s De(con)struction of the Southern Reader.” Literature and History 12 (1986): 3–15. Tanselle, G. Thomas. “The Sales of Melville’s Books.” Harvard Library Bulletin 17 (1969): 195–215. Thomas, Dwight, and David K. Jackson. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849. Boston: Hall, 1987.

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Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere Reception Studies and Utopian Literature KENNETH M. ROEMER

What could be more out of fashion than a book like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888)? Witness the didacticism, the monologic guide-visitor talks masquerading as dialogical argument, the now obsolete gadgets served up as newness, the values grounded in white, male, middle-class nineteenthcentury-isms, and the advocacy of a socialistic system at the opening of a twenty-first century when, for many American readers, the word “liberal” is an anathema (socialism is not even on their radar screen). In his recent book Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005), Frederic Jameson analyzes several other basic objections to the entire genre of the traditional literary utopia. For example, too many of the authors have been “maniacs and oddballs” (10), and their narratives and visions of utopia can be mired in sameness. (One French review of Bellamy was subtitled “Too Dull for Endurance” [“French Opinion” 457].) Jameson especially emphasizes the association of utopianism with Stalinism and other

forms of twentieth-century oppression—an association amplified by classic dystopias by Zamiatin, Orwell, and Huxley—and a confining sense of closure that can transform once-liberating texts into reading experiences that frighten and entrap twenty-first-century imaginations (182–210). Despite these well-known negative associations with literary utopias, the study of the genre and of utopianism in general has flourished over the past thirty years in scholarly articles, bibliographies, anthologies, books, specialized journals, national and international academic associations, and grand museum exhibitions at the New York Public Library and the Bibliothèque nationale in Paris attended by hundreds of thousands of viewers.1 One glaring omission in the flourishing of utopian studies has been reader-response/ reception studies. There have been surprisingly few studies of the readers of utopias (either as theoretical constructs or actual readers) who made meaning out of these strange texts.2 I say “surprisingly” because the diversity of the literature and its hybrid nature (combining among other genres manifesto, treatise, argument by dialogue, and narratives of travel, romance, and mystery) invite a rich variety of responses and because so much “documented evidence” of reading experiences exists in reviews, marginalia, letters, sequels, prequels, book-length fictional responses, illustrations, and material about the founding of intentional communities, national and international reform movements, and grand projects directly or indirectly inspired by literary utopias.3 In Utopian Audiences (2003) I address the omission by presenting utopian literature as a fascinating site for the expansion of reader-response and reception studies. In part 1, I stress the complex hybrid nature of literary utopias and then discuss the tremendous variety of documented evidence of reception including book illustrations.4 The rest of the book, except for the afterword, is an extended examination of theoretical and “real” readers of Looking Backward. I selected Bellamy’s utopia in part because its popularity and international influence generated a tremendous variety of reception evidence—as large as the Nationalist movement (a reform political party that had local branches from New England to California) and the Tennessee Valley Authority, which was headed by one of Bellamy’s biographers, and as small as Tolstoy’s marginalia (Kumar 135). Looking Backward also poses a challenging test to understanding how past and present readers made and make meaning out of a book that seems so distant from us today. Jameson speculates that we are not “well placed” to comprehend the tremendous appeal of Looking Backward because we are radically different readers from the readers in 1888 (Archaeologies 227). Indeed, for many modern readers, traditional utopias are “desperately unreadable.” Their “content [seems] as irrelevant to consumer society as the draft constitutions and natural or contractual theories of the classics of political science.” Jameson adds, however, that what has “actually become obsolete” is “a certain type of reader whom we must imagine just as addicted to the bloodless forecasts of a Cabet or a Bellamy as we ourselves may be to Tolkien . . . or detective stories” (Jameson, “Of Islands” 2). 100

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When I was searching for a label for modern readers of Bellamy, one that would articulate the distance between them and the original readers, I chose Robert Escarpit’s concept of the “alien” reader. His aliens are so far removed from the “community of assumptions” that linked the text to its initial audience that they cannot “penetrate” the text, cannot perceive its “reality.” They can produce only “distorted” readings (78, 81). In an attempt to avoid onedimensional explanations of why past (and some present) readers were (and are) moved by Looking Backward, I developed an eclectic approach, including discussions of the cultural construction of appropriate readers, of readers implied by the text, and of real readers: the first reader (Bellamy), almost 100 reviewers, and 733 modern (“alien”) readers.5 This essay extends that work by focusing on Bellamy’s late nineteenthcentury reviewers and the 733 late twentieth-century alien readers. In particular, it compares the reviewers’ concepts of competent readers of utopian literature to the profile of readers that emerged from the alien readers’ questionnaire responses and their written descriptions of the influences that shaped their reading experience. I label these influences transformational associations because they defined parallels between the text and the identified influences, but they also reconstructed the text to make it particularly meaningful to the reader. The comparisons between the reviewers and the modern readers, which I did not explicitly define and highlight in Utopian Audiences, reveal striking similarities: for instance, the ways they place the text within genre categories, their belief in American utopian aspirations, and their assumption that the competent reader of a literary utopia is not an aesthetic reader but one much closer to Louise Rosenblatt’s “efferent” reader—in this case one who could uncover the core ideas of the text rather than discover and appreciate its form.6 But the comparisons also suggest a fundamental shift in assumptions about the functions of literary utopias (possibly all literature) and their impact on readers. The shift suggests changes in beliefs about the power of books to transform perceptions and lives. I hope the comparisons will help us to address the enigma of Bellamy’s past appeal and the value of the “distorted” modern readings, to understand how readers make meaning from utopian texts, and to see why utopian literature is such an important site for reception studies.

1 Using reviewers as indices of reading strategies during a historical period is a risky business. As Nina Baym notes in Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, “a review does not necessarily represent the notions of anybody except its author, and even numbers of congruent reviewers may express only the opinions of a particular group of interested people” (18). Those interests were often quite biased. For reviews of Looking Backward, it is not surprising that Eugene Debs, Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere

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in the Locomotive Fireman’s Journal, his union’s publication, praised Bellamy’s egalitarian view of workers (Rosemont 163), that Peter Kropotkin criticized Bellamy’s authoritarianism in the anarchist journal Révolte, or that Henry George saw the seeds of a single-tax America in Bellamy’s utopia (Review). Another obvious problem is that among my sample of eighty-three reviewers, drawn primarily from Toby Widdecombe’s bibliography, I identified only three women reviewers and no minority writers. No wonder thorough examinations of how Looking Backward depicted gender and race were absent. One other problem was that tight deadlines and space restrictions could lead to misleading readings. For example, it is evident that the New York Times reviewer did not finish the book (or just skimmed Julian West’s return to 2000 ad after his nightmare return to 1887). He announces that the entire utopia “has only been [West’s] dream” (“Recent Books” 3). Despite these drawbacks, the Looking Backward reviews are valuable sources for reception studies. They were the most widely distributed published responses to the novel, appearing not only in the New York Times, the New York Tribune, Ladies’ Home Journal, Atlantic, Harper’s, and the Saturday Review, but also in a wide variety of American journals and in periodicals in other countries (Roemer, Utopian Audiences 140–45). Furthermore, James Machor reminds us that in nineteenth-century America reviews were “the primary vehicle for the dissemination and assimilation of ideas about the relation between fiction and readers” (64). This relationship was of particular interest during an era that believed in the power of books to transform individual lives and society. A convergence of forces enhanced this power: increased literacy rates, improved means of production and distribution, and advances in lighting and eyeglasses. Just as or more important was what John L. Thomas has called the “community of moral discourse” (91). Thomas and other scholars have argued that the “belief in the power of print was almost unlimited in Victorian America” (Sicherman 142). Along with this belief came the hope that reading could transform America for the better and a fear that it could instead corrupt America. As the tremendous popularity of Looking Backward became evident, reviewers often perceived themselves as moral guardians of an explosive force that had to be used rightly. Their response was to articulate a series of four reading strategies to control this force. One was a synecdochic approach by which the text was reduced to particular episodes (e.g., the analogy of the stagecoach on a rocky road for the American experience) that represented the set of core values and ideas readers should discover. Second, reviewers tested this set against contemporary events “outside” the text. The third approach was also contextual; they placed the core values and ideas within historical contexts.7 Fourth, the reviewers attempted to place and control the reading by constructing models of ideal and inappropriate readers. For the reviewers, the fourth strategy was the most significant. One of the first steps in this process was to indicate the nature of the text to which the readers were responding. Reviewers assumed that readers had to know what they were getting into if they were to respond properly and understand that 102

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what they were getting into was both unusual and powerful. Typically, the reviewers defined the text using specific intertextual comparisons and broad genre contexts that identified the nature and functions of a utopian text. For instance, the specific comparisons to Irving’s, Hawthorne’s, and Dickens’s fiction and to Henry George’s popular treatise Progress and Poverty (1879) emphasized Looking Backward’s imaginative qualities, its exposé and reform appeals, and its ability to popularize ideas and shape public opinion. The most common comparison to a popular novel—Uncle Tom’s Cabin— attests to the significant connections between utopian and sentimental reform fiction. This choice reflected a perceived similarity in content and appeal. The Pilot reviewer stressed the similarity in content when he proclaimed Looking Backward “the ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ of the industrial slavery of today” (“New Utopia”). Just as important was the potential impact (noted in early reviews) or the actual impact (discussed in reviews after mid-1889) of appealing to hundreds of thousands of readers, as Harriet Beecher Stowe had done, to alter their perceptions of the present and future and to use these altered perceptions as guides to the construction of a new, more egalitarian society. By making the specific comparisons, the reviewers’ primary argument was not that being a “competent” reader of Bellamy meant being a reader fully aware of the intertextual relationships between Looking Backward and the other texts. The reviewers were primarily concerned with using the comparative texts as defining markers, shorthand paradigms that demonstrated how Looking Backward’s power was rooted in combinations of imaginative flights; emotional, ethical, and realistic exposés; and socioeconomic proposals. Reviewers implied that readers needed to be aware of these combinations and, as the evocation of Uncle Tom emphasized, that the Looking Backward reading experience had the potential to alter personal lives and entire societies. Most reviewers went beyond comparisons to specific books to place Looking Backward within broad genre or multigenre contexts (discussed later). Their comments frequently implied genre hierarchies and appropriate reading processes. Like many Victorian cultural leaders, they often suspected that fiction was a poor medium for serious thought. J. A. M., the reviewer for the Knox College Monthly and Presbyterian Magazine, countered this position by noting that Bishop Vincent gave a “strong recommendation” for Looking Backward (209). J. A. M. was the only reviewer to seek dispensation from a bishop to discuss fiction. More typically reviewers, including William Morris, depicted the fictional elements of the book as necessary sugar coatings that would ease the consumption of important ideas for the average reader (see, for example, Morris, “Looking Backward” 287). This strategy became the basis for advice about reading techniques of separation and discovery similar to Rosenblatt’s processes of efferent reading. In the British magazine Academy, William Sharp proclaimed that Bellamy’s “real aim” was to examine “the most exigent problems of our day” and to “trace the evolution of social life within the twentieth century” (284). Although other reviewers avoided essentialist terms such as “real aim,” the clear message was Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere

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that competent readers were similar to discovers/exposers. They could separate the fictional from the intellectual/ethical portions of the text and privilege the latter, which Morris called the “serious essay” (287). Reviewers, in effect, recommended a hierarchical reading process according to which Julian West’s long sleep and romantic episodes were less worthy of attention than the dialogues between West and Dr. Leete about government, production, distribution, and labor. These “serious” essays were typically defined with nonfictional labels, including “political economy,” “social and political science,” “sociological tendencies,” even “philosophy.” Besides training readers to distinguish between the surface and the core of a literary utopia, the reviewers also hoped to help their readers to distinguish between fiction that was “ordinary” (a label used by the Tribune and other reviewers) and fiction that was serious and responsible. It is not surprising that they often turned to utopian literature as the most appropriate serious fictional genre designation for Looking Backward. Thus a century before Robert Elliott’s Shapes of Utopia, Gary Saul Morson’s Boundaries of Genre, and Chris Ferns’s Narrating Utopia appeared, many of these reviewers argued that literary utopias were “designed to be interpreted in the tradition of previous utopian literary works” (Morson 74). Typically reviewers made brief associations between respected utopias and Looking Backward. The early reviews mentioned Plato and Sir Thomas More frequently; later reviewers included works that responded to Bellamy such as Morris’s News from Nowhere and Howells’s Altrurian Romances. As when they made comparisons to specific texts, most of the reviewers were not suggesting that a specific reading background (e.g., utopian literature) was a prerequisite for understanding Looking Backward. (The notable exceptions were reviewers who claimed that Bellamy plagiarized from literary utopias—John Macnie’s Diothas [1883] or Mary E. Lane’s Mizora [1889, serialized in 1880–81].)8 Placing Bellamy within the tradition of Plato and More did, nonetheless, give Looking Backward a historical identity that, for Bellamy’s supporters, helped to make the text familiar and give it authority and, for his critics, helped to justify assertions about dull or dangerous literature. In either case, the reviewer became a crucial mediator who instructed readers by placing Looking Backward within a network of recognizable titles, genre connotations, hierarchies, and reading processes that would enable them to grasp Bellamy’s “real aims” and potential impact. The reviewers were activists. They hoped to create competent readers of this literary utopia. These readers would approach the reading experience armed with some knowledge of the hybrid nature of the text and with a charge to surpass the efforts of “mere taledevourers” (Freeman 297) by using their ability to identify and separate the fictional elements from the “central points” (Shortt 273) and then to examine these points by constructing and evaluating “in the reader[s’] mind[s]” the “contrasts” suggested by the text (“Recent American Fiction” 845). The reviewers went beyond descriptions and implications of the intertextual and genre contexts to speculate about the nature of readers’ minds as 104

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they were shaped by ideology, profession, class, and geography. The Current Literature reviewer singled out the members of Bellamy’s Nationalist movement, who had been inspired by Looking Backward, as offering the best source of ideal readers, the “enthusiastic Nationalistic neophyte” (“General Gossip” 185); in a mixed review, E. Douglass Fawcett chose those willing to consider socialism seriously and wrote off the “sleekly optimistic capitalist” who was not willing (475). Considering his anticipated audience of Presbyterian readers, it is not surprising that J. A. M. presented ministers as the ideal readers (211). It is also not surprising that the reviewers for the Knights of Labor (Martyn) and Pilot (“New Utopia”) focused on laborers. For Morris and Howells, the British and American middle classes were the appropriate audience. A commentator who called him- or herself “Housekeeper” in the Home correspondence department of Good Housekeeping critiqued Bellamy by negatively defining his readers out of existence. The rich would not be interested because they had servants; middle-class wives do not need help and would resent the interference in their “independent” private lives; and the poor were too weak-minded and “stubborn” to comprehend Bellamy’s theories. Besides, poor women would be too “idle” without housework, since they have no other “interests” (Housekeeper 214). Morris and Howells maintained opposing positions on the ideal situation for a middle-class Bellamy reader. Morris argued that Looking Backward empowered the urban industrial middle class. For them work was a curse. Urban centralization and technology had made this curse tolerable. The greater degrees of centralization and technological development that Bellamy’s vision offered confirmed, even empowered, their views of life and work, which Morris viewed as misguided (“Looking Backward” 288–89). Howells’s American perspective was quite different. City dwellers had seen enough of technological development. They were tired of it and oppressed by it. Rural Americans had not seen enough technological improvements to desire or fear them. Villagers, on the other hand, had “seen something of them,” enough to “desire them” but not to fear them (“Edward Bellamy” 254–55). For Howells’s smalltown readers, Bellamy’s utopia offered the promise of pleasure beyond the tolerable. Most of the reviewers avoided overly restrictive ideological, professional, class, or geographical definitions of Bellamy’s potentially competent or incompetent readers. Instead they preferred general terms such as the “average” reader (Howells, “Edward Bellamy” 254). Alexander Merriam made this point by placing Bellamy’s readers in the context of centuries of readers of utopias. More’s Utopia, which first appeared in Latin, and other “classic” utopias demanded “select readers” in a society where readers were only a tiny fraction of the population. Furthermore, the visions portrayed in pre-nineteenthcentury utopias were often so removed from the readers’ realities that even “select readers” could have difficulty conceiving of the utopias as anything other than thought experiments. Comprehending Looking Backward, on the other hand, did not demand a great deal of specialized knowledge, and the Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere

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industrial and technological developments of the nineteenth century had placed many elements of Bellamy’s utopia within the realm of possibility (225). Despite all their explicit and implicit arguments about “average” readers, these were select averages—readers who had special characteristics, which made them both vulnerable and powerful. As indicated, they were vulnerable enough to need reminders about (or a beginner’s lesson in) how to read utopian combinations of fiction and nonfiction. Average readers also lacked sophisticated knowledge about and the mental capacity to comprehend fully their historical moment and the complex theories designed to improve life. They could enter into the complexities of social and economic discussions and of socialism only if the “serious essay” came wrapped in familiar fictions and if the “central points” were simple. Reviewers depicted the simplification process with various degrees of praise and condescension. Clark W. Bryan, a reviewer for Good Housekeeping, complimented readers and Bellamy by suggesting that Looking Backward “lifted” the discussion of socialism out of the realms of complex economic issues and statistics to a level of “broader human sympathy” (96). M. Bentzon’s compliments were a bit more condescending. For him, Bellamy was “ ‘a very ingenious vulgarizer of ideas.’ ” The anonymous British reviewer who commented on this Frenchman’s review gave a positive, if somewhat deterministic, spin to this view of simplification: “ideas must be vulgarized before the vulgar can become ideal” (“A French Opinion”). Howells presented this process in a much less condescending manner, linking it to the blend of materialism and faith that for him was the essence of the American “average”: Our average is practical as well as mystical; it is first the dust of earth, and then it is a living soul; it likes great questions simply and familiarly presented, before it puts faith in them and makes its faith a life. It likes to start to heaven from home, and in all of this Bellamy was of it, voluntarily or involuntarily. (“Edward Bellamy” 256) The reviewers’ depictions of simplification and the results of the simplification process suggest an important aspect of their conceptions of the vulnerability and power of average American (as well as British and French) readers. They were dependent on ingenious popularizers like Dickens, Stowe, and Bellamy; they would be unable to grasp the great issues and reforms of the times without their humanizing fictions. Yet once they had grasped what they could grasp, they experienced “great” ideas and intellectual debates as articles of faith that could motivate and empower them to change their perceptions and their worlds. For the Twentieth Century reviewer, this was something to celebrate. For Morris it was to be feared. The reviewers defined another manifestation of the combination of vulnerability and power in their comments about the readers’ thoughtfulness, concern, and dissatisfaction. The primary reason Bellamy’s average readers 106

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were superior to “mere tale-devourers” was that they were “thoughtful readers” who were concerned about “the great evils of our times” (“Nationalism and Modern Romance” 57). Anticipating Jameson’s emphasis on the power of literary utopias to “open the space into which [a utopian synthesis] is to be imagined” (qtd. in Fitting, “Concept” 15), Henry George represented the conjunction of historical moment, readers’ longing, and utopian text as a reform process initiated by “breaking up [the readers’] minds,” so that there would be openings for new thoughts (Review 1). Bellamy’s critics depicted these liberated minds quite differently. Morris, for instance, worried about concerned but unsophisticated readers, whose longing for hopeful prophesies inclined them to turn misleading simplifications of socialism into articles of faith (“Looking Backward” 289). A basic assumption underlay many of the comments about the readers’ responses to simplification of complex ideas and readers’ concern, dissatisfaction, and longing: that the most important readers of Looking Backward, like those of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were capable of being deeply moved by a reading experience. “Transported” might be a more accurate term, one used by Andrew Elfenbein to describe a reading response often praised by Victorian reviewers.9 Howells and many other reviewers believed that the transportation of readers could in part be understood by defining the text as a powerful stimulus that drew forth reactions triggered by an empathetic correspondence between text and reader. As Howells put it, “Somehow, whether [Bellamy] knew or not, he unerringly felt how the average man would feel” (“Edward Bellamy” 254). But the reviewers’ explanations of emotional response typically were not one-way dramas between text-as-stimulus and reader as passive respondent. To establish the type of text–reader correspondence suggested by Howells’s assertion, readers had to approach Looking Backward with knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs—for example, Christian millennial perspectives, some knowledge of American history, a belief in America as a potential utopia, and a belief in the transformative power of books—that would allow them to perceive elements of the text as the stuff of empathetic correspondence. For most of the reviewers, the concerns about the “great evils of our times,” the dissatisfaction about suffering and insecurity, and the longing for hopeful (and simplified) solutions made these readers ready to “correspond” actively with Bellamy’s text even before they read the enticing opening line of the preface spoken from “the closing year of the twentieth century” (93).

2 The two sets of profiles of readers examined in this essay are admittedly problematic. The late nineteenth-century reviewers who constructed models of competent readers were reading with an eye toward a form of publication shaped by particular expectations and conventions, the nature of the Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere

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anticipated audience, and time and space limitations. The 733 modern “alien” readers were reading in anticipation of completing an extensive questionnaire (with queries ranging from specific questions about likes and dislikes of named characters to broader questions about the book’s relevance and functions) and writing a reader-response essay that required them to describe and indicate the impact of five significant transformational associations (including the one they considered most important) that shaped their responses and enabled them to create what cognitive psychologists would call “coherent and usable representations of the text” (Elfenbein 485).10 These transformational associations might relate to immediate circumstances, or to memories of specific personal experiences or people, memories of reading or viewing experiences, or prior knowledge or general beliefs and attitudes. Comparing these two sets of responses can certainly be faulted as comparing apples to oranges, and like the reviewers, the 733 alien readers were hardly representative American readers. The geographic representation was skewed toward Texas and the Midwest (63 percent); only 20 percent of the sample were married; and the average age was twenty-three, reflecting the dominance of college students. But the gender balance was fairly representative (F: 58 percent; M: 42 percent); 68 percent had work experience; there was racial diversity (approximately 25 percent were Asian American, African American, Hispanic, or American Indian); readers came from seven states (Texas, Minnesota, Kentucky, Maryland, New York, Massachusetts, and California) and four countries (U.S., Canada, Japan, Austria);11 and because of the presence of readers from high school classes, a women’s reading group, and a retirement community, the age spread was sixteen to eighty-nine. There is historical depth to the sample (1982–97). The sample is large enough (733 and more than 3,000 transformational associations identified) to generate tentative generalizations.12 Some of those tentative generalizations include the following: The completed questionnaires, response essays, and discussions that followed the completion of the questionnaires and essays supported my expectations about literary utopias as fascinating sites for response and reception studies. For example, comparative studies with realistic fiction indicated that the hybrid nature of the utopian text (the previously mentioned combinations of manifesto, treatise, argumentative dialogue, and narratives of travel, romance, and mystery) did indeed invite more diversified responses. The transformational associations linked to the former were limited primarily to connections with personal experiences. For the utopian texts there were mixes of associations with belief systems, reading and viewing tastes, academic experiences, and immediate circumstances, as well as personal experiences (Roemer, Utopian Audiences 192–95). The questionnaires also clearly indicated which types of discourse seemed annoyingly distant (dialogues, sermon), and which maintained appeal (the romance narrative) (184–92). Besides class, gender, and race, it was clear that age was a powerful variable: The older readers often placed Bellamy’s ideas and narrative episodes within the contexts of key 108

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events in their lives, events that represented crucial paradigm shifts or had become icons of strong beliefs (200–203). Comparisons between all-women sub-samples revealed how different interpretive communities can either reinforce or obscure women’s issues in the text (207–15). In Utopian Audiences I did not explicitly highlight comparisons between the late nineteenth-century reviewers’ construct of an ideal reader and the general profile of readers that emerged from the questionnaires and response essays. In the remainder of this essay I will do so. The similarities briefly mentioned earlier—for example, the genre categorization, the association of America with utopia, and the efferent reading processes—suggest that literary utopias are not as “desperately unreadable” today as Jameson thought. Nevertheless, the modern readers’ apparent questioning of a faith in the transformative powers of texts does suggest a significant shift, though there were specific groups of modern readers who still accepted Bellamy’s invitation to transformation. Although the reviewers did not believe that a thorough knowledge of the genre was necessary, they, like Gary Saul Morson, thought that a competent reader would perceive Bellamy’s utopia as part of the tradition of utopian literature and thought. The modern readers certainly demonstrated a general awareness of intertextuality: 74 percent of them classified Looking Backward using a form of the word utopia. Many of the other terms used, such as science fiction, are associated with utopian literature. Unlike the reviewers, these readers did not mention Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but all the specific authors mentioned (e.g., Sir Thomas More, H. G. Wells, B. F. Skinner, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and several contemporary feminist utopists) are typically labeled utopian or dystopian. The most frequently mentioned titles used to define the genre were Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World. For readers critical of Bellamy, invoking Orwell and Huxley gave them authority to criticize his authoritarianism. But just as often, students suggested, in class discussions, that whether they responded positively or negatively, a knowledge of these dystopias facilitated their entry into Bellamy’s form of literature—an attitude that coincides with the reviewers’ opinion of reading processes. It would be unfair to label the modern readers “sleekly optimistic capitalist,” the language used by one of the reviewers to define inappropriate readers of Bellamy’s utopia (Fawcett 75). But they certainly didn’t exhibit the socialistic leanings the reviewers looked for in sympathetic readers. The collapse of the Soviet Union and gradual movement toward conservatism in the 1980s and 1990s in the United States convinced most of the readers that Bellamy’s Nationalism represented either an obsolete or an un-American road to utopia. On the other hand, it was clear that two other criteria assumed by the reviewers were met: Explicit or indirect comments in the questionnaires indicate that the clear majority of the readers were Christian and could appreciate Bellamy’s evocation of Christian millennialism and that the American part of the sample (91 percent) were familiar with the concept of America as (at least a potential) utopia. One Texas student with an Amish background Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere

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even proclaimed, “I believe utopia is attainable and that God wants it for us [Americans]” (Roemer, Utopian Audiences 220). The Japanese readers represented the strongest exception to this belief. Not only did they not believe the America-utopia connection; they also had difficulty linking any nation to utopian concepts. Typically, they expressed bewilderment at the connection; for example, they used words such as strange, obscure, and mysterious, words that, from an American or European Orientalist perspective, might be used to characterize Japanese beliefs (219). Darko Suvin and Louis Marin, critics who maintain that the forms of literary utopias are as or more important than the “content,” would be dismayed by another connection between the two groups of readers. Despite the impressive variety of transformational associations the modern readers described, a pattern emerged from the response writings that privileged content over form. Transformational associations articulated in terms of general attitudes, beliefs, and values repeatedly, though not in every case, topped the hierarchy of types of associations, accounting for 30 percent to more than 50 percent of the associations. Like the preferred readers defined by William Morris and many of the reviewers, these readers assumed that their task was to go “beneath” the surface details and narrative to discover the core utopian values or, as Morris put it, the “serious essay.” Like the reviewers, they tended to transform a speculative fiction text into a nonfiction argument. Responses to the questionnaire indicated a surprisingly strong confirmation of relevance, suggesting another connection between the reviewers and modern readers: the belief in book power. In response to question 4, “Would you like to read a book like this again? If so, why? If not, why not?” and question 21, “Would you recommend this book to someone else? If so, why? If not, why not?” respectively 75 percent and 77 percent of the combined samples responded positively. The typical explanations in these responses were similar to Jameson’s emphasis on invitations to open up thought processes and to the necessary combination of hopes and fears the reviewers described. The responses indicated the belief that Looking Backward provoked thought about alternative possibilities, about comparisons between past and present visions of better worlds, and about the serious flaws in our society. An even higher percentage (81 percent) answered yes to question 17, “Do you think Looking Backward is still relevant?” In the combined sample, 63 percent agreed that Looking Backward was “a speculative work with some possible applications” (option b for question 17). In response to question 19—“Do you think Bellamy primarily wanted to (a) change social systems? (b) change individuals’ feelings and thoughts? (c) both of the above equally? (d) neither of the above?”—34 percent of the responders chose (b), and 55 percent chose (c). The overlap between these two responses reveals that almost 90 percent of the readers thought Bellamy wanted to change individuals’ viewpoints. The responses to questions 4, 17, 18, and 21 suggest that these readers might not be as “alien” as we thought. 110

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Yet when the same readers were asked, “Did reading Looking Backward change your views about (a) society? (If so, how?); (b) yourself? (If so, how?)” (question 20), the consensus seemed to collapse, even reverse. In the combined sample, 63 percent indicated that their view of society had not changed, even though their written response essays and other question responses revealed that their awareness of inequality had increased. The youngest sample, composed of the high school students, was the only one with more than 50 percent indicating an altered view of society. The oldest sample, the Wesley Palms retirement community members, had the lowest positive response rate: 17 percent. Almost 75 percent of the combined sample perceived no change in self-image; the Wesley Palms responders had the lowest reflection of change: 0 percent. The readers surveyed at the close of the twentieth century believed that the primary power of Looking Backward was to provoke thought about “things out there” distanced either by time (comparative views of society) or impersonality (abstract social questions rather than personal reevaluations of interpersonal relations or self). As constructed by nineteenth-century reviewers, ideal readers of utopias would, for better or for worse, take Looking Backward to heart. These modern readers kept utopia at arm’s length. Of course, one obvious explanation for this difference is that the reviewers and initial readers were reading a new and best-selling book about their world, which spoke in a language (including romance, dazzling gadgets, and dialogues and sermons on current issues) that could “transport” them. Most of the modern readers were experiencing a century-old book in an alien language as a class assignment. Nonetheless, the unwillingness of the majority of the modern readers to perceive reading a utopia as a means of perceptual transformation of society and self indicates another change in attitude about reading books in America, a move away from John Thomas’s community of moral discourse. For certain types of readers and certain types of books—the life-changing books promoted by Oprah Winfrey, Tim LaHaye’s Left Behind series, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, some self-help books, and, of course, the Bible and Koran—the promise and danger of book power survives. Nevertheless, Bellamy would no doubt be dismayed by the tendency of 733 modern readers to hold the traditional utopia at arm’s length. He might, however, also take heart in the fact that 40 percent of the modern readers indicated that their view of society changed and 25 percent noted a change in self-perception. And reader-response critics should take note that these figures were frequently linked to two variables not often highlighted in the reviews, except for those printed in labor publications like Eugene Debs’s Locomotive Fireman’s Journal: experiences with poverty and with a move from one country or culture to another. Even more than knowledge of other utopian or dystopian works, these two types of experiences facilitated entry into the text and heightened readers’ ability to be transported or to experience emotional and cognitive openings. Only five readers in my sample of 733 indicated that their substantial wealth influenced their responses to Bellamy’s utopia. On the other hand, Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere

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more than one hundred identified short or extended periods of poverty as crucial associations. Some of these experiences were as short as one Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute student’s experience of living in a tent for three months because his family could not afford a house. Others seemed endless. One University of Texas at Arlington (UTA) mother recalled her childhood growing up with fourteen brothers and sisters. She wore flower-sack dresses through her teens and did not visit a grocery store until she was twelve. Whether the poverty experiences were short or long, they typically enabled these readers to empathize with the nineteenth-century poor described by Julian West and Dr. Leete and to sympathize strongly with the emphasis on equality of opportunity in Bellamy’s utopia. These responses were strong enough to overpower aversions that many readers who identified themselves as ardent Christians might have had to what they perceived as Bellamy’s secular humanism. Whereas experiencing poverty allowed readers to engage in portraits of particular types of people (the poor) and with egalitarian outlooks, experiencing a cultural or national change impacted the entire reading process. Readers’ memories of these changes provided personalized paradigms of the comparative modes of perception that are so essential to engagement in a utopian reading experience. In other words, readers must be able to “see” relevant comparisons to past and present conditions as they read about nonexistent futures (or other forms of displacement). They should, for example, be able to see the inequalities of the present while vicariously experiencing the equalities of utopia. In effect, the readers who had experienced significant cultural changes said that they could read utopias with intensity and sympathy because they had already seen reality in terms of layered comparisons. Depending on the specific crosscultural experience, the responses might be positive or negative. For example, several of the students attending UTA, Hood College, and the University of Minnesota had lived in countries governed by various forms of socialism or strong centralized governments: West Germany, Finland, Honduras, for example. The former two associations created powerful positive biases toward Bellamy’s utopia; the latter engendered a negative response. Living in Taiwan during the Tiananmen Square massacre set up strong criticisms of Bellamy’s authoritarianism for one reader, while reading Looking Backward within view of the extremes of wealth and poverty in Cancun, Mexico, generated great enthusiasm for Bellamy’s egalitarianism in another. The positive or negative nature of the responses varied dramatically depending on the specific international experience. But the intensity of engagement suggested that crosscultural experiences greatly facilitated readers’ willingness to engage actively with a utopian text. One particular example combines both variables in a striking way. This reader was one of the “older” ones (approaching forty). The iconic experience she used to transform Bellamy’s text occurred when she was much younger. She was not impoverished, and she did not move from another country. But she was a working-class African American suddenly placed in another world. Her father was a brick mason in Cleveland. Because of her strength and skills, 112

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he hired her, though without his supervisor’s knowledge that he had done so. She “used wheelbarrows, broke up existing sidewalks with a sledge hammer, laid foundations, did everything required of [her].” But because she was “in a different world”—a man’s world (the company did not hire women)—crowds gathered to watch this alien presence. She was afraid her father would get in trouble; someone had contacted a Plain Dealer reporter. Consequently, “without Dad’s approval,” she quit (Roemer, Utopian Audience 210–11). The repeated calls for career and other forms of equality in Looking Backward combined with this powerful memory to transport her into an alternative world where she could imagine herself being praised for the merit of her strength and skills. She had an extremely positive response to Bellamy’s utopia, so strong that it blocked out explicit comments late in the book by Dr. Leete about the physical inferiority of women. Escarpit would no doubt proclaim that this was a “distorted” reading by an “alien” reader transforming an obsolete text. But her transformations and the transformations performed by other modern readers, most of whom deemed Looking Backward relevant, certainly demonstrate that readers today can find ways to create a “coherent and usable mental representation” of a century-old utopia. This creation is a testament to the power of Bellamy’s utopia and of the modern readers (even if this modern reading experience had the overtones of an academic forced march where the marchers were typically expected to produce meanings). It is also a testament to the rich possibilities of using utopian literature in reader-response and reception studies. The comparison of the nineteenthcentury reviewers’ construction of ideal readers and the portrait of the 733 modern readers represents just one possibility. I have set up small-scale transformational-association response assignments with utopias preceding (Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance) and following Looking Backward (Ursula Le Guin’s Always Coming Home). As I expected, associations with past readings and attitudes about narrative structure and narrative voice climbed much higher in the hierarchy of transformational associations.13 But whether we use traditional or contemporary utopias; documented historical readings or surveys of readers today; or written, visual, or experiential responses of intentional communities and reform movements, we are bound to discover intriguing insights about how readers transform texts. In part, these transformations result because literary utopias offer such complex mixes of appealing and disturbing invitations that practically ensure a rich diversity of responses—positive and negative. Their uplifting portraits of utopian characters may remind us of our own flaws. They appeal to our desires for a better world while reminding us how poorly we may be prepared to define what we desire. They tempt us with wonderful imaginings of alternatives filled with so many gaps that we learn how exciting and difficult imagining alternatives can be. They challenge us with the urgent need for and impossibilities of imagining utopia. Confronted with this encouraging and disruptive form of literature, it is no wonder that readers (including nineteenth-century reviewers and alien Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere

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modern readers) create marvelous mixes of responses that can keep readerresponse and reception critics busy until nowhere is somewhere, which of course is never. Acknowledgment I thank the 733 readers for their willingness to participate in this study and Phil Goldstein and Jim Machor for their suggestions for revising this essay. I also thank Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, the editors of Utopia Method Vision: The Use Value of Social Dreaming (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2007) for permission to use revised passages from my essay “More Aliens Transforming Utopia”; and the University of Massachusetts Press for permission to use revised passages from chapter 6 of Utopian Audiences. Notes 1. For an overview of recent utopian studies, see Roemer, Utopian Audiences (1–2); for a discussion of the exhibits, see Fitting, “Representing Utopia.” In part, this interest in utopian studies reflects the reinvigoration of the genre in the 1960s and 1970s, thanks to the emphasis placed on feminist and ecological issues. It also reflects excitement about new forms of literary utopias variously labeled, by critics such as Tom Moylan, ambiguous or critical utopias and critical dystopias (Demand; Scraps) and the rediscovery, by bibliographers such as Lyman Tower Sargent, of whole bodies of non-American utopian literature (see “Australian”; New Zealand; “Utopian”). The reinvigoration and rediscoveries have fostered highly respected genre studies (e.g., Eliott; Suvin; Morson), cultural studies that link utopia to cultural value systems (e.g., Roemer, Obsolete Necessity; Segal), and new historicist analyses that complicate such linkages (e.g., Leslie). Even the basic functions of literary utopias have been reexamined, in particular by Jameson, who, beginning in the 1970s and culminating in Archaeologies, questions the emphasis on normative representations of better worlds and highlights instead constructive negative functions: utopias as critiques of the “present,” as narratives that raise our awareness of the linguistic and cognitive challenges (indeed the impossibility) of imagining radically better worlds, and, most recently, as disruptive interventions that impel us to break from present perspectives so that we can forcefully critique the status quo and, despite the challenges, attempt to imagine radical alternatives. Without these disruptions, he argues, the likelihood that better futures will happen is seriously undermined (see Jameson, “Of Islands” and Archaeologies, especially 211–33, 267–80, 282–95). (The title of Terry Eagleton’s essay review of Archaeologies—“Making the Break”—highlights Jameson’s most recent functional definition.) 2. Before Roemer’s Utopian Audiences, the one book that focused on readers (primarily implied readers) was Ruppert’s Reader in a Strange Land (1986). Morson’s Boundaries examines the intersections between genre and reading. Pioneering response and reception articles include Cornet; Fitting; “Positioning”; Khanna; Pfaelzer; Shor; Widdicombe. 114

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3. For example, Theodor Herzl’s Altneuland (1902), which built on his Jewish State (1896), played an important role in the establishment of the Zionist movement and the nation of Israel. 4. For an extended discussion of book illustrations, see Roemer, “Eyewitness.” 5. I begin with broad cultural perspectives examining the historical events, key attitudes (e.g., about technology), worldviews (e.g., Christian millennialism), and concepts of reading (especially the belief that book power could transform lives) that led to the social construction of readers ready to perceive literary utopias as agents of social and personal change (71–89). I then move to a particular reading competence (the knowledge of conventions of the sentimental romance) that facilitated entry into Bellamy’s utopia, especially into its domestic settings and androgynous narrative voice (90–116), and then to analyses of implied readers, especially relationships between past and present implied readers “outside” the text and the narrator and fictional audience (narratee) “in” the text (117–28). The rest of Utopian Audiences examines the responses of “real” readers: the first reader (the author, 128–36), professional readers (reviewers, 139–68), and the sample of 733 late twentieth-century “alien” readers (169–224). 6. Rosenblatt 32–33. I define a literary utopia as a fairly detailed narrative description of an imaginary culture—a fiction that invites readers to experience vicariously an alternative reality that critiques theirs by opening up cognitive and affective spaces that encourage readers to perceive the realities and potentialities of their culture in new ways. If the author or reader perceives the imaginary culture as being significantly better than the “present,” then the work is a eutopia or, in the popular usage, a utopia; if significantly worse, it is a dystopia (see Roemer, Utopian Audiences 60–68). 7. For a discussion of these three methods, see Roemer, Utopian Audiences 146–58. 8. See “The Millennium of Socialism” 6; Suvin 71; Morson. 9. Elfenbein specifically discusses Margaret Oliphant’s use of the concept, but he argues that this was a criterion used by many Victorian reviewers (491–92). 10. Elfenbein quotes from van den Broek and Kremer’s “Mind in Action.” The questionnaire for Looking Backward contained twenty-one questions. Here is a sample of the different types: 1. If someone who had not read LB asked you what it was “about,” what would you tell him or her? 2. What type of book do you think LB is? 6. Are there any particular episodes that you (a) particularly liked, (b) particularly disliked? 7. In reference to the “love story” (West and Edith Leete), did you (a) dislike it, (b) have no particular like or dislike, (c) like it? 11. Did you like or dislike the following characters? (The list included Julian West, Dr. Leete, Edith Leete, and any other characters the readers wanted to name.) 13. What do you think Bellamy’s primary criticism of the nineteenth century was? 17. Do you think LB is (a) still relevant, (b) out of date? 20. Did reading LB change your views about (a) society (if so, how), (b) yourself (if so, how)? 11. Unfortunately, only one Austrian student participated. 12. For a complete portrait of the sample, see Roemer, Utopian Audiences 233–37. 13. See Roemer, Utopian Audiences 193–95. References Baym, Nina. Novels, Readers and Reviewers: Responses to Fiction in Antebellum America. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1984. Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere

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Bellamy, Edward. Looking Backward, 2000–1887. 1888. Ed. John Thomas. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967. Bryan, Clark W. “Edward Bellamy.” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Good Housekeeping, 21 Dec. 1889, 95–96. Cornet, Robert J. “Rhetorical Strategies in Looking Backward.” Markham Review 4.3 (1974): 53–58. Eagleton, Terry. “Making a Break.” Review of Archaeologies of the Future, by Frederic Jameson. London Review of Books, 9 Mar. 2006, 25–26. Elfenbein, Andrew. “Cognitive Science and the History of Reading.” PMLA: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 121 (2006): 484–502. Elliott, Robert C. The Shape of Utopia: Studies in a Literary Genre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Escarpit, Robert. Sociology of Literature. Trans. Ernest Pick. Painesville, Ohio: Lake Erie College Press, 1965. Fawcett, E. Douglass. “ ‘Looking Backward’ and the Socialist Movement.” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Theosophist, June 1890, 475–85. Ferns, Chris. Narrating Utopia: Ideology, Gender, Form in Utopian Literature. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1999. Fitting, Peter. “The Concept of Utopia in the Work of Frederic Jameson.” Utopian Studies 9.2 (1998): 8–17. ———. “Positioning and Closure: On the ‘Reading Effect’ of Contemporary Utopian Fiction.” Utopian Studies. Vol. 1. Ed. Gorman Beauchamp and Kenneth M. Roemer. Washington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1987. 23–36. ———. “Representing Utopia.” Utopian Studies 12 (2001): 108–32. Freeman, William. “Looking Backward, 2000–1887.” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Zealandia, Nov. 1889, 296–97. “A French Opinion of ‘Looking Backward.’” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Review of Reviews, Nov. 1890, 457. “General Gossip of Authors and Writers.” Current Literature, Mar. 1890, 185. George, Henry. Progress and Poverty. 1879. New York: Random House, 1905. ———. Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Standard, 31 Aug. 1889, 1–2. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Blithedale Romance. Boston: Ticknor, 1852. Herzl, Theodor. Altneuland, Roman. 1902. Gesammelte Zionistiche Werke. Vol. 5. Tel Aviv: Hozaah Ivrith, 1935. ———. The Jewish State. 1896. New York: Dover, 1989. Housekeeper. “A Plain Talk with Mr. Bellamy.” Good Housekeeping, 1 Mar. 1890, 213–15. Howells, William Dean. The Altrurian Romances. Ed. Clara Kirk and Rudolf Kirk. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1968. ———. “Edward Bellamy.” Atlantic, Aug. 1898, 253–56. Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Doran, 1932. J. A. M. “Looking Backward.” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Knox College Monthly and Presbyterian Magazine 10.4 (1889): 209–12. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. 116

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———. “Of Islands and Trenches: Neutralization and the Production of Utopian Discourse.” Diacritics 7.2 (1977): 2–21. Khanna, Lee Cullen. “The Reader and Looking Backward.” Journal of General Education 33 (1981): 69–79. ———. “Text as Tactic: Looking Backward and the Power of the Word.” Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy. Ed. Daphne Patai. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. 37–50. Kumar, Krishan. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in Modern Times. Oxford: Blackwell, 1987. Lane, Mary E. Mizora: A Prophecy. New York: Dillingham, 1889. Le Guin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. Leslie, Marina. Renaissance Utopias and the Problem of History. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1998. Machor, James L. “Historical Hermeneutics and Antebellum Fiction.” Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Contexts of Response. Ed. James L. Machor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. 54–84. Macnie, John. The Diothas or a Far Look Ahead. New York: Putnam’s, 1883. Marin, Louis. Utopics: Spacial Play. Trans. Robert A. Vollrath. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities, 1984. Martyn, Carlos. “The Success of ‘Looking Backward.’ ” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Knights of Labor, 6 Feb. 1890, n.p. Merriam, Alexander R. “Some Literary Utopias.” Hartford Seminary Record, May 1898, 203–26. “The Millennium of Socialism.” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Boston Evening Transcript, 30 Mar. 1888, 6. Morris, William. “Looking Backward.” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. 1889. Science Fiction Studies 8 (1976): 287–89. ———. News from Nowhere; Or, An Epoch of Rest, Being Some Chapters from a Utopian Romance. Boston: Robert Bros., 1890. Morson, Gary Saul. The Boundaries of a Genre: Dostoevsky’s “Diary of a Writer” and the Traditions of Literary Utopia. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination. New York: Methuen, 1986. ———. Scraps of Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, and Dystopia. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 2000. “Nationalism and Modern Romance.” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. New Nation, 23 Jan. 1892, 57. “The New Utopia.” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Pilot, 7 Apr. 1888, 1. Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker and Warburg, 1949. Pfaelzer, Jean. “Immanence, Interdeterminance, and the Utopian Pun in Looking Backward.” Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy. Ed. Daphne Patai. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. 51–67. “Recent American Fiction.” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Atlantic, June 1888, 845–46. “Recent Books.” Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. New York Times, 27 Feb. 1888, 3. Placing Readers at the Forefront of Nowhere

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Roemer, Kenneth M. “Eyewitness to Utopia: How Illustrations Reconstruct ‘Nowhere.’ ” Millennial Perspectives: Lifeworlds and Utopias. Ed. Brigitte Georgi-Findlay and Hans-Ulrich Mohr. Heidelberg: Winter Universitätsverlag, 2003. 55–97. ———. The Obsolete Necessity: America in Utopian Writings, 1888–1900. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1976. ———. Utopian Audiences: How Readers Locate Nowhere. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003. Rosemont, Franklin. “Bellamy’s Radicalism Reclaimed.” Looking Backward, 1988–1888: Essays on Edward Bellamy. Ed. Daphne Patai. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988. 147–209. Rosenblatt, Louise M. Literature as Exploration. 5th ed. New York: Modern Language Association, 1995. Ruppert, Peter. Reader in a Strange Land: The Activity of Reading Literary Utopias. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986. Rushdie, Salman. Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1989. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Australian Utopian Literature: An Annotated Chronological Bibliography, 1667–1999.” Utopian Studies 10.2 (1999): 138–73. ———. New Zealand Utopian Literature. An Annotated Bibliography. Occasional paper 97/1. Wellington, New Zealand: Stout Research Center, Victoria University of Wellington, 1996. ———. “Utopian Literature in English Canada: An Annotated Chronological Bibliography.” Utopian Studies 10.2 (1999): 174–206. Segal, Howard P. Technological Utopianism in American Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985. Sharp, William. Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Academy, 27 Apr. 1889, 284. Shor, Francis. “The Ideological Matrix of Reform in Late Nineteenth-Century America and New Zealand: Reading Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward.” Prospects 17 (1992): 29–58. Shortt, Adam. Review of Looking Backward, 2000–1887, by Edward Bellamy. Presbyterian and Reformed Review 2.6 (1891): 272–81. Sicherman, Barbara. “Reading and Middle-Class Identity in Victorian America.” Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950. Ed. Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. 137–60. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 1852. Facsimile ed. Columbus, Ohio: Merrill, 1969. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. Thomas, John. Alternative America: Henry George, Edward Bellamy, Henry Demarest Lloyd, and the Adversary Tradition. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1983. van den Broek, Paul, and Kathleen E. Kremer. “The Mind in Action: What It Means to Comprehend during Reading.” Reading for Meaning. Ed. Barbara Taylor, Michael Graves, and Paul van den Broek. New York: Teachers College Press, 2000. 1–31. Widdicombe, Toby. “Edward Bellamy’s Utopian Vision: An Annotated Check List of Reviews.” Extrapolation 29 (1988): 5–20.

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Richard Wright’s Native Son From Naturalist Protest to Modernist Liberation and Beyond PHILIP GOLDSTEIN

It is well known that Native Son is a naturalist protest novel in which Wright shows how racial discrimination and class oppression destroy Bigger Thomas, the novel’s hero. It is equally well known that Native Son depicts Bigger’s existential struggle for liberation. Less familiar is the incompatibility of these accounts. As the contrary responses of many critics testify, to treat the novel as protest fiction is to deny that Bigger wins liberation, whereas to treat the novel as a modernist or existential depiction of Bigger’s liberation is to deny that the novel protests his oppression and victimization.1 In other words, if he is liberated, the system does not defeat him, whereas if the system defeats him, he does not liberate himself. A liberated victim is a contradiction in terms. Edward Margolies comments, “Wright does not seem to be able to make up his mind. The reader feels that Wright, though intellectually committed to” the communist views of Max the lawyer, “is more emotionally akin to Bigger’s” existential views (79–80).2

Where does this indecision or opposition between Max’s communism and Bigger’s existential struggle come from? What does it show? Scholars attribute it to Wright’s changing beliefs. I will maintain, however, that, more than his beliefs, the reconstruction of the text, thanks to the changing status of the naturalist and modernist literary movements and the emergence of black aesthetics and black studies programs, explains it. Some critics consider these changes regressive, if not irrational, but they produce a different, more progressive text. As John Frow says, “Any text which continues to be read over an extended period of time . . . will in some sense not be the ‘same’ text; its value and standing . . . its intertextual relations, its social or affective force and the uses to which it can appropriately be put all shift unstably” (53). In what unstable ways have the “intertextual relations” or “social or affective force” of Native Son shifted? Consider the high status of naturalist fiction in the 1930s, when Wright wrote Uncle Tom’s Children and Native Son. At that time the naturalist literary movement of Stephen Crane, Emile Zola, and Theodore Dreiser was very important and influential, whereas modernist fiction was considered experimental or regressive. It is not surprising, then, that the novel adopts the naturalist assumption that, in Donald Pizer’s terms, “life placed tragic limitations on individual freedom, growth, and happiness” (29). It is also not surprising that, as many reviewers and critics pointed out, the novel parallels Dreiser’s American Tragedy, which reveals the social forces that make a tragic victim of Clyde Griffith, its protagonist.3 These parallels show that, like Clyde, Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son, is a tragic victim of implacable social forces. Native Son accepts, at the same time, an existential modernism in which the individual mind preserves its independence of conventional views. Since Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God also involves sex, death, and modernist independence, Native Son, despite Wright’s hostility to Hurston’s work, parallels it. To be more precise, I will show that Native Son parallels the naturalistic American Tragedy, in that both Bigger and Clyde are victims of large social forces. However, because of the evolution of Wright’s beliefs, the changing status of naturalism and modernism, and the establishment of black studies programs, Native Son also parallels the modernist Their Eyes Were Watching God in that Janie Starks and Bigger achieve liberation.

Native Son and An American Tragedy Wright compresses the story, which begins on the morning when Bigger kills the rat, terrifying his family, and ends several months later when, sentenced to death on the electric chair, he bids his lawyer, Max, goodbye; whereas Dreiser elaborates his story, which starts when Clyde Griffiths, as a child, sings religious hymns with his evangelical family on street corners and ends when, as a grown-up, he dies on the electric chair. Wright sticks strictly to the viewpoint 120

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of Bigger, whose feelings he explains, whereas Dreiser engages in an omniscient narration, which tells us why the Griffith family neglects Clyde or why the district attorney decides to prosecute him. Despite these different artistic strategies, both novels show that their protagonists reject their impoverished, religious families, pursue the American dream of wealth and ease, and, because of class or racial divisions, suffer a tragic death on the electric chair. The poor family of Clyde proselytizes on street corners, soliciting donations and worshippers. Breaking with them, Clyde works at a soda fountain and then at luxurious Kansas City and Chicago hotels, which teach him to esteem the attentions of pretty girls and the value of good clothes and a life of wealth and ease: Such a life “meant that you did what you pleased. That other people, like himself, waited upon you. That you possessed all of these luxuries” (61). To begin doing “what you pleased,” he and his fellow bellhops visit a house of prostitution, but he is disgusted with himself afterward because of his religious upbringing. He also pursues the beautiful Hortense Briggs, who, despite her coldness, fascinates him so much that he neglects his pregnant and abandoned sister, Esta, in order to buy the fickle Hortense the fur coat and the other expensive goods she desires. After a speeding car carrying him and the other bellhops to work accidentally kills a girl, he flees Chicago, but he does not abandon the pursuit of a beautiful woman or the life of luxury and ease. On the contrary, in the Kansas City hotel, he imagines a rich patron who “might take a fancy to him and offer him a connection with something important somewhere . . . and that might lift him into a world such as he had never known before” (188). Bigger also rejects his poor religious family and seeks a wealthy patron who might lift him into such a world. While his mother works and prays and his sister Vera attends sewing school, Bigger and his pals plan to rob stores or play the roles of the U.S. president or an army general. In a scene Reader’s Digest removed from the published version, a film about the promiscuous Mary Dalton and her communist lover, Jan, convinces Bigger that if he went to work for the wealthy Daltons, they would enable him to make his fortune. In other words, like Clyde, he seeks a life of great wealth, but, turning very humble, he works as the Daltons’ chauffeur, as his mother and “the relief ” require him to. Similarly, Clyde’s mother advises him to write to his wealthy uncle, Samuel Griffiths, who, when they meet at the Kansas City hotel, invites Clyde to work in his collar factory in Lycurgus, the Griffiths’ upstate New York hometown. Clyde, esteemed by the factory workers but neglected by the Griffiths, dates Roberta Alden, a poor working woman whom he refuses to marry when he gets her pregnant, just as he declined to assist his pregnant sister, Esta; at the same time, he pursues and wins the rich and beautiful Sandra Finchley, who, unlike the poor Roberta, can fulfill his dream of a marriage providing wealth and ease. Similarly, Bigger has a relationship with the poor working woman Bessie Mears, whom he also gets pregnant, and with the rich Mary Dalton, for whom Richard Wright’s Native Son

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he works as a chauffeur; however, while Clyde attracts Roberta and Sandra because of his rich relatives, Bigger interests Mary because of her communist sympathies. Clyde’s submissive personality and intense adoration appeal to Sandra, whereas Mary and her communist lover, Jan, befriend Bigger out of a desire to understand and aid black people. In other words, after Bigger and Clyde reject their religious families and get involved with worldly friends, they both find patrons and/or lovers who for very different reasons might help them realize their dreams of wealth and ease. Moreover, they both murder their lovers by accident. Since Mary makes Bigger painfully aware of his race and since he believes that she really despises him, Bigger hates her but does not mean to kill her. In the unedited version, he carries the drunk and sexually aroused Mary to her room where, aroused himself, he fondles her. When her blind mother comes in, he is so terrified that he will be taken for a violent rapist that he accidentally suffocates her with a pillow. Clyde, too, kills Roberta by accident, but initially he plans to kill her because he fears that if she reveals her pregnancy, he will lose any chance of marrying Sondra and living the wealthy life. His feelings about her are, however, so ambivalent that he is unable to carry out his plan; instead, he lets her drown when, after he accidentally strikes her with his camera, she falls into the lake. In these somewhat different ways, Clyde and Bigger both commit murder, and they both undergo trials in which the prosecuting attorneys seek political advantage, newspapers depict them as brutal killers, hostile mobs call for their lynching, and their mothers and religious leaders try to save them. Moreover, during their trials they both suffer discrimination.4 District attorney Orville Mason, who uses his prosecution of Clyde to reinvigorate his campaign for reelection, construes Clyde as a slick city playboy who seduced and murdered an innocent country girl. Similarly, state’s attorney Buckley, who is also campaigning for reelection, insists that Bigger is a violent animal who has raped and killed many women and whose death will make society safer. Alvin Belknap and Reuben Jephsen, Clyde’s defense lawyers, are not entirely convinced of Clyde’s innocence, but to undermine the playboy stereotype and to protect the Griffiths’ reputation, they make the false argument that but for the accident, he would have married Roberta. By contrast, Max, Bigger’s communist lawyer, does not contest Buckley’s case or deny Bigger’s guilt; rather, in a controversial thirteen-page speech, he argues that centuries of African American oppression explain why Bigger killed Mary Dalton and Bessie Mears and why other blacks may commit similar crimes. Max claims that, as a result, the death sentence does not make sense because it will do nothing to alleviate the oppression that made Bigger a killer and that is creating more Biggers. Some critics object that, instead of this sociohistorical defense of Bigger, Max should have argued that Bigger was temporarily insane.5 In both novels, the real issue is, however, the victimization of the main character, not the death sentence; more precisely, the issue is the oppression and class division 122

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victimizing Clyde and Bigger. That is, the rural stereotypes and political strategizing, the false account of Roberta’s death, the protection of the wealthy Griffiths, and the implacable mechanism of Clyde’s prison underline the point that the divisions of rich and poor are destroying Clyde. Similarly, the centuries of American racial and class oppression described by Max’s long speech make Bigger a murderer and hence a victim. As these parallels suggest, Native Son affirms the naturalist view that rigid class divisions cause individual tragedy, yet the novel also manages to break with its naturalism. Although Clyde and Bigger are both moved by their trials and the intense, national spotlight to examine themselves, their examinations go in contrary directions. Sentenced to death, abandoned by Sondra and his friends, and confined to a death-row cell block, Clyde plunges into despair. Only his mother, a strong religious woman, and Duncan McMillan, a young, energetic evangelist, support and restore him. Thanks to their prayers and admonitions, Clyde reaffirms his rejected religious beliefs. Examining himself anew, he recognizes not only his guilt but also the external social forces and internal vacillation that have destroyed him. Bigger also examines his life, but instead of determining the extent of his guilt or recognizing his victimization, he uncovers feelings of oppression and anger, which, the narrator says, he normally repressed. For example, after his mother berates him for terrifying his sister Vera with the dead rat or failing to get a job and helping to support the family, he represses his feelings: “He knew that the moment he allowed what his life meant to enter fully into his consciousness, he would either kill himself or someone else” (14). Moved by Jan and Max, who wish to help him even though he has killed Jan’s lover, Mary, Bigger recognizes these repressed feelings, but unlike Clyde, he repudiates religious salvation because it makes humanity guilty for its fallen state. For instance, while Clyde welcomes the support of his mother and McMillan, who convinces him to turn to God to overcome his despair and terror and to write a farewell letter urging others to accept God, Bigger agrees to read the Bible, as his mother wishes, but when she gets down on her hands and knees to beg the Daltons to spare his life, he finds her impossibly weak and feels humiliated. In addition, Bigger resents the pastor sent by his mother and throws away the cross the pastor gives him. As the narrator says, the “preacher’s words . . . made him feel a sense of guilt deeper than that which even his murder of Mary had made him feel” (264). Although Bigger rejects religion because of this unacceptable guilt, he accepts the humanist belief that human nature transcends the limits imposed by racial stereotypes. Initially he takes the stereotypes for granted; as the narrator says, “To Bigger and his kind, white people were not really people. They were a sort of great natural force like a stormy sky looming overhead” (109). Before the trial ends, he experiences an epiphany showing him the humanist truth: In a vision, he sees himself “standing in the midst of a vast crowd of men, white men and black men and all men, and the sun’s rays melted away the many differences, the colors, the clothes, and drew what was common and Richard Wright’s Native Son

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good upward” (335). In other words, humanism becomes his new religion; as the narrator puts it, “The word had become flesh” (268). In addition to this new humanism, he experiences a new, existential sense of liberation. For example, when he kills Mary and his girlfriend Bessie, he feels transformed: “He had murdered and created a new life for himself ” (101). As critics point out, he embraces the murders as a way to free himself from cultural stereotypes or racial degradation (Baker, Introduction 18; Fishburn 99; Jackson 132–33). Since this new freedom opposes Max’s communist view of liberation, Max faults him during their last meeting: “Bigger, you killed. That was wrong. It’s too late now for you to . . . work with . . . others who are t-trying to . . . believe and make the world live again” (390). Shocking Max, Bigger rejects organized political activity and defends his newfound freedom: “What I killed for must have been good” (392). The parallels between Am American Tragedy and Native Son break down because, as the conflict of Max and Bigger suggests, the existential humanism of Bigger does not square with the novel’s scientific naturalism.6 The scientific naturalism Wright shares with Dreiser makes Bigger a victim of large social forces, whereas the existential humanism freeing Bigger gives the novel what Craig Werner calls a “modernist subtext” in which the imagination defeats oppressive social circumstances (126; see also Costello 39–40; Howe 139).

Native Son and Their Eyes Were Watching God Critics usually identify this subtext with Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, in which Raskolnikov also considers himself free to kill.7 The subtext suggests, however, that, in addition, Native Son parallels Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which was published in 1936, four years before Native Son, and which also depicts sex, murder, and existential liberation.8 Of course, Their Eyes is a problematic text. As I will shortly show, Wright condemned it for entertaining whites, instead of protesting racial or class oppression. (Hurston famously rejected what she termed “the sobbing school of Negrohood who hold that nature somehow has given them a lowdown dirty deal” [“How It Feels” 153].) Moreover, Their Eyes approximates a romance such as Pride and Prejudice, rather than a naturalist protest novel. Both Their Eyes and Pride depict oppressive marriages and expose their causes—romantic illusions and misunderstandings. Both describe the female characters’ difficulties, including the public and private selves into which they gradually divide and the public speech with which they overcome the division. For example, Elizabeth often engages in witty public discourse, freely disputing the opinions of one and all and thereby winning the ardent admiration of the wealthy Darcy. When she discovers that she has mistaken his character, she divides into a derisive public and an amorous private self, but her marriage to him overcomes this division 124

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and reinstates Enlightenment ideals. To overcome the self-division imposed by her domineering husband, Jodi Starks, Janie also engages in public talking, but she must struggle for the right to speak. Her struggle culminates when, after Joe calls her an old woman, she ridicules his sexual potency: “When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak du change uh life” (75). In shock, Jodi retreats to his deathbed, sick from a bad liver and a wounded ego. He complains that she does not appreciate his achievements as a “big voice,” but, when she says that he has never known her true self, he promptly dies. His death implies that, far from preserving Enlightenment ideals and middle-class propriety, Hurston’s realism undermines them. Instead of engaging in public speech, as Janie and Elizabeth do, Bigger fights with his pals or plays the role of general or president; however, since he believes that killing Mary Dalton frees him from his family’s and his community’s blindness, he also divides into a public and private self and, by rejecting Enlightenment ideals, liberates himself from the debased community. Moreover, Wright’s third-person narration preserves the traditional distinction between standard English and the black dialect and, as a result, justifies Bigger’s debased view of the community. By contrast, Their Eyes, which in the modernist fashion rejects the opposition of dialect and standard speech, depicts black speech and folk culture remarkably positively. In keeping with the Harlem Renaissance, which sought to demonstrate that black folk culture was not simply the subject of comic minstrelsy but worthy of serious artistic depiction, Hurston cultivated an exceptionally knowledgeable and perceptive view of African American folk culture. Both Bigger and Janie achieve liberation despite their divided selves; however, while Bigger discovers that black culture is defeated and blind, Janie learns to appreciate the rich values of ordinary black folk. This positive view of black folk emerges from Janie’s intense, romantic relationship with Tea Cake. After Jodi’s death, her friends encourage her to marry a middle-class man able to manage her money and run the business, but Janie realizes that, in marrying Jodi, she had mistakenly accepted Nanny’s blind faith in the slaveowners’ values: that owning things counts more than exploring the horizon. The playful, imaginative courtship of the young Tea Cake shocks the town, which sees in it only mercenary motives, but pleases Janie because she rejects Nanny’s and the town’s oppressive views of women, wealth, and marriage. Although Tea Cake eventually fosters her independence, initially he, like Jodi, treats her as a private possession. After he excludes her from his all-night party, she angrily protests such treatment. He proceeds, then, to teach her the rich games, work, talk, music, and food of black folk culture. They move to the Florida muck, where she learns to shoot a gun, pick beans, talk porch talk, and in general enjoy life. Although Tea Cake beats Janie and, along with Stew Beef, Sop-de-Bottom, and other friends, destroys the restaurant of the prejudiced Mrs. Turner, Janie finds the intense playing, fighting, working, socializing, and lovemaking fulfilling. Richard Wright’s Native Son

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This naturalist utopia brings the “soul” of the fulfilled Janie “out of its hiding place” (122) but reveals limitations when a hurricane threatens the Florida swamp. Overconfident, Tea Cake ignores the wisdom of the fleeing animals and the Indians, only to become caught in the hurricane’s high winds and flood waters. Tea Cake and Janie escape the hurricane but not the bites of a mad dog, whose rabies drives Tea Cake mad as well. When, overcome with jealousy and mad thirst, he tries to shoot her, she shoots him—a tragedy of immense proportions: “It was the meanest moment of eternity” (175). This tragedy suggests that, unlike Wright, who initiates what Michele Wallace terms a tradition of macho violence justified in existential terms (55), Hurston implicitly faults Tea Cake’s chauvinist violence and pride. The tragedy also suggests that Hurston rejects the naturalist assumption that circumstances defeat human aspirations, for, like Bigger, Janie achieves liberation. Although Bigger, too, kills his girlfriend Bessie in self-defense and at his unjust trial is depicted as an animal and condemned to death, that killing, which keeps her from betraying him, makes him feel liberated. Janie’s trial, by contrast, gains her the absolution of the curious white jurors. When she returns home, she teaches Pheoby and, through Pheoby, the contemptuous community the lessons of her newfound independence: “tuh go to God” and “tuh find out about livin’ fuh theyselves” (183). Bigger, too, is liberated because, despite his death sentence, he believes his killings must have been right and, affirming his newfound humanism before he dies, he sends Jan his greetings, calling him Jan, not sir. More imaginative, Janie achieves her liberation not only by teaching Pheoby the lessons of her independence but also by retreating to her bedroom, where she imagines that a prancing Tea Cake returns to her.

The Changing Contexts of Native Son Native Son parallels Dreiser’s American Tragedy, implying that the class divisions of the rich and the poor frustrate the aspirations of Clyde and Bigger and cause their tragic deaths, and parallels Hurston’s Their Eyes, suggesting that the imaginations of Bigger and Janie enable them to overcome the biases and conflicts of social life and to achieve liberation. In other words, although naturalism and modernism are incompatible, critics see Native Son as adopting both. What explains these contrary naturalist and modernist interpretations of the novel? The explanation lies, I will suggest, in equally contrary influences: the evolving beliefs of Wright, the changing status of naturalism and modernism, as well as the emergence of black studies programs. In terms of Wright’s beliefs, Max’s views express the political commitment of Wright, who, in the 1930s, led the left-wing John Reed Club and wrote articles for the Worker and other communist publications. Like many other radical African Americans, he favored the separate, southern black nation advocated by the Communist Party and the autonomous national Soviet 126

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republics created by “Comrade Stalin” (Maxwell 6–8; see also Bell 152–54). By contrast, Wright’s commitment to Bigger’s liberation anticipates Wright’s later work, in which he rejects communist politics and accepts individual existential and African national autonomy. As Margolies says, “It is . . . in the roles of a Negro nationalist revolutionary and a metaphysical rebel that Wright most successfully portrays Bigger” (82). In other words, the opposition of naturalist social protest and modernist existential liberation echoes Wright’s political evolution from a communist who believed that Marxism pointed a way “beyond race” to a Black Power advocate who defends black autonomy.9 In addition, more than these biographical changes, the opposition reflects the changes that the movements of modernism and naturalism and the types of literary criticism have undergone since the 1930s and 1940s. Although the status of modernism has risen dramatically since then while that of naturalism has fallen, at that time the naturalist movement was, as I noted, highly influential, whereas modernist works were labeled experimental or regressive and were held in low esteem. Consider, for instance, left-wing realist criticism of Hurston’s Their Eyes. Wright complained that it “carries no theme, no message, no thought” (Gates and Appiah, Hurston 17). Because Hurston entertained and flattered her patron, Mrs. R. Osgood-Mason, a very controlling woman whom she called “godmother,” and had, as a result, acquired the reputation of being a simple, childlike, primitive “darkie” (see Washington, Foreword vii–viii), Wright describes the “minstrel fashion” in which the novel entertains white readers (17). In the more moderate Negro Voices in American Fiction (1948), Hugh Gloster praises the novel’s “vivid pictures of social life in Eatonville, gambling dives in Jacksonville, and bean-picking communities in the Everglades” and “the social tension of the Southern scene,” but he, too, complains that Hurston is “more interested in folklore and dialect than in social criticism” (237). As late as 1973, Darwin Turner, who treats the novel as a bad classical tragedy because it mixes the comic and the serious, lamented “Miss Hurston’s continued emphasis upon intraracial and intrafamilial hatred” (108). In other words, the realists have objected that the novel fails to protest American racial prejudice and class oppression or fault black nationalist and religious ideals. The realists were right: the novel celebrates the independence of a black woman’s imagination and the virtues of the black community. By contrast, critics praised the social and psychological realism of Native Son. For example, Ralph Ellison, who was a friend of and influenced by Wright, claimed that, unlike Hurston’s Their Eyes, which was marred by her “calculated burlesque,” Wright’s Native Son “possesses an artistry, penetration of thought, and sheer emotional power that places it in the front rank of American fiction” (Gates and Appiah, Wright 15, 12). Along with James Baldwin, who was also Wright’s friend, Ellison went on, however, to complain that the novel did not depict black humanity or intellectual and artistic independence in a positive way. In defense of the novel, Irving Howe and others argued that Wright’s anger with blacks and whites truly reflected his debilitating Richard Wright’s Native Son

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experience of American social life and that in oedipal fashion Baldwin and Ellison were rebelling against their literary father. Howe’s view lost out, for Lionel Trilling, his fellow New York intellectual, argued that naturalist protest fiction had gained high status because liberals mistakenly preferred “reality” to “mind,” as their praise of Dreiser’s work showed (23–24). Along with the New Critics, who established themselves at that time, Trilling complained that such “liberal democratic” art does not provide “the sense of largeness, of cogency . . . of being reached in our secret and primitive minds” characterizing the work of Henry James and other modernists (286). Morris Dickstein says that because of these critiques, “seminal writers like Dreiser and Richard Wright were relegated to the shabby ghetto of propaganda, rather than art” (381). In the 1960s and 1970s, newly established black studies programs rehabilitated Native Son but preserved this opposition of realism and modernism. As Alessandro Portelli says, “When the time came to rescue the novel for the burgeoning field of African-American studies . . . Bigger was now most often described as a heroic self who achieves freedom and full humanity,” instead of “an inarticulate victim of his environment” (255). For example, Houston Baker argues that the novel depicts Bigger as an existential hero and not as a naturalist victim. His development echoes the liberation depicted in nineteenth-century slave narratives: “Bigger’s movement from bondage to freedom follows the same course: he repudiates white American culture, affirms black survival values, and serves as a model hero—a strong man getting stronger” (Introduction 5; see also Gayle 179). Moreover, Baker considers the novel’s existentialism, rather than its naturalism, a realistic response to black life: “The fundamental conditions of black life in America led him to see that apriori [sic] moral values could scarcely be operating in the great scheme of events” (Introduction 18; see also Jackson 129; JanMohammed 16–18). Similarly, the strong community of black cultural life, not the revolutionary organizations of the working class, explains, Baker says, Wright’s communism. By contrast, Henry Louis Gates parodies the novel’s Marxism, calling it a matter of “race and superstructure.” He also complains that Native Son continues what he terms the black drive to justify the race’s intelligence, instead of employing the aesthetic devices of the black literary tradition (30). On this aesthetic basis, he faults Native Son but esteems Their Eyes. He argues that its metonymic projection and metaphoric assertion expresses Janie’s selfdivision. For example, when Joe slaps Janie for preparing a bad dinner, she imagines that her image of him has fallen off her mental shelf. Gates considers this fallen image of him both a metaphoric description of his lost status and a metonymic introjection of her oppressive domestic life. In the realist fashion Michael Awkward objects that, ignoring the disabling effects of racial discrimination, the novel divorces voice and action, subject and object, self and community. In contrast, Gates says that Janie’s voice “is an outcome of her consciousness of division,” not “a sign of a newly found unified iden128

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tity” (Gates and Appiah, Hurston 187). Gates also says that the novel’s figural devices and free indirect discourse initiate the multivoiced narration of black modernist art. As Robert Stepto says, the novel “forwards the historical consciousness of the tradition’s narrative forms” (From Behind 166). On these aesthetic grounds, Gates and Stepto esteem the modernist Their Eyes over the naturalist Native Son, while Baker justifies Native Son’s naturalist or Marxist realism on sociocultural grounds; however, they all revalue Their Eyes or Native Son, assimilating them to black traditions and experience. Other critics also revalue Native Son but dismiss the novel’s black contexts. Joyce Joyce, for instance, claims that Wright’s artistic genius matters more than the novel’s themes or politics. On this basis, she construes the novel as a classical tragedy revealing the objective truths of human nature. She calls Bigger a “blind seer” who recognizes “the futility of looking outside the self for affirmation,” achieving thereby the dignity and tragic stature of an Oedipus (Richard 116). Moreover, she dismisses both the “naturalist and existential views” of him: “Naturalistic and existential views of Bigger as either a victimized or isolated figure limit the dimensions of Bigger’s character and give no attention to how Wright’s use of language punctuates the irony and ambiguity of Bigger’s personality” (172).10 Other critics also defend the novel’s objective truth and fault black or existential notions of Bigger’s “isolation” or liberation, but these critics emphasize the novel’s historical insight into class and racial oppression, rather than its tragic character. For instance, Barbara Foley, who fully explains the parallels of Native Son and An American Tragedy, defends Max’s long speech on the grounds that it provides what An American Tragedy takes for granted: a critique of American racial and class oppression (“Politics” 195). Moreover, more negative than Joyce, Foley terms Bigger’s “surge of existential freedom . . . a twisted assertion of identity which, in its very deviance, profoundly condemns the social circumstances which have . . . deprived Bigger of any coherent sense of self ” (194; see also Burgum 122; Decoste 133–43). While Joyce construes the novel as a modern tragedy, Foley takes it to reveal the racial and class oppression of the 1930s; nonetheless, unlike Gates, who situates the novel in the black literary tradition, or Baker, who argues that Bigger’s existential liberation as well as the novel’s procommunist politics reflect black cultural practices, Foley and Joyce both assume that the insights of the novel transcend ethnic or racial differences and reveal the objective truths of human nature or capitalist society. Not only do Foley and Joyce dismiss these differences but also they argue, along with Cornel West and others, that Gates, Baker, and other black scholars accommodate the white literary establishment and neglect the community or the working class.11 As West says, in general, black studies repudiates “the African American literature of racial confrontation during the four decades of the forties to the seventies” because of “the existential needs and accommodating values of the black and white literary professional-managerial classes” (39).12 Richard Wright’s Native Son

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Such critiques fail to consider, however, that in the twentieth century the modern university and giant corporate media have acquired massive cultural influence undermining the common values or public sphere in terms of which Foley, Joyce, and others interpret the novel or defend “the literature of racial confrontation.” David Shumway points out that when the study of American literature acquired professional status in the 1920s and 1930s, historians adopted what he calls the positivist microanalysis of a text’s sources and influences or a writer’s biography, era, and culture but preserved the traditional American canon with its white, male, Anglo-Saxon roots (189–90). After World War II, literary historians, the New Critics, the New York intellectuals, and other critics and scholars esteemed the work of William Faulkner and other conservative modernists and denigrated naturalist protest fiction. For instance, unlike the historians, the New Critics, who dominated major American universities at that time, promoted the modernist avant-garde but, as supporters of the southern Agrarian movement, they defended the organic community and patriarchal traditions of the Old South and condemned the “progress,” industry, liberalism, science, wealth, bureaucracy, and democratic equality of the Yankee North (see Jancovich 71–101). Allied with the New Critics, the New York intellectuals treated conservative modern writers as an oppositional force undermining the “indiscriminate” liberal faith in human equality and social justice. In the 1930s and 1940s, liberals and communists struggled for racial equality and social progress. American communists defended Stalin but effectively promoted African American culture, provided it showed a “masculinist” bias (Kelley 120–21). At that time, the New York intellectuals, who included Sidney Hook, Lionel Trilling, Irving Howe, and James Burnham, also defended Marxist and radical views. These scholars then reversed themselves, reducing communist practices to a nightmarish totalitarian other and liberal writers and critics to fellow travelers whose tolerance of communism showed their blindness to impending evil. Scholars point out that a broad range of critics, fearing an oppressive cultural decline, also justified the subversive force of modern high art and dismissed naturalist protest fiction and popular culture (see Huyssen 26; Norris 242; Pietz 65; Ross 42–64; Schaub 17; Sinfield 102). It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that, thanks to the Black Power and civil rights movements, student rebellions, rapidly expanding American universities, and an unusually prosperous economy, African American literary study established itself in academia. At that time, it underwent what Baker terms a “paradigm shift”: The Black Power movement gave rise to a new black aesthetics, which dismissed the realist belief that African American literature adhered to common American ideals and that identified African American literature with peculiarly African American experience, culture, language, and history (Blues 76–77). This paradigm shift came too late for Hurston, who in 1959 died impoverished and forgotten. Her work was initially reclaimed by Alice Walker and other black feminists, not by the black aestheticists; nonetheless, this shift, which “made it possible for literary-critical and 130

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literary-theoretical investigators to . . . include previously ‘unfamiliar’ objects in an expanded (and sharply modified) American art world” (77), justified the reinterpretation of Their Eyes and Native Son as novels of liberation.13 New York intellectuals adopted modernist accounts of American or Western culture and dismissed not only naturalist protest and popular “mass” fiction but also “nationalist” African American studies as well as women’s, ethnic, and postcolonial studies and poststructuralist theories. By the 1980s and 1990s, when conservative politicians increasingly dominated federal and state government and the global economy was absorbing American industry and finance, scholars as diverse as Allan Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Gerald Graff, Fredric Jameson, Terry Eagleton, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, and Edward Said blamed the universities’ expanding disciplines, black, women’s, or ethnic studies, and multicultural clientele for the humanities’ growing fragmentation and declining public support. Scholars on the right and the left attributed this declining support to the humanities’ withdrawn, academic character. They argued that, with its theoretical “jargon,” subjective responses, and black, minority, and women’s literatures, academic criticism alienated the public. I cannot here address the full range of issues raised by these debates;14 suffice it to say that, far from alienating the public, scholars who situate Native Son or Their Eyes in African American contexts bring together the university and the black community. As Richard Ohmann points out, these scholars “are in fact far more active and consequential now than in the early sixties. . . . They work in different sites and in different ways” (75). More negative than Foley, Joyce, or West, Walter Benn Michaels objects that critics who examine racial or sexual differences are not “consequential” or progressive, as Ohmann suggests; they are racist or sexist because their examination of these differences implicitly rejects the common or public rationality of traditional criticism. Moreover, he attributes the breakdown of this rationality to communism’s collapse, not to the university’s and the giant corporate media’s cultural influence: “ideological differences have been replaced by differences that should be understood on the model of cultural or linguistic differences. . . . Readers at the end of history . . . differ but they do not disagree” (80). If readers no longer engage in such rational debate, it is not because of communism’s breakdown (far from rational, blacklists, prison sentences, indoctrination, and warfare usually resolved the ideological differences of communists and anticommunists); rather, the cultural influence that the modern university and the giant corporate media have acquired since World War II has destroyed the ability of literary scholars to address the public sphere in traditional ways. This influence has, at the same time, given them the ability to influence their professional and nonprofessional communities positively. In other words, instead of co-opting black scholars or rendering them irrational, the modern university and the giant corporate media have given them new import or importance. Along with Wright’s changing beliefs and modernism’s and Richard Wright’s Native Son

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naturalism’s new status, this new import explains why Native Son’s naturalist version, in which racial and class oppression victimize Bigger, can now be seen as incompatible with its modernist version, in which Bigger overcomes his oppression and liberates himself. This new import is, moreover, progressive. In the 1930s and 1940s, when middlebrow magazines such as Reader’s Digest, which published Native Son, still influenced the public sphere, Wright and other realists faulted fiction that, like Their Eyes, addressed “nationalist” cultural issues, and they justified naturalist protest fiction, which, like Native Son, would transform the working class and, more generally, American social life. The accounts of Joyce, Foley, and others also address the American public, but to preserve the novel’s universal or historical truth, these accounts dismiss the “debilitating” influence of black studies, the university, and the media. By contrast, the views of Baker and others suggest that African American experience justifies the novel’s existential view of Bigger’s liberation as well as its naturalist account of his tragic racial and class oppression. Since corporate elites dominate the increasingly privatized university of the twenty-first century, these accounts effectively foster the excluded cultures and oppositional movements of the black community.15 Notes 1. Critics who consider the novel protest fiction and implicitly or explicitly deny the existential or modernist character of Bigger include Bell 166; Bone 151; Burgum 121; Ben Davis, Jr., cited in Reilly, Wright 75; DeCoste 141, 143; Foley, Politics 95–96; Hynes 96; Margolies 72; Siegel 97. Critics who treat the novel as an account of Bigger’s liberation and deny or minimize its protest of class and racial oppression include Baker, Introduction 5; Bayliss 5; Butler 55; Fishburn 90; George 504; Gibson; Joyce 24–25, 103–4; JanMohammed 84–85; Kennedy 283. 2. See also Jerry Bryant, who claims that “Bigger is . . . psychologically free in a way that even Max is not. . . . Max’s failure suggests that the Communist party, like Mrs. Dalton, like Bigger’s family, is blind, too” (24); Yoshinobu Hakutani, who appreciates the novel’s protest against racial discrimination (61) as well as Max’s enabling Bigger to grow (83); Irving Howe, who says, “Between Wright’s feelings as a Negro and his beliefs as a Communist there is hardly a genuine fusion” (139); Joseph Skerrett, who says that the last section presents “an open-ended or suspended argument in which Wright is refusing to allow Bigger’s individuality to be swallowed up or subsumed by Max’s social analyses” (37); Robert Stepto, who says that Max, not Bigger, proves articulate and sensitive, but Bigger is clearly the hero (“I Thought” 64–65), and John Reilly, who says that, while the novel justifies Max’s social analyses, Bigger finds his own voice (“Giving” 58–59). 3. Theodore Dreiser, a fellow member of the Anti-Fascist League of American Writers and other left-wing writers’ associations, was one of Wright’s favorite writers (see Rowley 60, 87). Reviewers who noted the parallels of Native Son and An American Tragedy include Howard Mumford Jones, The Boston Evening Transcript (2 Mar. 1940); Clifton Fadiman, New Yorker (2 Mar. 1940); Peter Monro Jack, New York Times Book Review 132

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(3 Mar. 1940); Edward Skillin, Jr., Commonweal (8 Mar. 1940); The Chicago Defender (8 Mar. 1940); Ben Davis, Jr., New York Sunday Worker (14 Apr. 1940); Samuel Sillen, New Masses (30 Apr. 1940); and Sterling A. Brown, Opportunity 18 (June 1940) (all qtd. in Reilly 47, 48–49, 53, 63, 64–69, 84, and 96, respectively). Critics who consider Dreiser’s fiction an important influence have included Ralph Ellison, who said that the work of Dreiser and Upton Sinclair developed “techniques for grappling with the deeper American realities” (14); Edwin Berry Burgum, who noted that Wright followed the “general plan” of An American Tragedy until the trial scene, where he merged his personality with Max (121–22); Irving Howe, who said that the novel showed the “molding influence of Theodore Dreiser, especially the Dreiser of An American Tragedy” (138); Michel Fabre, who considered the parallels of Dreiser and Wright biographical as well as literary (“Beyond” 41–42); Barbara Foley, whose detailed comparison of An American Tragedy and Native Son is one of the best (“Politics” 191–94); Robert Stepto, who examines why Wright turned to Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis and not black authors (“I Thought” 61–62); and Yoshinobu Hakutani, who examines in detail how the two novels diverge (84–99). 4. Joseph Karaganis points out that, thanks to the intense national spotlight, Clyde’s trial confers on him a celebrity status questioning his public or national self (156). 5. Ann Algeo points out that Wright modeled Max on Clarence Darrow, who in the famous Leopold and Loeb case granted their guilt but argued that their circumstances warranted lesser punishment (51–52). 6. See Hakutani, who argues that “despite the obvious parallels between Native Son and An American Tragedy, the comparison is of limited value” because, unlike Clyde, who is defeated at the end and never gains any insight into himself or his position, Bigger achieves liberation (86–88). 7. Michael Fabre points out that in 1938, when Wright was writing the novel, his friend Jane Newton convinced him to reread “with close attention to technique and detail The Possessed and The Brothers Karamazov” (Wright 170). As a result, he came to appreciate Dostoevsky’s existentialism, so much so that, when Newton objected to Bigger’s killing his girlfriend Bessie Mears, Wright defended the killing on the grounds that, as Fabre says, Bigger was “gradually turning into another Raskolnikov” (171). 8. For a discussion of these parallels, see Cooke 87–88; Portelli 260. 9. Robert A. Lee says, “Throughout the Depression years and even into the 1940s [Wright] was regularly taken to reflect the Communist Party view that Marxism pointed a way ‘beyond race.’ . . . Then, during the Eisenhower Tranquil ’50s . . . he found himself castigated as some kind of literary dissident, an ungrateful black antiAmerican voice . . . still enamoured of Soviet Russia. . . . In turn, in the 1960s . . . the generation raised on Civil Rights and then marches like that into Selma and innercity explosions and the rhetoric of Malcolm X and the Panthers seized on him as an exemplary spokesman for Black Power, an early standard-bearer of either-or black militancy” (111). 10. See also Charles Scruggs, who argues that Bigger, whose life was “one long act of rebellion against what society officially considers pious” (166), deserves the electric chair and that, far from atheistic communism, Wright describes Chicago in biblical terms. “If Max gives his redeemed city a Marxist bias, Wright makes sure that readers see it in a more universal light through its archetypal setting” (168). Richard Wright’s Native Son

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11. See Foley, “Marxism” 5–37; Joyce, “Black Woman” 543–65. 12. See also Barbara Christian, who says that because of these theorists, “some of our most daring and potentially radical critics (and by our I mean black, women, third world) have been influenced, even co-opted, into speaking a language and defining their discussion in terms alien to and opposed to our needs and orientation” (52). 13. Similarly, Barbara Herrnstein Smith says that a text may be rediscovered as an “unjustly neglected masterpiece” when “different of its properties [sic] and possible functions become foregrounded by a new set of subjects with emergent interests and purposes” (49). 14. For a full discussion of these polemics, see Goldstein 17–20. 15. As Paul Lauter says, a democratic humanities is “a goal of both progressive faculty and working class, minority, and immigrant communities, and thus an intellectual and policy basis for alliances between such groups” (63).

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———, ed. Richard Wright: The Critical Reception. New York: Franklin, 1978. Ross, Andrew. No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture. New York: Routledge, 1989. Rowley, Hazel. Richard Wright: The Life and Times. New York: Holt, 2001. Schaub, Thomas. American Fiction in the Cold War. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991. Schwartz, Lawrence H. Creating Faulkner’s Reputation: The Politics of Modern Literary Criticism. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1988. Scruggs, Charles W. “The City without Maps in Richard Wright’s Native Son.” Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” Ed. Keneth Kinnamon. New York: Hall, 1997. 147–79. Shumway, David. Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994. Siegel, Paul N. “The Conclusion of Richard Wright’s Native Son.” Critical Essays on Richard Wright’s “Native Son.” Ed. Keneth Kinnamon. New York: Hall, 1997. 94–103. Sinfield, Alan. Literature, Politics, and Culture in Postwar Britain. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Skerrett, Joseph T., Jr. “Composing Bigger: Wright and the Making of Native Son.” Richard Wright: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Arnold Rampersad. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice, 1995. 26–39. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Stepto, Robert B. From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979. ———. “ ‘I Thought I Knew These People’: Wright and the Afro-American Literary Tradition.” Richard Wright. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House, 1987. 57–74. Trilling, Lionel. The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1953. Turner, Darwin T. In a Minor Chord: Three Afro-American Writers and Their Search for Identity. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971. Wallace, Michele. Black Macho and the Myth of Superwoman. London: Verso, 1980. Washington, Mary Helen. Foreword. Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. New York: Harper & Row, 1990. vii–xix. Werner, Craig. “Bigger’s Blues: Native Son and the Articulation of Afro-American Modernism.” In New Essays on “Native Son.” Ed. Keneth Kinnamon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 117–52. West, Cornell. Keeping Faith: Philosophy and Race in America. New York: Routledge, 1993. Wright, Richard. “Between Laughter and Tears.” Zora Neale Hurston: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. K. A. Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. New York: Amistad, 1993. 16–17. ———. Native Son. New York: HarperCollins, 1989.

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Main Street Reading Main Street AMY L. BLAIR

Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street was a “literary sensation,” garnering both critical acclaim and phenomenal sales (Bucco 13). Published with relatively little fanfare in October 1920, by a year later it had sold 295,000 copies (Lingeman 157). Main Street was not only the best-selling novel in the United States for 1921; it continued to be so for the following four years (Hart 525). And people who did not buy books were also jumping on the Main Street bandwagon: According to the Bookman, it was the book requested most in public libraries across the United States from February through December 1921 and remained in the top five for requests for months after.1 The book had both legs and buzz: In May 1921, Catherine Beach Ely, a reviewer for the New York Times, claimed she was “the last inhabitant” (she does not say of what) to read “the season’s wonderwork.” In the same issue of the Times, one publishing executive bemoaned the fact that “there are actually thirty-seven neo–Main Streets getting into type at present” (Lowry), one of which, Dorothy Canfield’s The Brimming Cup, also published by Harcourt and touted as an “answer” to Main Street, became the second-best-selling novel of 1921. Lewis’s novel spawned parodies such as Carolyn Wells’s Ptomaine Street, and the phrase “Main Street” became almost immediately a shorthand derogatory term for small town U.S.A.2

Harcourt’s claim on the inside front cover of the January 15th issue of Publisher’s Weekly that Main Street would be “The Big Novel of 1921” was not just bluster; it was prescience. The reason for the novel’s mass appeal eluded publishing executives in the 1920s just as it has confounded critics ever since. Martin Light has argued that “By seeing Carol Kennicott as a quixote, we come to realize that Lewis satirized both his heroine and the village” (182), but I believe Lewis’s double satire renders discernment of its reception complex. Most contemporaneous commentators staked a position somewhere between claiming the book was famous despite Lewis’s simultaneous criticism of the American small town (as a bastion of ignorance devoid of culture) and caricature of his heroine (for her quixotic attempts to change the minds of those around her) and asserting it was successful because of the scandal caused by these positions. However, fan mail written to Lewis reveals that Main Street’s popularity was less tied to the novel’s satirical content than to the mechanisms of the burgeoning middlebrow culture of the 1920s. In the novel, Lewis offered biting commentary on nearly every aspect of that culture. At the same time, the novel itself became an artifact of middlebrow culture—both as one of the “best books” that cultural arbiters such as William Lyons Phelps and Stuart Pratt Sherman advised a growing mass of readers to read and as a book “everyone [was] talking about” because of its incendiary attacks on the world of the middlebrow.3 The widely variant reader responses evinced in Lewis’s surviving fan mail ultimately seem to be related more to the highly individualistic motivations propelling readers toward the book than to Lewis’s satirical project. Phelps—a Yale professor, literary lecturer, and future Scribner’s columnist— articulated the apparent contradictions of the Main Street phenomenon: The inhabitants of Main Street would seem to have a counter-weight in a balancing number of those who laugh at them. . . . To prove that people need it as much as they apparently want it, [the novel] should circulate only among the élite and be either vaguely irritating or downright incomprehensible to the general. Instead of being caviar, it is shredded wheat. The other alternative is that there are two million five hundred thousand élite readers in America, allowing conservatively five readers to every copy, and remembering that the sale has considerably increased since I began to write this article. Now to believe that there are millions of the élite in America is to believe that this is indeed God’s country; such a belief would put the believer forever on Main Street. (298)4 Phelps, as Joan Shelley Rubin has shown, was a dissenter from the genteel critics of his generation and a regular at women’s clubs and Chautauquas, “drawing up to two thousand people at a performance” on the lecture circuit in the early 1920s (281–82). Since Phelps was one of the critics who was pointing all of these readers to the novel, his apparent surprise at the sales figures seems 140

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somewhat disingenuous. A telling aside marks, I think, the crux of the problem with the book’s success: “I admire both ‘Main Street’ and its author; I rejoice in his success; but the cyclonic popularity of the book—if foreseen—might conceivably have tempered its zeal” (298). That is, if the book’s indictment of the mass of readers was accurate, then the book would never have found such a wide audience. Since it has achieved popular success, its diagnosis was clearly inaccurate, its prescriptions unnecessary. In this remark, Phelps seems to refer to “the book” as an independent entity, perhaps in an attempt to avoid critiquing one of his pet authors. Phelps was one of Lewis’s early supporters, a young and iconoclastic assistant professor at Yale when Lewis was a student there. He had written in 1913 to tell Lewis that Our Mr. Wrenn was “an absolutely bully book from the first word to the last” (qtd. in Schorer 214). But Main Street seemed more like a schoolyard bully, and Phelps suggests that, had the book been able to foresee its apparent widespread appeal, it would not have been so acerbic in satirizing the middlebrow reader. Phelps’s argument rests on the assumption that the mass of popular readers were reading the book the way he read it—as an indictment of middlebrow taste. Instead of characterizing the reading public as self-flagellating, though, he presumes that the critique was off base from the beginning. He does not entertain the possibility that these readers’ pursuit of the text was not predicated on agreement with its perceived argument. In other words, what if readers made their selection based not on what the text “said” but on what “having read” the text signified? Main Street’s time as a best seller had ended by 1926, by which time, Janice Radway has argued, “a series of relatively tight material and social linkages between particular kinds of writing practices, production methods, books, and readers had congealed into ideological habit, producing two quite distinct ways of conceptualizing the book” (129). The contemporaneous anxiety over the meaning of Main Street’s popularity can perhaps be ascribed in part to the quickening of this process in the first half of the decade.5 At this time, publishing houses had a financial imperative to increase the sales of “literary” books, as Christopher Wilson observes: “The growing consensus in the teens was that the ‘book-buying habit’ was not secure enough among the general public and that book promotion needed to focus instead on ‘opinion makers,’ notably critics, discriminating booksellers, or influential community figures, and, in [Charles] Doran’s words, be more ‘impartial,’ professional, even academic” (216). This commercialization of the literary threatened, however, to make the literary indistinguishable from the “purely commercial book,” one produced mechanically, without the involvement of an individual author under the influence of creative inspiration. Radway notes that elite desires to shore up the difference between “commercial books” and “literary books” led to the development of “a new genre of writing . . . that was devoted to the issue of how and what to read” but that finally, and ironically, proceeded “not by linking [‘literary books’] with leisurely meditation and reverent appreciation but by associating them with a more Main Street Reading Main Street

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instrumental view that emphasized the benefits they conferred on the reader” (142–43). Ultimately, this culture of advice and its notions of “proper” reading materials and practices comprised the cultural atmosphere in which the middlebrow reader in the 1920s breathed, and Lewis’s book became the focus of all these energies. In the 1920–21 issues of Publisher’s Weekly in which Harcourt heavily promoted Main Street to the trade, the bookstore-based “Buy a Book a Week” campaign was in full evidence, with sample advertisements and store signs offered as inspiration to the trade and think-pieces on the impact of best-seller lists dominating discussions of marketing to “non–book readers.” Main Street was generally considered a success story in the commercialization of the literary through such lists, as in an anonymous article of 14 May 1921, “Best Seller List Encourage [sic] Book Buying”: “It would be difficult to estimate how many people have picked up copies of ‘The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,’ ‘Main Street,’ etc., simply because they knew they were the ‘best sellers.’ ” These ads and articles assume that the desire to read a popular book is ultimately a social desire, tied both to the belief that other readers are able to exercise good aesthetic judgment and to the belief—the latter being the most important for my purposes here—that there is some cultural capital to be gained through one’s exposure to and ability to demonstrate knowledge of a text.6 Jennifer Parchesky has characterized middlebrow culture as the result of a new group of middle-class, white-collar workers’ simultaneous resistance to highbrow cultural authorities and selfdifferentiation from the “masses” through a pronounced dedication to reading and education: “their vision is bound up with then-emergent theories of progressive education and psychology that valorized learning as an ongoing process of ‘experience’ and interpretation, offering a model of education that helped to assuage anxieties about a rapidly changing and deeply disconcerting modern society” (232). Although Lewis’s readers shared many of the same convictions, they were not necessarily the “defiant” middlebrow readers Parchesky finds corresponding with Lewis’s contemporary and colleague on the 1921 best-seller list, Dorothy Canfield.7 Lewis’s readers retained a measure of respect for the dictates of intellectual cultural arbiters and, one may discern from their letters, a sense that reading Lewis’s fiction in concert with the attitudes of book reviewers was socially and personally desirable. As it turned out, this attitude did not always translate into a response with which any of these critics would agree. Middlebrow readers, encountering Lewis’s satire after encouragement to read this book that “everyone [was] talking about,” might have faced the following dilemma: how to receive a message skewering the very values and motivations that brought them to the text in the first place. In choosing to defend the “village” against Lewis’s charges of parochialism or to identify with Carol Kennicott and ignore the quixotic side of her character, the readers of Main Street who were motivated to write to the author about their reading experience and whose letters the author kept 142

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for posterity were remarkably inconsistent in their responses, reacting to the novel in eclectic and highly personal ways, depending on individual histories and motivations for reading. In other words, these readers saw themselves in the novel and chose to praise or censure Lewis on the basis of how accurately they felt he reflected their own personal experience. While at first glance the peculiarity of some of these responses might make us think of them as outliers, I believe we might say that they are exactly what one might expect when the mechanisms of literary commercialization cast a wide net, appealing to desires for social and economic success and promoting the reading of the right kinds of books as a means to those goals. Someone—one hopes Lewis himself, since the handwriting is similar to his own—titled one of the folders in the Sinclair Lewis Papers at the Beinecke Library “Crank Letters etc. and Fan Mail.” Some of the letters in the archive are from passing acquaintances or from other authors (e.g., other “Satevenposters” congratulating Lewis on the success of Main Street [Lingeman 78]). It is true that a significant number of these letters—thirteen of the eighty-two that can be classified as substantial letters from relative strangers—are from certifiable “cranks,” the messiahs of bizarre religions or paranoid persons whose missives one suspects Lewis kept as material for future characters or as comic relief. The middlebrow reader who identifies too wholly and uncritically with Carol or too wholly or uncritically with the Gopher Prairie-ites is, of course, not a delusional “crank,” but the archival grouping of these middlebrow readers’ letters with the crank ones indicates that the difference broke down in the mind of the Beinecke file’s organizer. What seems to one reader (again, perhaps Lewis himself) to be misplaced identifications or apparent “misreadings” are in fact “cranky” readings, but they are also entirely understandable responses in a reading environment that encouraged middlebrow readers to both discover and cultivate their best selves through familiarity with “the best books” of the day.8 The fan mail in the Lewis Papers covers his whole career, but the largest number of letters that mention specific titles mention Main Street, even though the collection as a whole is skewed toward letters from late 1948 through 1950, when Lewis was out of the country and correspondence was vetted and archived by Random House.9 There are twenty-six substantial letters from relative strangers that discuss Main Street at some length, and seventeen of these were written in 1920 or 1921 during the heyday of Main Street’s initial release. Of the nine letters that mention Main Street retrospectively, two reference the Sauk Centre, Minnesota, post office’s 1938 National Air Mail Week cancellation, which included a drawing of the Main Street book cover; two mention Main Street as the book that initially interested the letter writers in Lewis’s work; one references Main Street by way of correcting Lewis’s later references to jazz musicians;10 and four, written by women passionately moved by Lewis’s work and, often, by stories of his life, retrospectively laud Lewis’s penetrating insights into the feminine mind. As a basis of comparison, the next most frequently mentioned work is Kingsblood Royal (1947), with Main Street Reading Main Street

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eight discussions (six contemporaneous and two retrospective letters). Coming in third, with five mentions, are Gideon Planish (1946) (all contemporaneous), Babbitt (1922) (four contemporaneous, one retrospective), and Cass Timberlaine (1945) (three contemporaneous, two retrospective as a result of the 1947 MGM film). There are several possible explanations for this distribution, none of which is verifiable. This proportion may accurately represent the fan mail Lewis received. It is also possible that Lewis kept more of the letters referencing Main Street because of the novelty of the book’s success or the responses’ attributes; after this first burst of fame, the later waves of fan mail may have been less interesting. The letters archived by Lewis’s publisher are thus perhaps more likely to demonstrate a “true” proportion of title mentions, either retrospective or contemporaneous, because the house apparently kept all received letters on file, the “interesting” ones along with the more straightforward requests for author signatures and auctionable items. These letters are more indicative, however, of the long-term interest in certain of Lewis’s texts, and thus signal something different about the reception of Main Street—namely, that of all Lewis’s works, it is either the one that was most frequently read beyond the initial period of publication because of some combination of availability and reader desire or the one that most frequently evoked in its readers the impulse to write the author. In any case, the Main Street fan mail is distinct, both in the period just after its publication and in the lasting memory of readers inclined to write fan mail. How representative, though, are readers who write fan mail, either of “nonprofessional” readers as a whole or of the readers attracted to a given book in particular? This question probably needs to be answered on a case-by-case basis. Barbara Ryan’s study of the fan mail written to Gene Stratton-Porter, for example, addresses a body of mail that was actively solicited by a critically maligned popular author as part of an “anti-critic campaign.” Ryan admits that there is no way to tell how representative the sample is, noting that the letters share a “vision of literature and thus of cultural production generally” that was in part motivated by Stratton-Porter’s own writings on the subject and in part selected for by both Stratton-Porter herself (as with Lewis, the letters we have access to were the letters she chose to save) and by her daughter, who edited the published collection of fan mail Ryan cites (162). Lewis’s extant fan mail shares many of the same characteristics as StrattonPorter’s, and this coincidence may in part be attributable to their close contemporaneity. But, as already shown, Lewis’s relationship to his critics was more complex than Stratton-Porter’s: Ryan argues in fact that, during the 1920s, sentimental novels and romances like Stratton-Porter’s “began to come under the influence of literary realism,” and her popularity faded as the “critical criteria which the Lady of the Limberlost only half understood became more accepted, officially sanctioned, and familiar because literary professionals, rather than writing readers, [came to] control the media that does so much to shape reading tastes” (175). But if we find Lewis’s readers reacting to his “realism” in personal ways that resemble the ways their predecessors 144

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reacted to Stratton-Porter’s “romance,” can we tie the reactions to the novels, or should we map “personal” reactions to the compulsion to write to an author? Ultimately, I think that Main Street’s fan mail can suggest a new way to address the text itself: The readers’ reactions to the novel in fact highlight the ambivalent nature of the text’s ostensible realism, and the readers of Main Street seem to be reacting in highly personal ways that say more about reader needs than about the text itself or Lewis’s authorial project. Like readers of Stratton-Porter and Canfield, many of Lewis’s readers feel a need to acknowledge in some way their sense that Lewis was receiving a good deal of fan mail in addition to their own. Unlike Stratton-Porter’s and Canfield’s correspondents, however, the writers to Lewis tend to adopt a defensive tone, as if they are wary of Lewis’s reaction. This is true of male correspondents such as H. H. Kingsley: “When you begin to read this letters [sic] I am sure you will say, ‘Here’s another one of those bores talking about Main Street,’ and very likely you will be right, but we have enjoyed the book so much that I cannot refrain from the pleasure it will give me to tell you so.” Female correspondents tend to be more abjectly apologetic, particularly when their letters proceed to the kinds of personal queries or confessionals that typify the other writers’ fan mail: “I suppose it is very presumptuous of me to write to you, and I can expect in the future to find myself blushingly reading your opinion of silly females that write fan letters to busy writers in one of your books, but I just couldn’t help it” (Niebler). While this writer is self-conscious about the general characterization of all silly fans as women, the defensive tone in Lewis’s fan mail cuts across gender lines and seems rooted in anxieties about intellectual inferiority. Kingsley self-identifies as “the ‘Professor Mott’ of the schools of your neighboring town,” and while he claims that “personally I have no identity,” he drops the names of some mutual acquaintances and prides himself on having taught a roster of apparently notable individuals. Joan Joyce Sellers closes her letter by exclaiming, “You smart gentlemen have wasted time on me! I simply refuse to rise beyond a bourgeoise [sic] level!” but only after noticing that “the Midwest still lingers in your sentences! It’s practically impossible, isn’t it, for a feller fetched up in the wholesome atmosphere of the country, to turn complete reprobate! His prejudices simply won’t turn loose and cooperate with his intelligence!” Sellers may not lay claims to intellectualism, but she can recognize Lewis’s unintellectual origins and does not hesitate to “out” him. The fact that so many of these readers were conscious of the genre of fan mail, and that many of these letters are careful to situate themselves as somehow different from a perceived typical fan letter, makes it impossible to ignore the degree to which even the most self-revelatory fan letter was, at least partially, a performance of reader reception. In this way, we must approach fan mail more warily than we might approach the (still not uncomplicated) diaries and family letters that have sometimes served as the materiel for case histories of “real readers.”11 The types of performance, though, vary with each letter. Hence, our ability to generalize from these particular texts comes not Main Street Reading Main Street

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only from the fact of performance itself but also from a dialogue between the encomia to proper reading on the one hand and the desires evoked by a growing industry of book producers, sellers, and marketers on the other. Of the twenty-six letters mentioning Main Street, ten are from women, and sixteen are from men. As one might expect, a large number of readers seem to have found themselves in Carol Kennicott, but these identifications do not seem to break down along gender lines. Identification with Carol was ironically consistent with one popular explanation for Main Street’s success. This theory contended that the book offered readers an opportunity to indulge in fantasies of personal exceptionalism, allowing readers, in effect, to look at Gopher Prairie through Carol’s eyes: It is quite obvious that in “Main Street,” as in all books of this kind, no reader sees himself, but he does see, with startling clarity, his neighbors. Nor does he admit that his own Main Street fits the picture; instead he views other Main Streets in other towns. So everyone could enjoy “Main Street,” except those few who were too far removed from it. (Brace 147) While Lewis, in Carol’s voice, observes that “It has not yet been recorded that any human being has gained a very large and permanent contentment from meditation on the fact that he is better off than others” (305), the idea that people embraced Main Street for its powers of self-congratulation is perhaps a more likely explanation than those that imagine a self-flagellating public. While the critic suggests that “no reader sees himself ’ in Main Street, the letters to Lewis demonstrate that in fact many readers saw themselves in the novel and that this identification took root in a variety of ways. Some identifications can be mapped onto the correspondents’ selfidentification as escapees from the Gopher Prairies of America. Such letters come from the readers Alfred Harcourt, the novel’s publisher, identified as the drivers of the book’s initial success in New York City, where, he rightly wrote, “the greatest aggregation of those who come from ‘Main Street’” lived (Hutchisson 42). H. W. Hawley, writing on the letterhead of the Cunard Steam Ship Company from State Street, New York, tells Lewis, “The book is particularly interesting to me as I was born in Red Wing, Minn., and as I lived there and in Minneapolis until I went away to college, I recognize many, many of the places mentioned here and there in your book.” Hawley asks Lewis for a signature in the book and encloses in his letter a copy of a double-sided, die-cut, cardstock bookmark he had “had printed to accompany each of the fifteen to twenty copies of ‘Main Street’ which I gave to various friends for Christmas.” Hawley’s actions were exactly what Harcourt had hoped for when he opted to rely on word of mouth instead of expensive publicity in the first months of the book’s publication. As James Hutchisson speculates, Harcourt expected that “copies of the novel [would be] given as Christmas presents from persons living in New York . . . to their friends and relatives in the provinces” (42), 146

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presumably not to taunt them with their own parochialism, but in a complex recognition of the truth behind some of Lewis’s portraits and the pleasure in seeing familiar scenes in a work of literature. Such readers, presumably, tempered Lewis’s sometimes bitter satire with their own affectionate memories of place and thus could easily disentangle the Red Wings from Gopher Prairie. The fan mail authors who explicitly identified with Carol were more passionate both in their praise of Lewis’s novel and in their condemnation of the faults they found in it. This response is perhaps unsurprising, given Carol’s characterization as an idealist who holds her reading to strict account. Carol’s self-education, while spurred initially by an imaginative father and a stint in college, parallels in many ways that self-education that was being encouraged by reader’s manuals and guides in popular magazines, the self-education that Janice Radway, like Parchesky, has seen as central to a middlebrow cultural identity. Representative of this group of readers might be Grace Sprague, who in the very beginning of her letter, feels compelled to qualify the Newark, Ohio, return address: “Dear Mr. Lewis—I don’t live here. I only stay 1 week now and then. I did live here thirty years . . . I lived many pages of Main Street for fifteen years and then went to N.Y.” She writes her New York City address under her signature as if it were her professional title: 126 W. 24th St. “How could you know any woman as well as you knew Carol,” she asks, but then turns that query into a critique of the way Lewis allowed Carol’s story to turn out: Believe me Carol Kennicott [being?] herself never would have gone back to Gopher Prairie once having left it—for spiritual and economic reasons and many other reasons. I know being Carol herself. To my mind Carol’s return to mediocrity or worse is the one weak point in the most remarkable story I have read in years. You condemn her children forever to commonplaceness. I don’t believe you really thought she did return, but you were writing a story and the reading public expects a woman to return to her husband, so Carol returned. During Carol’s residence abroad she would have found pleasant and congenial companionship, sympathy and understanding, she would have met real people, she would have made money, and in every way have been able to give her children advantages not to be thought of in Gopher Prairie. This letter is complicated because of its frequent elision of the “fictional” world of the novel and the “actual” world inhabited by the reader and by Lewis. She asks, “How could you know any woman as well as you knew Carol?”—a question that both presumes and discounts the author’s control over the world and the characters in his novel. And yet this reader steps outside of the novel, as her identification with Carol gives her purchase to criticize Lewis’s story as factually inaccurate, altered to suit the prejudices of the “reading public.” After presenting herself as Carol, Sprague also sets herself against the masses Main Street Reading Main Street

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of popular readers, who would “expect a woman to return to her husband.” Sprague ignores Lewis’s concession of the very point she makes: that many Carols do leave the village and do not come back. She therefore also misses his important qualification of this point: that a Carol must be in a particular stage of life to make that flight a permanent one: With such a small-town life a Kennicott or a Champ Perry is content, but there are also hundreds of thousands, particularly women and young men, who are not at all content. The more intelligent young people (and the fortunate widows!) flee to the cities with agility and, despite the fictional tradition, resolutely stay there, seldom returning even for holidays. The most protesting patriots of the towns leave them in old age, if they can afford it, and go to live in California or in the cities. (Main Street 307) Contrary to contemporary critics, such as Mencken, who lionized Lewis for bravely turning his back on popularity with Main Street, this reader finds the book a concession to popular taste and thus a betrayal of Carol’s rebellious spirit. Identification with Carol finally forces a choice between her and the author, and Sprague is compelled to rebuke Lewis for writing against what he “really thought” Carol would do by “condemning” Carol and her children to mediocrity. Such vicarious identification involved considerable willful misreading of many of Lewis’s criticisms of both Carol and of the whole practice of readerly identification. For example, in the novel, Carol cares much less about her son Hugh than about her own intellectual freedom. While she does, on occasion, note that Hugh has turned into a perfect Gopher Prairie child, “a serious and literal person, and rather humorless” (489), saving him is not her motive for fleeing to Washington, D.C., nor does it seem to be much of her project while there. Indeed, Hugh takes up relatively little of her time while in Washington: She had, though it absorbed most of her salary, an excellent nurse for Hugh. She herself put him to bed and played with him on holidays. There were walks with him, there were motionless evenings of reading, but chiefly Washington was associated with people, scores of them, sitting about the flat, talking, talking, talking, not always wisely but always excitedly. (495) Sprague’s projection of concerned motherhood onto Carol belies a degree of willful reading that is symptomatic of a practice of readerly identification; as Michel de Certeau characterizes it, in “assimilating” the text, the reader is “making [the text] similar” to herself (166). But to identify with Carol as a cultured person in the midst of “troglodytes,” one would also need to ignore Lewis’s criticisms of Carol’s quixotism, 148

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her often ridiculous romanticism, and her unrealistic or misplaced expectations for Gopher Prairie. Ellis M. Potter sent Lewis a poem written in the voice of “the aesthetic ‘Carol’ hemmed in by unconquerable environment (Oh, the pity of it!).” As the parenthetical exclamation suggests (and the poem’s excess confirms), Potter laments Carol’s inability to continue escaping from “the world” in imaginative flights; the poem opens with the couplet “Yes, I am tired, and I lie here and weep, / And long, Oh, how I long for sleep!” and gets only more bathetic as it continues. This poem runs counter to the (ironically idealistic) notion held by critics from Carl van Doren to Hutchisson that Lewis’s readers were “at least partially aware of the stultifying conventionality of their lives” (Hutchisson 43) or even that they were removed from the desire for the romance or the sentimental reading practices of the early to mid– nineteenth century.12 This reader’s Carol laments that “For me no elfin fairies play / Or dance before some woodland shrine”—a lament presumably shared by the author of the poem, who reads the realism proffered by Lewis but longs for the fairies of latter-day literature. The archaisms in this reader’s poem and the references to “elfin fairies” are worthy of Carol’s most quixotic moments, and this reader fully embraces Carol’s quixotic nature, treats it as a precious thing, and assumes that Lewis’s intent in Main Street was to indict small-town America for the tragic destruction of a dreamer. Sentimental reflexes intact, this reader has read what Lewis repeatedly insisted was a “realist” text as a romance, an occasion for feeling and a warrant for the reader’s own imaginative practice. While (the indeterminately gendered) Potter was the only writer to have recourse to woodland sprite imagery, other readers, like the aforementioned Grace Sprague, had impassioned and even sentimental reactions to the novel, even turning to Lewis for advice, as in the case of one latter-day letter writer whose note never reached the ailing, expatriated Lewis. On New Year’s Day 1950, eighteen-year-old Harriett Hardy wrote that she suddenly felt forlorn and in need of some advice on something that probably concerns millions of young people all over the world. . . . I want my life to be a happy one for myself, and also to spend it in a way that some good will come of it for others. But what can one single girl accomplish in one lifetime that will make the world just a little better place to live in? Can anything be done at all, particularly if you don’t want to give up your own happiness? Although Hardy does not mention Main Street by title, by the date of her correspondence Lewis was already a literary lion, the first American recipient of the Nobel Prize and the highly public refuser of the Pulitzer. In the title pages of his recent novels, however, he was now known principally as “the author of Main Street and Babbitt” and only secondarily as the recent author of Kingsblood Royal. Add to this situation Hardy’s self-identification as an eighteen-year-old college student, and it becomes difficult not to read her Main Street Reading Main Street

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letter as at least unconsciously, and probably consciously, evoking parallels between herself and Lewis’s most famous college girl “about to ‘enter life.’ ” The self-dramatization in Hardy’s note is vintage Carol, down to the eager desire to “make the world just a little better place to live in.” Hardy turns to Lewis as one who has already envisioned the difference one young person could make, but she does not seem to find a satisfying answer in any extant Lewis texts. She needs another text, a more personalized answer, perhaps one that would differ from Main Street because of the passage of time between Lewis’s composition and her propitious moment. She can see that Lewis has diagnosed some sort of problem with the available options for young female college graduates, and she intuits that he is sympathetic to Carol and would, by extension, be sympathetic to another young idealist. Hardy’s final condition, that she doesn’t “want to give up [her] own happiness,” is, however, an implicit indictment of the conclusion Lewis imagined for Carol, a response more oblique than Sprague’s but just as dissatisfied. Hardy has taken a different approach with the elder statesman of letters, though, than Sprague takes with the relatively unknown author who is her peer: Hardy appeals to his sympathetic side in hopes that it might trump the cynical. The sentimental mode is clearly being used by these letter writers because they believe it is one with which Lewis is sympathetic, perhaps one he employs uncritically when he employs it through Carol’s voice. Lewis of course does have sympathy for Carol, but he certainly also shows her sentimental responses—and one might presume the sentimental excesses of his correspondents—to be ineffective and ultimately harmful. As my reading of the Carol-ite letters begins to indicate, many readers’ responses to the novel were in themselves as “conventional” as Carol herself, whom Lewis characterized in a November 1920 letter to Harcourt as “a small-town woman . . . differing from other small-town women only in being more sensitive and articulate” (45). By creating a quixotic Carol, Lewis touched a nerve in readers whose own reading practices danced on the edge of quixotism, between romance and ambition. When Main Street became “the book every one is talking about” in addition to one of the “best books” of the year, decade, and century, it became a book that middlebrow readers who wanted to sophisticate themselves would naturally pursue. Carol, as the book’s representative of this group, was eminently available for identification, appealing to such readers as a kindred spirit and evoking disappointment, in some, that her resolution was not more revolutionary. Carol’s supporters were not the only ones to write to Lewis either expecting his sympathy or critiquing his text; small-town America had an equal number of defenders who were equally various in their expressions of support for and condemnation of Lewis’s book, at times expressing both in the same sentence. One fan letter sent to Lewis by Percy A. Beach simultaneously praises him for getting the small town “right” and, it seems paradoxically, launches into an account of his town’s landscaping and cultural successes: 150

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I appreciate your great work: you know the small town. Just now a few of us are raising by popular subscription $6000 to beautify the grounds around our new $200,000 school house. There is a park of maples in front of it. We hired landscape architects, and are doing the work right. . . . But are our folks as provincial as Main Street’s? No, because over 50 per cent of them have traveled extensively . . . and I know there isn’t a more beautiful village, naturally, anywhere. It is in among the soft, low hills—the foothills of the Alleghenies. More power to y’! The lack of transition here between an assertion that Lewis got the small town “right” and a boosterish account of his own village’s beautification campaign (along with the cost thereof) evinces no awareness of a potential contradiction. Lewis skewers small town improvement projects through Gopher Prairie’s “anti-fly” campaign and Carol’s various flower-planting projects, but this letter writer sees these improvements as a thing to trumpet to the author. Perhaps Beach feels the hiring of landscape architects properly distinguishes his town’s efforts from the ill-advised ones of Gopher Prairie or that the relative well-traveledness of his townspeople marks their efforts as more successful than the feeble ones in the novel. The town’s more felicitous geographical location might also differentiate it. But aside from the one reference to travel, Beach is not explicitly trying to differentiate his home from the novel’s representation—he is saying, “you got the village right—I live in one of those villages.” There seems at the very least no eagerness to accept Lewis’s diagnosis of the village world’s conventionality but, in fact, an apparent determination to fit Lewis’s novel into preconceived ideas about the perfection of village life. A letter quoted on the editorial page of the Minneapolis Morning Tribune attests to a less convoluted defense of Main Street against Lewis’s criticism. Mrs. Ralph Tennal, “wife of the editor of the Sabetha [Kansas] Herald,” had written to the Tribune’s editor planning what amounts to an early version of Savannah’s Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil tours: “Our town is crazy over [Main Street], to such an extent that summer vacations are planned to Man Trap Lake. The easiest way in the world to get up a row nowadays is to start discussing ‘Main Street.’ ” The Tribune editor speculates that other civically minded, patriotic Main Streeters might likewise choose to show their support for fellow villagers in Minnesota by sending tourism dollars their way. “Come on, then, Kansans,” the editorial continues, “come up and see Gopher Prairie for yourselves. Come, and together we will confound this Lewis person, and make his book an invitation instead of an indictment” (“Good Out”). The Tribune and Mrs. Tennal take the novel’s criticism as a rallying-point for regional and civic pride, embracing the idea that no press is bad press. There is little question that the people of Sabetha and Minneapolis have, in the final analysis, found Lewis’s novel an (unfair) denunciation of the village life that must be answered. Yet Mrs. Tennal’s initial statement that “our town is crazy over the book” is slightly ambiguous. Again, while the remainder of the Main Street Reading Main Street

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letter signals that this “craziness” ultimately evinces itself as anger against the book’s ill-treatment of a fellow Midwestern village, there is also a degree to which the town is “crazy” about the book in a positive way—eagerly desiring to read it, enjoying it, even perhaps finding in it something positive or affirming about village life. There are certainly a number of lyrically beautiful passages in Main Street describing the prairie at various times of the year, and many of the hardworking farmers living near the village are depicted admirably; to find the lake attractive is not to utterly pervert the intentions of the text. It is interesting, though, that some flicker of admiration can coexist with the distresses of seeing one’s hometown disparaged in effigy, and alongside the hostility toward an East Coast traitor there are echoes here of Percy Beach, whose reaction tends to assume Lewis will join him in celebrating the small town. The small town remains, for both of these writers (and for the editors of the Tribune) the “point” of the novel, and Carol’s narrative fades to the background as she becomes a mechanism through which Lewis may dissect the village. Such shifts in identification are of course attributable to individual perspective, though to adopt this position one must either efface or condemn Lewis’s criticisms of the village. Lewis, of course, was an ambivalent native of the Midwestern village, and his small-town past came back to haunt him in the form of one letter from Mrs. Harry C. Smith, writing in August 1921 from Campbell, California. Mrs. Smith begins her letter, like so many others, by acknowledging the probability that she is one of a multitude of fans seeking to contact Lewis: “Dear Sir—Without doubt you are besieged with communication of various sorts and this may meet with the summary fate that many others do but I trust you will read it, and that it may be accorded a reply.” After this rather formal greeting, she starts down a path that, again, many others traveled, telling Lewis that she is going to “endeavor to establish [her] identity.” But she is not interested in explaining how she is like Carol or how she is one of the boosterish intelligentsia of her village; instead, she goes on to relate a substantive personal connection: You probably recall your native town enough to remember the Oliver Boobars, he having been post master several years and is quite lame. Your father was their physician since my earliest recollections of visiting them in Sauk Centre. In fact he fitted my first pair of glasses and we were quite fond of each other in the friendship that exists between elders and children. I was Edna Fawcett of St. Cloud, a niece of Mrs. Boobar, and I well remember taking you riding several times with their horse and buggy when you were a small boy. Here, let me offer my sincerest congratulations on the success which you are attaining in the literary world and especially of the phenomenal success of Main Street. I know how proud your father and mother are if they are still living, as I presume they are, altho [sic] I have not heard recently from my relatives there—I know how dis152

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tressed the Doctor was when you left Yale on those trips to England and that you were deviating from the course which Claude was following, so it must be a great satisfaction to him. Edna Smith (née Fawcett) is no stranger writing Lewis from a sense that he will understand her struggles since he wrote about them in Main Street; on the contrary, she seems more like an occasional childhood companion pleased with her friend’s success, aware of the dynamics of his family, and genuinely attempting to acknowledge a degree of community acceptance of his chosen career, given the success he has met with. Her uncle’s name sounds straight out of a Lewis novel, and her attention to his physical infirmity seems beside the point, but they are charming details that add to the intimacy of these passages, striking primarily in contrast to the polite distance of the greeting. By the time she has evoked his father’s past disapproval and presumes things have changed, Mrs. Smith feels ready to broach the real motive behind her letter: Now as to the reason for this rather lengthy preface. I have been asked to give a review, Sept. 26th, before a literary club, on “Main Street” and I thought how wonderfully fine it would be if we could have a few words from the author himself, as to the purpose or intention of the story, where or under what circumstances it was written, or any information or word you might see fit to impart. If that is asking too much, any clippings or reviews of the book you might be willing to loan or suggest would be most gratefully received. Trusting that this request may not fall under the caption of David’s “presumptuous sins” from which he prayed to be withheld, and that you may find time for a word in reply—I remain, Yours Truly, Mrs. Harry C. Smith On reading the kind of information Mrs. Smith hopes to elicit from her letter to a childhood acquaintance, one might ungenerously imagine her book group as only a few steps this side of the Gopher Prairie Thanatopsis Club, which treated “the poets” from Shakespeare through Kipling in less than an hour with generalized biographical pabulum—“Burns had to work hard and was sometimes led by evil companionship to low habits” (146). Though she seems aware on some level that her questions are presumptuous (what could be more presumptuous than asking an author to collect and distribute review clippings?), she also “trusts” that she will not be cast aside, that she has merited this kind of assistance through her connection with him. While this trust may be simply her parroting of epistolary idioms, on some level she clearly hopes that by acknowledging how close she is to the line separating appropriateness from insolence she will earn the benefit of the doubt from Lewis. The aporias that are the condition of possibility for this letter, though, go beyond a simple tin ear for the subtleties of etiquette. Mrs. Harry C. Smith read Main Street (or, if she did not read it, at least engaged with the novel and Main Street Reading Main Street

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participated in the phenomenon of its popularity) in the context of a literary club, which, like countless other literary clubs in the early twentieth century, was probably formed on a Chautauqua model, probably followed prepublished reading guides, and had as its raison d ’être a desire for self-improvement and social codification, just like Gopher Prairie’s Thanatopsis Club. At the very least, she remains undaunted by Lewis’s unambiguous mockery of such institutions and forges ahead in writing him for answers to the most basic, and most banal, of questions. Perhaps she has not yet read the novel; this omission could be the reason for her blandly vague questions and her willingness to self-identify as a literary club member. In either case, her letter cautions us not to idealize such groups as bringing “sweetness and light” to the masses. A more generous reading might find in her desire to learn “the purpose and intention of the story” a persistent wall between the middlebrow reader and the highbrow literature being pursued by groups like the Thanatopsis. Even if Smith had read the novel and had made her own assessment of its message and its merits, she still felt in some way beholden to the authorial mind, to Lewis’s “intentions,” and did not assume from the outset, as other letter writers did, that her version of events or the outcomes she desired were the proper ones.13 Perhaps Smith’s hesitancy in the face of one of the “best books” was a more common reaction than records might otherwise show, and her close connection to Lewis the only reason her note was not thrown into the dust heap. In her letter, Smith seems eager to consult expert reviews of the novel; these guides would be at the very least a point of departure for, if not a substantial component of, her talk and thus of her book group’s communal reception of the novel. Perhaps Smith’s lack of personal investment in assessing the text is more constrained by this theater of reception than by any other: In becoming the book group’s expert, as it were, on Lewis, perhaps by virtue of that personal connection, Mrs. Smith must now sound like an expert critic, regardless of any quirkiness in her individual response. She may not even think of herself as having space for an individual response. She needs to be certain she has things “right.” Encountering the novel in concert with her membership in an “improving” book group, Smith seeks additional frameworks for her reception from the author and the critics. In one sense, even though we have her letter to the author, her “true” response is finally elided. This letter highlights the bifurcated nature of all fan mail, particularly of the fan mail addressed to a celebrated highbrow author: The content is both a signal of “private” response and a moment of “public” disclosure; the letter writer is both brazen in taking up the author’s time and hesitant in the face of the authorial personage. If we truly seek to understand the complexity of reader response, we cannot simply dismiss Smith’s impulse to make the personal connection with Lewis, and her interest in the “Sauk Centre boy made good” side of the Main Street phenomenon, as philistinism. Instead, we must understand both the genre of the fan letter, which was clearly so easily recognized by these writers, and the manifold but at base self-interested motivations that drove the mass popularity of 154

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highbrow books such as Main Street. We can also use the evidence of reception as a spur to a more nuanced discussion of the generic slippages that occur in the text and to complicate the equation between highbrow or middlebrow reading practices and certain literary genres insisted on by contemporaneous and latter-day critics alike. Eclecticism ends up finally not as a signal for reception studies to sigh and concede the atomism of any reader’s practice but as a spur for recognizing the social, aesthetic, and material conditions that enable any particular manifestation of eclecticism. In embracing multiple possibilities for reception, reception studies demonstrates yet again that we must use caution when citing the simple popularity of any text as evidence for an embrace of an “expert’s” notion of its message. Notes 1. The Bookman published a monthly feature called “The Bookman’s Monthly Score,” which tallied reports of the most demanded titles in fiction and nonfiction from public libraries across the United States. This feature is a valuable source because, in addition to tracing nationwide reading demand, it breaks demand down by region. There is typically some regional variation in these reports, but for the thirteen-month period from February to December 1921, Main Street was the most requested title in every region. 2. Though the term was in some use before 1920, it was generally attributed to Lewis after the novel’s publication (Mathews 1019). 3. This phrase was used repeatedly in reference to the novel; an early instance can be found in Publisher’s Weekly, 15 Jan. 1921, 150, but there are innumerable others. 4. Phelps was not the only commentator surprised by Main Street’s success—nearly every mainstream and elite reviewer of the book mentioned the paradox of its popularity. See, for example, Ely 16; Lowry 6; O’Dell; Brace (retrospectively). The most famous articulation of this stance was undoubtedly Carl van Doren’s in the Nation (12 Oct. 1921): “Had Mr. Lewis lacked remarkable gifts he could never have written a book which got its vast popularity by assailing the populace. The reception of ‘Main Street’ is a memorable episode in literary history. Thousands doubtless read it merely to quarrel with it; other thousands to find out what all the world was talking about; still other thousands to rejoice in a satire which they thought to be at the expense of stupid people never once identified with themselves; but that thousands and hundreds of thousands read it is proof enough that complacency was not absolutely victorious and that the war was on” (410). 5. This dating, of course, is by no means rigid, either in Radway’s work or in my own notions of actual reception, which, as I will demonstrate, is profoundly fluid and aperiodic. At the same time, I take seriously the notion that there are trends in the dominant discourse about book production and reception, and that cognizance of these trends underlies any contemporaneous discussion of the processes of authorship, publication, and readership. 6. Such is the function of cultural artifacts in the work of Pierre Bourdieu, notably his Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Main Street Reading Main Street

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7. The resonances between the Canfield mail and the Lewis mail are particularly intriguing, given the marketing hoopla surrounding The Brimming Cup as an “antidote” to Main Street. 8. “Best books” is a stock phrase from any number of items of reading advice, both books and columns, during the period. “Misreading” as I use it here is elaborated by Mailloux. 9. Twenty-seven, or nearly one-third, of the eighty-two substantial letters from relative strangers date from this period. The Random House letters are contained in a different file from the others, in a folder titled “Fan, Nut”; this folder also contains thirty-five letters I did not classify as substantial: thirty-one are simple signature requests, and four solicit Lewis to donate something for various local charity auctions. 10. “Pee Wee [Russell] was obsolete long before the Kenicots [sic] made their way to Gopher Prairie” (Snyder). 11. Here I am thinking, for example, of Barbara Sicherman’s groundbreaking work “Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women’s Reading in Late-Victorian America,” as well as the work in James Machor’s Readers in History, particularly the essays by Steven Mailloux and Susan K. Harris. My indebtedness to these studies is, I hope, apparent in these pages. 12. Carl van Doren’s assessment of Main Street as an anodyne to “the confectionary shelf of fiction” presumes that the Main Street reader would condemn the latter. 13. We unfortunately do not know what kind of review Smith delivered to her group; a search of the Campbell California Historical Museum is currently underway.

References Beach, Percy A. Letter to Sinclair Lewis. Nov. 1920. Sinclair Lewis Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. “ ‘Best Seller’ List Encourage [sic] Book Buying.” Publisher’s Weekly, 14 May 1921, 1432. Bourdieu, Pierre. Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987. Brace, Ernest. “Cock, Robin & Co., Publishers.” Commonweal 30 (1930): 147–49. Bucco, Martin. Main Street: The Revolt of Carol Kennicott. New York: Twayne, 1993. de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Rendall. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Ely, Catherine Beach. “A Belated Promenade on Main Street.” New York Times Book Review and Magazine, 8 May 1921, 16. “Good out of Main Street.” Minneapolis Morning Tribune, 8 Apr. 1921, 18. Hardy, Harriett. Letter to Sinclair Lewis. 1 Jan. 1950. Sinclair Lewis Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Harris, Susan K. “Responding to the Text(s): Women Readers and the Quest for Higher Education.” Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response. Ed. James L. Machor Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. 259–82.

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Hart, Irving Harlow. “Best Sellers in Fiction During the First Quarter of the Twentieth Century.” Publisher’s Weekly, 14 Feb. 1925, 525–27. Hawley, H. W. Letter to Sinclair Lewis. 28 Dec. 1920. Sinclair Lewis Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Hutchisson, James M. The Rise of Sinclair Lewis, 1920–1930. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996. Kingsley, H. H. Letter to Sinclair Lewis. 14 Jan. 1921. Sinclair Lewis Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Lewis, Sinclair. Letter to Alfred Harcourt. 13 Nov. 1920. From Main Street to Stockholm: Letters of Sinclair Lewis, 1919–1930. Ed. Harrison Smith. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1952. 44–45. ———. Main Street. New York: Bantam, 1996. Light, Martin. “The Quixotic Motifs of Main Street.” Critical Essays on Sinclair Lewis. Ed. Martin Bucco. Boston: Hall, 1986. 174–83. Lingeman, Richard. Sinclair Lewis: Rebel from Main Street. Chicago: Borealis, 2002. Lowry, Helen Bullitt. “Mutual Admiration Society of Young Intellectuals.” New York Times Book Review and Magazine, 8 May 1921, 25. Machor, James L., ed. Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Contexts of Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. Mailloux, Steven. “Misreading as a Historical Act: Cultural Rhetoric, Bible Politics, and Fuller’s 1845 Review of Douglass’s Narrative.” Readers in History: NineteenthCentury American Literature and the Contexts of Response. Ed. James L. Machor. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. 3–31. Mathews, Mitford M., ed. A Dictionary of Americanisms on Historical Principles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951. Niebler, Hilda B. Letter to Sinclair Lewis. 20 Sept. 1949. Sinclair Lewis Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. O’Dell, George E. “The American Mind and ‘Main Street.’ ” Standard 9 (1922): 17–20. Parchesky, Jennifer. “ ‘You Make Us Articulate’: Reading, Education, and Community in Dorothy Canfield’s Middlebrow America.” Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950. Ed. Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. 229–58. Phelps, William Lyon. “The Why of the Best Seller.” Bookman, Dec. 1921, 298–302. Potter, Ellis M. Letter to Sinclair Lewis. 17 Jan. 1921. Sinclair Lewis Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Radway, Janice. A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997. Rubin, Joan Shelley. The Making of Middlebrow Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992. Ryan, Barbara. “ ‘A Real Basis from Which to Judge’: Fan Mail to Gene Stratton Porter.” Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950. Ed. Barbara Ryan and Amy M. Thomas. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. 161–78. Schorer, Mark. Sinclair Lewis: An American Life. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1961. Sellers, Joan Joyce. Letter to Sinclair Lewis. 10 Sept. 1949. Sinclair Lewis Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University.

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Sicherman, Barbara. “Sense and Sensibility: A Case Study of Women’s Reading in LateVictorian America.” Reading in America: Literature and Social History. Ed. Cathy Davidson. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989. 201–25. Snyder, Cpl. C. T. Letter to Sinclair Lewis. 28 Oct. 1945. Sinclair Lewis Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Sprague, Grace. Letter to Sinclair Lewis. Dec. 1920. Sinclair Lewis Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. van Doren, Carl. “Contemporary American Novelists X: The Revolt against the Village.” Nation, 12 Oct. 1921, 407–12. Wilson, Christopher P. White Collar Fictions: Class and Social Representation in American Literature, 1885–1925. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992.

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Learning from Philistines Suspicion, Refusing to Read, and the Rise of Dubious Modernism LEONARD DIEPEVEEN

In an article entitled “Left Bankers Believe Bob Brown’s Pill Box Book Reading Machine Will Help Them Absorb Dozen Gertrude Stein Novels in Afternoon,” a reporter in the second decade of the twentieth century quipped: His idea is a mechanical reading machine which will move so swiftly that only major words will assault the mind and leave their impressions. Commas, capital letters, periods, the thes, buts, ands—all punctuation marks and articles—will be minimized, slaughtered, made entirely useless. And, with the public accustomed to such reading, surrealism will be more understandable. (Montparno)1 Anyone with even a passing interest in modernism will have seen responses like this before, responses whose ponderous wit dismisses the text under discussion, refusing to engage seriously with it. Raymond Weaver, for

example, opened his review of T. S. Eliot’s 1920 Poems with the assertion that “The ‘Poems’—ironically so-called—of T. S. Eliot, if not heavy and pedantic parodies of the ‘new poetry,’ are documents that would find sympathetic readers in the waiting-room of a private sanatorium” (130). In its most dramatic form, this dismissal asserted that modernism and its texts were a fraud, a hoax—as did Herbert Palmer’s in 1931, which characterized The Waste Land as “the most stupendous literary hoax since Adam” (17). Citing their own individual integrity in the face of experts and a public gone mad, readers found the emperor’s new clothes irresistible. Writing in 1941, and seeing the prestige of his aesthetic principles slipping away, the notorious curmudgeon Lord Elton directed his vitriol at Joyce’s “Three Tales of Shem and Shaun.” Noting that this text “was accepted as a work of powerful and illuminating genius by many of the literary critics of the time,” Elton invoked the fable, and followed it with a quotation from Joyce’s text, which he believed self-evidently declared its own fraudulence: The Emperor, it will be remembered, . . . strutted about in his underwear. And all the courtiers said that only clever people could see that in fact he was wearing a sumptuous velvet suit. And the courtiers added that they themselves could discern the suit—ever so clearly. “The wheel of the whool of the whall of the whool of the Boubou from Borneum is thus come to toan.” Elton urgently concluded: “It is time, I think, that more of us ventured to say in public that, in this instance, the Emperor has on no clothes whatever” (40). Modernism, according to readers like Elton and Weaver, did not deserve serious treatment. It did not deserve to be read. Their reading practices, the frustrated retort of what would become a lost aesthetic, permeated the opening decades of the twentieth century, being addressed not just to Stein, Eliot, and Joyce but also to William Faulkner, Marianne Moore, Mina Loy, E. E. Cummings, and modernism as a movement in all the arts. Premised on suspicion rather than trust, these recalcitrant responders refused to read and walked away from modernism and the reading practices that arose in its defense. These refusals form a massive, unexplored archive in anthologies, reviews, publicity blurbs, parodies, advertising, letters to the editor, and newspaper articles.2 Although an archive this large and energetic would seem to provide a great scholarly opportunity, it is hard to put its arguments to work. More scandalous than intellectually rich, they do not proffer very satisfying research for reception historians. Not very inspiring reading, they have not attracted inspired scholarship, providing good anecdotes but little more than that. Scholars have typically understood the suspicious and dismissive public reception of modernism as middlebrow “philistinism” that in retrospect presages the inevitable triumph of canonical—and perhaps pernicious—modernism. In studies of modernism, the traditional role of these responses has been to demonstrate 160

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how far literary culture has come or to indicate the sociocultural background of a particular class or of nonprofessional readers. At best, these responses may occasion the starting point of a more systematic inquiry. Thus, one may begin with one of J. C. Squire’s witticisms in the London Mercury and then turn to his more measured moments to undertake a serious examination of the aesthetics that prompted the wit. There are two reasons for these responses’ partial elision from literary history. The first is that while these dismissals provide some quick Jaussian work (revealing what was new about the primary texts), they do not connect to later readings of modernism or current understandings of it. As arguments, they do not fit a teleology. Not all responses to modernism are like this, of course; some forms of reading we know what do with. For example, in modernist history scholars have fruitfully worked with the reading practices that eventually led into New Criticism. Charting the rise of different forms of New Criticism is workable reception history. Congruent with Jaussian models, such inquiry has a teleology, directing its argument to how we came to be “here” and focusing on practices that pushed things forward.3 Witty dismissals of modernism do not lend themselves to these uses. But there is a second reason, for it is not just that this endless parade of dismissal and vitriol lies on the wrong side of history and that it is easier to work with teleologies than dead ends. More central to how these comments have been elided from reception histories is that they appear uninteresting and unworkable. They do not have much weight with which to engage as arguments. They are more about wit than about proof. Complacent, unadventurous, and dismissive, they just sit there and smirk. After all, these responses are not so much about engaging the text as they are about refusing to engage, about closing down inquiry. They never rise above the status of opinion and bon mot; their authors never developed these accusations into sustained arguments that attempted to document and prove that Ulysses, say, actually was a hoax. But logical argumentation was not the purpose of these accusations, and to evaluate them on that score is to look in the wrong direction. These dismissive responses will always be nothing more than impoverished if scrutinized with the usual activities of literary scholarship, such as privileging the best-argued and best-developed responses, examining the evidence behind central claims, looking for signs of serious engagement, or privileging those responses that most clearly show change and development in the way culture thought about art. Instead, one must consider the work these dismissals attempted. These readers’ suspicions and refusals did their work obliquely, for these were not claims that asked to be tested for their veracity. More epistemological than ontological, the dismissive statements attempted to change the interpretive lens rather than establish a fact. Through the work these refusals did, modernism’s skeptics attempted to remove modernist texts and art from the realm of serious aesthetic discussion and into the realm of ethics. The witticisms asserted modernism’s paucity and through that assertion attempted to change Learning from Philistines

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interpretive activity to one that was premised on these works’ insincerity, nonseriousness, and ethical shortcomings. And at that level, these responses were quite successful. Modernism could not just prove these assertions wrong; it could not just show that it was offering its texts in good faith. It had to do something more basic; it had to change the terms of the discussion. The legacy of modernism’s response shows that where we came from is also defined by what we rejected, by the ponderous witticisms of the New York Sun.

1 Rethinking these statements necessitates methodological adjustments. To that end, I center my work on those ponderously witty readings that look more like collections of rhetorical tropes than reasoned arguments, and in these tropes I privilege the typical over the atypical. Following John Guillory, my research is skewed toward the collective, but it is not sociology “in the fully disciplinary sense.” Rather, it “appropriate[s] certain sociological paradigms as self-consciously and carefully” as possible “to make sense of the history of literary studies” (103). Finally, while it does delineate the major assertions of these refusals to read, this essay’s methodology does not look for the evidence behind the claims of these reading practices. It looks instead at what they do and the kinds of responses they generated. The refusal to read, the dismissal, was set in motion by kernels of arguments, so abbreviated they look like rhetorical tropes. For example, when in 1912 he presented the following lines for the amusement of New Age readers, Harold B. Harrison was setting into play shorthand arguments about inspiration, emotional expression, and the place of theory in providing the impetus for art: Once the glory and pride of the school, I have turned out a Futurist fool, And the paint from my tube I expend on a cube That I’ve drawn with a compass and rule. (671) Harrison is hardly original here; indeed, the witty refusal to read set in motion a limited collection of tropes, arrayed in predictable patterns. The most basic manifestation of the refusal to read was not even a kernel of an argument; it was the form in which the dismissals were presented. The refusal to read critiqued modernism by presenting its refusal as a quip, as a succinct, aggressively curtailed explanation that closed off reading. A commentary on Stein’s Tender Buttons was headlined “Officer, She’s Writing Again,” while the Chicago Inter-Ocean announced the arrival of the Armory Show with “Hit Mud with Brick; Result, Cubist Art.” Reviewing The Waste 162

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Land, F. L. Lucas included this parenthetical aside: “The punctuation largely disappears in the latter part of the poem—whether this be subtlety or accident, it is impossible to say. ‘Shantih’ is equivalent to the ‘Peace that passeth understanding’—which in this case it certainly does” (198). These quips were not just statements of fact or demonstrations of the reviewers’ wit; they did something. They fenced things off by precluding serious, nuanced discussion. They also carried an argument in their very form. Quips worked if their wit was attractive, and their wit could be attractive only if their central logical components were understood to be obvious. Antimodernist quips, by their very shortness, argued that the tools we use to verify—and to exclude—things as art should not be that complicated. What makes art art should be obvious. Conversely, the poverty of modernism was equally obvious. The quip’s form itself argued that this work’s value and raison d’être could be simply explained; more time did not need to be spent reading it. In many cases, a simple description or short quotation of the offending work was supposed to speak for itself, the bareness intending to be eloquent. Referring to Tender Buttons, a reviewer for the New York City Press noted: “We do not understand it and as there is no translation furnished (admirers of Gertrude’s writings say they can ‘translate’ them) we simply offer a few extracts from the book.” Such responses, and their wit, were all about closing things down, not opening things up. Many instances of closing down turned to common sense; Max Eastman grumbled: “Practical and downright people can hardly help suspecting that there is something of a hoax about this whole cult of uncommunicative writing” (103). “Practical and downright,” presented as the rallying cry of the man in the street, implied common-sense notions of mimesis, demonstrating what ought to be obvious. Thus, Stein’s writing just was not very useful for “realworld” communication or persuasive argumentation. An article entitled “Our Own Polo Guide: The Game Explained à la Gertrude Stein” purported to give the rules for polo as Stein would have written them: “Polo, a game not a basket but nevertheless, molasses running up Woolworth but Wu Ting Fang, yes, no, no, yes, certainly, but by hakes and that which is a turnip is not a peanut notwithstanding.” Mobilizing pragmatism and ideas of mimesis, these writers suggested alternative explanations for the work, explanations that recast its “seriousness” as pretension and brought it down to earth. Alfred Kreymborg, writing in the New York Morning Telegraph, began with an imagined encounter between a husband and his wife, who had just bought a new hat. Kreymborg narrates what would happen should the wife explain where she purchased the hat: Colored hats are necessary to show that curls are worn by an addition of blank space, this makes the difference between single lines and broad stomachs, the least thing is lightening, the least thing means a single flower and a big delay a big delay, that makes more nurses than little women really little women. So clean is a light that nearly all of it Learning from Philistines

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shows pearls and little ways. A large hat is tall and me and all custard whole. The husband asks another question of his wife, Anastasia, receives the same kind of response, and, beginning to hold his head “in fear that it may blow away,” asks another: Quickly, you grab the package she has brought home and in an effort to bring her back to reason, ask ever so gently: “What is this, dear?” and uncover a new cup and saucer. But your wife persists: “Enthusiastically hurting a clouded yellow bud and saucer, enthusiastically so is the bite in the ribbon.” The husband loses out; he goes mad along with her, and a new measure of balance is restored, thanks to Gertrude Stein (165). This kind of pragmatist objection was a way of asserting not just that a violation had occurred but that the violation was obvious and fundamental. Pragmatism, not theoretical discourse, was the bedrock on which art should be based. The new art had no connection to daily life. One-liners made at the expense of the relationship between titles and works of art frequently used this opposition. A reporter for the Chicago Record-Herald was typical in noting that “a group of first-viewers, some critics and some just plain reporters, carried catalogues and tried to figure out why the Chinese puzzle was labeled ‘King and Queen Surrounded by Nudes,’ how the ‘Man on the Balcony’ had ever got through Ellis Island, and where the antediluvian animals and men had been resurrected to pose for ‘A Pastoral’ ” (“Step In!”). The more outrageous the apparent violation, the more often readers mobilized pragmatic critiques. The retort was a way of asserting the paucity of these texts, implying that they were not even good for basic communication or for representing what they purported to represent. Indeed, for skeptics the skimpiness of modernist texts was the major sign that serious reading was not worth pursuing. The paucity had several forms, all of which pointed to these texts’ lack of seriousness and emotional resonance. Most strikingly, the refusal to read often reduced a complex aesthetic production to a single pertinent aspect. Consider Gertrude Stein’s work, for example. One early reviewer dispatched her with the comment that she was “merely a red flag waved by the Zeitgeist,” while another summed things up in this way: “A performance of Tender Buttons for piano could be arranged by placing candy on various keys and letting the family dog eat freely” (“Flat Prose,” 39, qtd. in Marquis). Frequently, readers attributed her writing to a simple application of madness. One response was that Stein’s work was a symptom of aphasia (G.); another prefaced a poetic parody with the comment, “The second stanza was composed while watching an escaped inmate of Matteawan fleeing from a three legged chicken who had just got out of a side show, both the chicken and the escaped person being under the impression that the latter was a grain of corn” (“Notes and Comment”). 164

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In asserting the paucity of modernist art, many skeptical readers not only reduced the work to a single aspect (the basic technique of the many parodies of modernism); as a corollary they often asserted that the work was monomaniacal, mechanically applying a banal procedure. Thus, Time magazine’s review of Ulysses and The Waste Land offered the following speculation on the former’s methodology: There is a new kind of literature abroad in the land, whose only obvious fault is that no one can understand it. Last year there appeared a gigantic volume entitled Ulysses, by James Joyce. To the uninitiated it appeared that Mr. Joyce had taken some half million assorted words— many such as are not ordinarily heard in reputable circles—shaken them in a colossal hat, laid them end to end. To those in on the secret the result represented the greatest achievement of modern letters—a new idea in novels. (“Shantih”) This idea of a mechanistic procedure towed a number of things in its wake. The default understanding was that works that depended on an application of a rules-based procedure or on an explanatory theory were impoverished, lacking the “value-added” qualities of great art. Thus, the art critic Royal Cortissoz, reviewing the 1926 Anonyme show, described the grotesqueness of a work by de Chirico and claimed, “It has the effect merely of some sort of recondite joke.” Turning to one of the show’s defenders, Cortissoz attacked the place of theory in validating this art: “But Miss Dreier in her preface alludes to ‘De Chirico from Italy and his group working out the problems of his Interieurs Metaphysiques.’ Presto, the day is saved! For who would speak disrespectfully of ‘Interieurs Metaphysiques’ or of an ‘Abstraction,’ or of a ‘Clarification.’” For skeptical readers, modernists relied on theory either to explain how individual works came to be or to justify their status as art. This reliance changed the glorious nuances of art into something rhetorical, mechanical, unable to adjust to the life before it. Charles Ginner, writing in the New Age, argued, “Lying with ease on a bed of formulas the brain becomes dull and the Art becomes bad” (271). Consider this response in the New York Sun’s review of Stein’s Tender Buttons: “Fill a thousand, ten thousand cards with single words of phrases. Shuffle, deal; align in ‘hands’ of assorted sizes, and send the result to the printer. It is the children’s game of ‘consequences’ with reduced chances for amusing coincedence [sic] of collocation” (“When the White Hunter”).4 Reviewers made it clear that, even when they criticized an author such as Joyce for writing “everything that pops into his head” (“Shantih”), such a compositional method was one that was held to too rigorously. A further trope asserted that monomaniacal art, particularly procedure- or theory-driven art, was not only mechanical but necessarily deliberate. Now, cultural change is always susceptible to this critique; the first time anyone does anything new in art it will likely be the product of a deliberate Learning from Philistines

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choice—in 1913 one could not take on free verse, for example, without being intentional about it. New aesthetic forms need a history of practitioners to make them unrhetorical, authentic, “natural.” But more was going on here. Dismissing modernist work because it was deliberate (rather than just saying it was not very good) fit into a complicated aesthetic based on emotional expression and sincerity, in which deliberate art was necessarily impoverished. This corollary is hardly surprising, for monomaniacal art had nothing additional happening in its background, nothing to give it resonance or a je ne sais quoi. The refusal to read asserted that modernism’s self-consciousness put it at odds with traditional notions of sincerity. (In this aesthetic, sincerity was the trump card: Wherever it appeared, sincerity was an aesthetic good. Reading began only in the presence of sincerity.) Deliberate works could not be “rich”; they could only be “clever,” a term that granted a self-conscious facility in one small area while at the same time trivializing both the motivation and the results. Marguerite Wilkinson, one of the three major anthologists of the early twentieth century, argued: “Sometimes poems by very clever moderns fall short of being good poems simply because the symbols used in them could never have been realized and profoundly felt and are, therefore, rather more clever than true” (85). Deliberateness stymied the riches of emotional expression, as the following review of Wallace Stevens pointed out: “But the achievement is not poetry, it is a tour de force, a ‘stunt’ in the fantastic and the bizarre. From one end of the book to the other there is not an idea that can vitally affect the mind, there is not a word that can arouse emotion” (Hutchinson 4). Moreover, according to the default aesthetic of the time, artistic activities undertaken deliberately (rather than organically or intuitively) were rhetorical, “impure,” the product of suspect motives. Arthur Clutton-Brock, grumbling in the Times Literary Supplement about current deliberateness, categorized it as an aspect of lazy professionalism: Now professionalism is the result of a false analogy between mechanical invention and the higher activities. It happens whenever the medium is regarded merely as material to be manipulated, when the artist thinks that he can learn to fly by mastering some other artist’s machine, when his art is to him a matter of invention gradually perfected and necessarily progressing through the advance of knowledge and skill. (49) The distrust of the ethics of “isms,” and self-consciousness about one’s method, was palpable. Harold Monro, writing a sendup of the modern poetry scene, attacked it in the following terms: The common claim of the modern group is to differ by the possession of a secret unknown to those outside its circle. The nature of the secret

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varies, but naturally it must be connected in some way with one of the following— 1. Choice of subject. 2. Method of treatment. 3. Idiosyncrasy of rhythm. 4. Style. Sincerity, as a primal quality, holds, in general, a lower place than might be expected among the essential characteristics that form the standard of the average group. (16) Dismissive readers further used their wit to point out that these works’ poverty was proven by how effortlessly they could be replicated: Anyone could simply set these works’ monomania in motion and quickly and effortlessly churn out similar material. This kind of dismissal made parody, employed to demonstrate the original’s paucity, central to the way many people read modernism. J. C. Squire used the pages of his London Mercury to write the following parody of Eliot’s quatrain poems: Apocalyptic chimney cowls Squeak at the sergeant’s velvet hat Donkeys and other paper fowls Disgorge decretals at the cat. The lead archdeacon eats her cheese Corrupting their connubial bliss And Mary on her six black knees Refuses Christopher a kiss. (131) Nothing was easier than creating modernist art. According to the Chicago Examiner, a group of artists called the “Cliff Dwellers” critiqued the Armory Show as follows. Earl H. Reed, who with Louis Betts constitutes the art committee of the Cliff Dwellers, started the ball rolling by dashing off sixteen cubist works in a couple of hours. A. M. Rebori did a cubist impression of the head of Hamlin Garland in less than twenty minutes. T. J. Keene pictured the explosion of a cold storage egg in an incredibly short space of time, and Lorado Taft captivated every one with a picture of ‘A Nude Eating Soup With a Fork,’ done in sixty strokes. (“Cliff Dwellers”)5 Typically applying a straitjacketed procedure to an absurd subject matter, parody did not just assert these works’ imitability. More centrally, the many parodies of modernism were founded on an aesthetic that asserted that

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imitability did not make for great art. Parody essentially asked how one could take something like the original seriously if it were so easy to imitate. But these witticisms, all asserting the aesthetic poverty of modernism and forming an incipient ethical critique, only go so far in justifying the refusal to read it. Lurking behind these witticisms was a refusal based on modernism’s intentions. Modernism’s deliberateness, for example, was not just about following a procedure or theory; it was also a deliberateness about effects, particularly about deception.6 The deliberate intent that produced modernist texts framed the literary work as an action and therefore peculiarly susceptible to ethical analysis. This analysis was directed beyond the origins of the artwork itself to what it set out to do. For many, modernism’s deliberateness attempted to defraud its readers. According to modernism’s skeptics, modernism’s fraud was made possible by a volatile aesthetic/social system, such as the fashion for difficulty, or the pretentiousness and gullibility of reviewers. Richard Burton, writing in the Minneapolis Bellman, asserted of Stein: She saw the cubist and futurist and post-impressionist and the rest of the man-monkeys in art having their little day; and she said to herself: “Why not the parallel fake in letters? They will stand for it, for they stand for it in painting and sculpture.” Whereupon, knowing that it must be done quickly if at all, since you can’t fool all the public all the time, nor a part of it for more than a limited period, she gets busy and produces masterpieces called “Three Lives” and “Tender Buttons.” Modernism, then, was not just an aesthetic failing. It was an ethical failing for its fraudulence, its mechanical and deliberate character, its reliance on a single pertinent aspect, and its susceptibility to parody. In the aesthetic from which it sprang, suspicion gave readers an ethical base from which not to take modernism seriously, to cast its sincerity into doubt. Indeed, conventional understandings of sincerity and seriousness ran aground on modernism. For modernism’s skeptics, sincere works were artless, giving little conscious attention to formal craft. Working intuitively, they were rich in emotional expression and had a seamless biographical impetus. Sincerity’s bedrock indicator was simplicity; as one early critic of cubism noted, “all effort to be simple is the supreme guarantee of sincerity” (qtd. in Weiss 94). These qualities resulted in what K. K. Ruthven terms the “authenticityeffect” (74), an unverifiable but irresistible aesthetic quality that performs the same kind of work as does “aura.” Within this framework, the refusal to read dismissed the possibility that modernist intentions could be serious in the sense that skeptics understood “serious”: as an ethical quality. One reporter wrote, “Let others take cubism seriously, but for myself I am convinced that it is merely a refuge for bunko artists” (Zug). “Seriousness” in this aesthetic was about interpersonal ethics. Skeptics based their version of “serious” on trust, achieved through interper-

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sonal communication, which partially explains why intent assumed a central place in skeptical reading practices. In the default aesthetic of the time, serious art was seen as necessarily flowing from a contract of trust between two souls. You can take something seriously (and read it) only if it is offered sincerely. Thus, the refusal to read was more about sincerity and ethics than about an articulation of the shoddy properties of this work or an assertion that it was a hoax. That ethical dimension pointed to the central thrust of these accusations: One need not engage because trust was not possible. For these readers, trust was the opening gambit in any aesthetic experience. Suspicion thus became essentially a performative gesture of a particular kind, a trump card that shifted the grounds for engagement and interpretation, putting accused works beyond the pale of aesthetic evaluation. Only sincere things could be taken seriously; only they could be read.

2 The cultural implications of this refusal to read deserve scrutiny. First, the peculiar configuration of the refusal raises theoretical issues for reception history, issues about the place of curtailment and the “obvious” in aesthetic discussion. Some arguments are not intended to go anywhere; they are about shutting things down. Further, in a certain kind of intellectual debate, a different set of rules apply. In these debates nuance and evidence are not central, and their lack is not a defect. The responses are more about the wit of the arguer, as different blocks of argument are pushed around and manipulated, presented in a comically abbreviated form. Public debate like this proceeds on the footing of a “game,” in which counters are pushed around a board and arguments are cited rather than used, perform rather than prove. This activity—dismissive, complacent, and unadventurous—is consequential and central to cultural arguments. In addition to showing something about the nature of cultural arguments, the form of the argument—its reliance on quips, parodies, and accusations about the abuse of the social context—shows that skeptics schematized the rise of modernism as an argument about power. This tactic was not just an argument about the virtues of certain kinds of texts; it was also about seizing control of aesthetic discourse. In an article suggestively titled “Rot,” a critic signed E. Oldmeadow grumbled that “whenever there is protest from any of us who retain our sanity and our respect for those minima of form and clarity without which neither Literature nor any other art could exist, we are told scornfully that we are dullards and backnumbers.” Oldmeadow went on to provide the real reason for the “Joyce Boom”: “Its vogue, we believe, is due to the fact that Joyceism subtly flatters the vanity of those critics

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who are mightily proud of having picked up odds and ends of knowledge” (512). The cultural implications of the dismissive reception also appear in high modernism’s interaction with central aspects of the skeptical aesthetic. Skeptical reading is not just a form of opposition that has been almost lost to history; high modernism, not limiting itself to instituting a set of formal features and ideological responses to the conditions of modernity, also responded to a skeptical readership by creating reading practices capable of showing modernism’s richness.7 The interaction was on several levels. First, skeptical refusals to read attempted to shut off a central principle of modernism: They curtailed discussion by refusing to allow complexity into the argument; and complexity, demonstrated by interpretations of these difficult works, is exactly what modernism needed to demonstrate its aesthetic value. Second, modernism needed to demonstrate the value of interpretation: both that interpretation was a worthy activity in itself, and that works that required interpretation were valuable. For many authors of these one-liners, aesthetic writing, based on affect, was not about interpretation. Works of art, for these readers, really need not be interpreted, and defenses of modernism that attempted to “interpret” the works were proof of these works’ paucity. Moreover, skeptics tended to believe that writing about art was not evidentiary writing and did not require overt theoretical discussion. To change that understanding of art was one of modernism’s central tasks; modernism moved writing about art from affect to interpretation. There was also a struggle about the form and place of “honesty” in aesthetic evaluation. When suspicion asserted modernism’s poverty (and consequently shunted these works from an aesthetic to a succinct ethical evaluation), it did not rely solely on assertions about ethics, context, and intent. Suspicious readers often claimed that pure honesty could distinguish the real from the sham. Reaching not outward to the social but inward to the personal, many readers articulated a profound belief in the power of the “natural” response to discriminate between the dubious and the authentic as the result of a “burst of sanity or honesty” on the part of its practitioners, if not on the part of its audience (Wood 310). The emperor’s new clothes could then be seen for what they really were. Honesty involved shutting out outside noise and examining one’s soul, a practice that would result in an infallible recognition of either sincerity or sham in current art. Margaret Bulley, in her 1925 Art and Counterfeit, argued that testing the difference between real and sham art was a workable proposition “in the only way by which art can be fully experienced”: “Putting aside our prejudices, we must follow Schopenhauer’s advice . . . and must stand before a picture as before a prince, waiting for it to speak” (72). The many stark citations of modernist work are no accident; they are meant to encourage a stripped-down, discriminating, honest gaze. This is suspicion’s litmus test: The quotation or bare description, presented with no aesthetic analysis, is meant to set aside all the explosive and distracting social

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context—to allow for a moment of pure and honest attention in which the work speaks for itself. The honesty would not only demonstrate the paucity of modernist art, it would vindicate the skeptical interpretation of the context that had produced it. And honesty did not need a helping hand from theory; indeed, theory worked at cross-purposes to it. This honesty was partly a principled objection to theory (particularly new work that required its theoretical principles to be stated) and partly a rejection of how theory, apparently, was socially manifested. Modernist theory was an exercise of power, and it stood accused of occluding what was really going on. Thus, an anthologist in 1936 argued, “The eclectic pursuit of puzzling novelties has perhaps encouraged many readers to neglect the poetry that does not provide the intellectual snobs with material for critical Mumbo-Jumbo” (Mégroz x). But two forms of “pure” honesty circulated at the same time, both asserting that the extratextual context was too unstable and distracting to provide a reliable interpretive guide. Like modernism’s critics, modernism’s proponents believed that honesty would restore true aesthetic values. One needed a quietness, but in this case it was not a quietness that allowed one to commune with another soul. It was, instead, a quietness at the moment of aesthetic contemplation that allowed one to remove one’s prejudices and to examine the work solely in terms of its unique aesthetic properties, which would become visible in all their richness and which were articulable in evidentiary arguments. This moment was valuable in and of itself and had nothing to say about the social context that produced the art. This formalist honesty would not use the moment of aesthetic contemplation to prove something about intent, historical context, or the mechanisms of mass culture. For modernists, though, theory and interpretation were used to validate that moment of aesthetic contemplation, and were increasingly seen not just as corroborations of modernism’s richness but as part of the artwork’s richness itself. The richness of modernism was complicated, its new aesthetic demanding an articulated discourse to make it expressive. Modernism demonstrated its richness by promoting the idea that central to a work’s value is the discourse that validates it. The suspicious refusal to read thus was also evidence of a struggle, on the part of modernists, to have the idea of “discourse” enter discussion of the work of art and even to define what art means or what makes something an artwork. For modernists, “discourse” was not just about a mechanical application of rules. Modernism’s proponents would argue that in the case of writers such as Gertrude Stein it was not just a procedure that was being enacted; it was a theory whose implications were being explored. Art was becoming inquiry. Modernism’s richness also was articulated through a different protocol for criticism, which moved away from the belles-lettres tradition, particularly through incipient New Criticism.8 In its turn to the formal properties of the text, modernism and its dominant reading practices removed affect as the

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dominant subject of critical writing. In 1915, in a piece entitled “The New Art” that he wrote for the Harvard Advocate, E. E. Cummings turned back to the 1913 Armory Show: At the 1913 exhibition the puzzled crowd in front of Brancusi’s “Mlle. Pogany” was only rivalled by that which swarmed about the painting called “Nude Descending a Staircase.” “Mlle. Pogany” consists of a more or less eggshaped head with an unmistakable nose, and a sinuous suggestion of arms curving upward to the face. There is no differentiation in modelling affording even a hint of hands; in other words, the flow of line and volume is continuous. But what strikes the spectator at first glance, and focuses the attention throughout, is the enormous inscribed ovals, which everyone recognizes as the artist’s conception of the subject’s eyes. In this triumph of line for line’s sake over realism we note the development of the basic principles of impressionism. (20–21) This way of writing about art, in which affect became less and less central and close formal description became more central, was essential for the triumph of modernism and shunted aside irrelevant talk about intent and sincerity. But this removal of affect, and a corresponding turn to formal properties, also effected a more profound change in literary culture: It placed a new stress on evidentiary argumentation. Evidence, particularly formal evidence, became central to demonstrating a work’s greatness. The feel of literary criticism thereby changed: Highly self-conscious, modernism’s literary criticism is anxious writing. For example, Eliot’s influential essays have parts that need to accomplish something, and there are clear criteria according to which they might fail. They are also recognizable as literary criticism: In their criticism Eliot and others may be wrong, they may even be pernicious—but by today’s standards they are not making a category mistake. Current scholars know how to read and argue with them. Crucially, in its use of evidence, New Criticism addressed neither affect nor intent, and the triumph of modernism meant that earlier, affect-based literary criticism had lost its sway. Affect had not only been a staple of literary criticism; it had been affect of certain limited kinds. The vertiginous anxiety that dominated the reading of many high modern texts was not, for skeptical readers, a valued affect. More centrally, affect itself was hard to discuss in evidentiary, professionalist argumentation. Now, affect-based critics did mean to be persuasive, but they believed that aesthetic evidence was too ephemeral to be marshaled for this purpose. Lascelles Abercrombie, reviewing Robert Frost, is typical in locating the source for his own evidentiary weakness: “Poetry per se is one of the most troublesome things in the world to discuss exactly. Like Goodness and Personal Identity, it is a thing which everyone is aware of, but a thing which, when you try to lay hold of it, proves a ghost that will scarcely be 172

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cornered” (11).9 Thus, while this first generation of modernism marks a time, just before the rise of formalism and the intentional fallacy, when intent and affect were central to aesthetic discussion, this moment also marks the beginning of some powerful counter-responses. The counter-response was not just directed against affect. An equally important response was that intentions do not matter—a response congenial to the rise of formalism. As Time magazine snarkily commented, “It is rumored that The Waste Land was written as a hoax. Several of its supporters explain that that is immaterial, literature being concerned not with intentions but results” (“Shantih”). Such a response is essential to understanding the peculiar hold that the intentional and affective fallacies held during the rise of New Criticism. In response to their skeptics, modernists also attempted to rework two key related concepts: seriousness and sincerity. In the modernist version, seriousness was not first of all about trust, sincerity, and emotional expression; “seriousness” was articulable through discourse, theory, and professionalism. As did their skeptics, modernists rested their aesthetic on a few foundational principles and used the presence of these as signs of seriousness. Eliot’s 1919 criticism of Robert Lynd presents the clash between these two systems of writing admirably: Mr. Lynd never does become quite serious. He obeys some inner check; perhaps he has been unconsciously bullied by the periodical public. He is never uninterested or uninteresting, he is never unintelligent; he never goes far wide of the mark, but his arrow does not flesh very deep. He never, that is, quite dares to treat a book austerely by criteria of art and of art alone. (“Criticism” 456) Eliot’s writing was part of a project that created a professionalist understanding of seriousness, which did not first of all concern itself with whether a work was offered in “good faith.” When, in response to Clutton-Brock, Eliot said that “we must learn to take literature seriously,” he defended an idea of “serious” that meant deliberate, focused: “Surely professionalism in art is hard work on style with singleness of purpose” (“Professional” 61). Serious work was about inquiry and development. Ezra Pound, in his famous letter to Eliot’s father, postulated that “the arts, as the sciences, progress by infinitesimal stages, that each inventor does little more than make some slight, but revolutionizing change, alteration in the work of his predecessors” (100). “Serious” work can develop under this aesthetic, in a way that it could not under the earlier model, which did not understand change as development. “Serious” work was not about development under the earlier aesthetic; it was about the eternally human. Finally, modernism also redefined sincerity but in a diminished way, replacing some of its function with another, quite different aesthetic value. To be sure, sincerity still had a place, but it became professionalized and demonstrated by one’s technique. Sincerity, moreover, did not retain its central place; Learning from Philistines

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indeed, with the triumph of modernist aesthetics it could not, for modernism brought about the rise of irony. Only one of these two terms could hold center stage, and in the face of traditional notions of sincerity, which were used to dismiss modernist art, moderns squarely put themselves behind irony as art’s dominant aesthetic value. While modernism’s terms—about the place of affect, interpretation, evidence, theory—have almost complete control over how literature is understood in the academy today, the reading practices of modernism’s philistines have not completely disappeared. Certainly, while suspicion does have some place in today’s professionalist reading practices (such as the “hermeneutics of suspicion” and cultural studies’ suspicion of the category “art”), the aesthetic principles of the refusal to read no longer are part of professional discourse the way they were then. Indeed, modernism established professionalist principles that almost inevitably make the aesthetic principles of these sorts of affect-based accusations—against theory, in favor of the indefinable aspects of art, against notions of development and art as inquiry—inherently amateurist. But it is not as if modernism completely triumphed: we might remember that skeptical reaction to art is a mode of aesthetic engagement that continues yet today. Although it is not as proximate to “serious” aesthetic writing as it was at the beginning of the twentieth century, suspicion as a response is still around as a vestigial reading practice, particularly in the general public. Understanding today’s stubbornly anachronistic general readers involves a turn back—to this formative gesture in cultural history.

Notes 1. This source, and many of the references to Stein in this essay can be found in the Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The assistance of Patricia C. Willis, curator, Collection of American Literature, is gratefully acknowledged. 2. These short dismissive responses are too numerous to quantify, but on a more specific level I have collected more than 450 essays and articles that accuse individual writers or, at times, all of incipient modernism of being a fraud. A significant portion of my research comes from two archives: Gertrude Stein’s clipping service, at Yale’s Beinecke Library, and Chicago-area newspapers of 1913, which responded spectacularly to the presence of the famous Armory Show there. Some of that response is collected in scrapbooks held at the library of the Art Institute of Chicago. 3. Development and newness, of course, are linchpins of Jaussian reception history. Following Jauss’s arguments, scholars use reading responses to discover what is new about the novel or poem under discussion. Such an approach also tends to deal most with the “winners” of the argument and those whose legacy continues; those deemed “lesser” figures become mere historical curiosities. New work in the past decade or so has taken a different direction, and worked with aesthetic principles antagonistic to modernism, principles based on affect, simplicity, 174

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and pleasure, which had trouble finding a purchase on modernism’s slippery texts. See, for example, de Bolla; Kermode; Scarry; Steiner. 4. Larger than just literature, this sense of an arbitrary compositional procedure was a reading process applied to all the encroachments of modernism. The hostility, at times, was palpable. The Chicago Tribune ran the following poem, entitled “The Cubist”: Blessings on you, painter man! Do you really think you can By some geometric law Make us see the thing you saw? Do you really think that Art Is of Science any part, And that through triangulation We shall come to your sensation? Have you, honestly, a notion Art is other than Emotion That it is, for you or us, Differential calculus? (“A Line-O’-Type or Two”) 5. A similar critique of Matisse’s composition practices appeared in the Chicago Tribune, which claimed that Matisse “one day left an unfinished canvas on his easel while he went to lunch. His child wandered in, took some brushes and paint haphazardly, and daubed away. Was the child punished? No. Matisse surveyed the work, and exclaimed, ‘That’s it!’ and a new school of art was founded.” (“Chicago Artist”). 6. Suspicion’s ethical redirection centered on intent, for one needs to postulate an intent to deceive in order to ascertain if something is a hoax. Theoretical research on fraud (Schrero; Truzzi; Stein) makes two points that are central to my project. First, theorists understand fraud as an action with predictable activities and consequences. Second, there is something purposive about a fraud; fraud is an event that attempts to do something. Works thus have to be created with a fraudulent intent in order to be fraudulent. 7. For accounts of these practices and their institutional consequences, see, for example, Guillory 134–75; Diepeveen 87–244; or Graff 121–243. 8. Consider Riding and Graves’s 1927 Survey of Modernist Poetry as perhaps the first moment in this demonstration. This work begins by proposing a “careful examination of poems that seem to be only part of the game of high-brow baiting low-brow” to see if they are, after all, “merely a joke at the plain reader’s expense,” and offers a close readings of Cummings’s “Sunset” to show that it is “poetry” and not a “literary trick” (10). 9. This ineffable quality of poetry did not result in paralysis, however. Rather than giving critics nothing to write about, it instead inflected the kinds of things written about, and the level of specificity at which they were discussed. It gave writers wide scope to write about poetry’s affect, for instance, which they claimed was by its nature unable to be argued about. Understanding poetry as a conduit of emotional expression, writers such as Abercrombie argued that poetry’s chief task was to be beautiful and consequently to provide pleasure, by which they meant quietness, poignancy, wisdom (a wisdom that was at least as much about affect as it was about knowledge). In Learning from Philistines

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turning to these affects, this writing had a natural affinity for an aesthetic of simplicity rather than of difficulty.

References Abercrombie, Lascelles. “A New Voice.” Review of North of Boston, by Robert Frost. Nation [London], 13 June 1914, 423–24. Reprinted in Robert Frost: The Critical Reception. Ed. Linda W. Wagner. New York: Franklin, 1977. 11–14. Bulley, Margaret H. Art and Counterfeit. London: Methuen, 1925. Burton, Richard. “Posing.” Minneapolis Bellman, 17 Oct. 1914. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Mss. 76, series 6. Clippings. Box 142, folder 3334. “Chicago Artist Starts Revolt.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 26 Mar. 1913, 15. “ ‘Cliff Dwellers’ Satirize the Cubist Art in Pointed Caricatures.” Chicago Examiner, 2 Apr. 1913. Art Institute of Chicago Scrapbooks, Ryerson Library, Art Institute of Chicago. Clutton-Brock, Arthur. “Professionalism in Art.” Times Literary Supplement, 31 Jan. 1918, 49–50. Cortissoz, Royal. “International Exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum.” New York Herald Tribune, 5 Dec. 1926, sec. 6, 1. Cummings, E. E. “The New Art.” Harvard Advocate, 24 June 1915, 154–56. Reprinted in Critical Essays on American Modernism. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. New York: Hall, 1992. 20–24. de Bolla, Peter. Art Matters. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Diepeveen, Leonard. The Difficulties of Modernism. New York: Routledge, 2003. Eastman, Max. The Literary Mind: Its Place in an Age of Science. New York: Scribner’s, 1931. Eliot, T. S. “Criticism in England.” Athenaeum, 13 June 1919, 456–57. ———. “Professional, Or. . . .” Egoist 5.4 (1918): 61. Elton, Lord. Notebook in Wartime. London: Collins, 1941. “Flat Prose.” Atlantic, Sept. 1914, 431–32. Reprinted in Critical Essays on Gertrude Stein. Ed. Michael J. Hoffman. Boston: Hall, 1986. 38–39. G., R. “Aphasia, the Muse of Futurist Literature.” New York Evening Sun, 25 July 1914. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Mss. 76, series 6. Clippings. Box 142, folder 3334. Ginner, Charles. “Neo-Realism.” New Age 14 (1914): 271–72. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Guillory, John. Cultural Capital. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. ———. “Toward a Sociology of Literature: An Interview with John Guillory.” By Jeffrey J. Williams. Minnesota Review 61–62 (2004): 95–109. Harrison, Harold B. “Cubism.” Letter to the editor. New Age 14 (1912): 671. “Hit Mud with Brick; Result, Cubist Art.” Chicago Inter-Ocean, 9 Mar. 1913. Art Institute of Chicago Scrapbooks, Ryerson Library, Art Institute of Chicago. Hutchison, Percy. “Pure Poetry and Mr. Wallace Stevens.” New York Times Book Review, 9 Aug. 1931, 4. 176

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Jauss, Hans Robert. Toward an Aesthetic of Reception. Trans. Timothy Bahti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982. Kermode, Frank. Pleasure and Change. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Kreymborg, Alfred. “Gertrude Stein—Hoax and Hoaxtress: A Study of the Woman Whose ‘Tender Buttons’ Has Furnished New York with a New Kind of Amusement.” New York Morning Telegraph, 7 Mar. 1915. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University, Mss. 76, series 6. Clippings. Box 142, folder 3334. “A Line-O’-Type or Two.” Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 Mar. 1913, B6. Lucas, F. L. Review of The Waste Land, by T. S. Eliot. New Statesman, 3 Nov. 1923, 116– 18. Reprinted in T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Michael Grant. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. 195–99. Marquis, Don. “The Sun Dial.” New York Sun, 18 Jan. 1915. Reprinted in Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas: A Reference Guide. Ed. Ray Lewis White. Boston: Hall, 1984. 10. Mégroz, R. L. Introduction. A Treasury of Modern Poetry: An Anthology of the Last Forty Years. Ed. R. L. Mégroz. London: Pitman, 1936. vii–xiii. Monro, Harold. Some Contemporary Poets. London: Parsons, 1920. Montparno. “Left Bankers Believe Bob Brown’s Pill Box Book Reading Machine Will Help Them Absorb Dozen Gertrude Stein Novels in Afternoon.” 1913[?]. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Mss. 76, series 6. Clippings. Box 142, folder 3333. “New Books by Gertrude Stein . . .” New York City Press, 7 June 1914. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Mss. 76. Box 75, folder 1371. “Notes and Comment: Cubist Literature.” 1913[?]. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Mss. 76. Box 77, folder 1408. “Officer, She’s Writing Again.” Detroit News, 6 June 1914. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Mss. 76. Box 75, folder 1371. Oldmeadow, E. “Rot.” Tablet, 14 Jan. 1933, 41–42. Reprinted in James Joyce: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Robert H. Deming. Vol. 2. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970. 511–13. “Our Own Polo Guide: The Game Explained à la Gertrude Stein.” New York Evening Sun, 13 June 1914. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Mss. 76, series 6. Clippings. Box 142, folder 3344. Palmer, Herbert. Cinder Thursday. London: Benn, 1931. Pound, Ezra. Letter to Henry Ware Eliot. 28 June 1915. The Letters of T. S. Eliot. Ed. Valerie Eliot. Vol. 1, 1898–1922. London: Faber and Faber, 1915. 99–104. Riding, Laura, and Robert Graves. A Survey of Modernist Poetry. London: Heinemann, 1927. Ruthven, K. K. Faking Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Scarry, Elaine. On Beauty and Being Just. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999. Schrero, Elliot M. “Some Rhetorical Aspects of Ironic Satire, Parodic Hoax, Sting, and Fraud.” Hypotheses: Neo Aristotelian Analysis 24 (1998): 21–23. “Shantih, Shantih, Shantih: Has the Reader Any Rights before the Bar of Literature?” Time, 3 Mar. 1923, 12. Squire, J. C. “The Man Who Wrote Free Verse.” London Mercury, June 1924, 121–37. Learning from Philistines

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Stein, Gordon, ed. Encyclopedia of Hoaxes. Detroit: Gale, 1993. Steiner, Wendy. The Scandal of Pleasure. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995 “Step In! No Danger! Cubist Show Now On.” Chicago Record-Herald, 25 Mar. 1913, 1. Truzzi, Marcello. “The Sociology and Psychology of Hoaxes.” Encyclopedia of Hoaxes. Ed. Gordon Stein. Detroit: Gale, 1993. 291–97. Weaver, Raymond. “What Ails Pegasus?” Bookman, Sept. 1920, lii, 59. Reprinted in T. S. Eliot: The Critical Heritage. Ed. Michael Grant. Vol. 1. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982. 130–31. Weiss, Jeffrey S. The Popular Culture of Modern Art: Picasso, Duchamp, and AvantGardism, c. 1909–17. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1994. “When the White Hunter Hunts.” New York City Sun, 21 June 1914. Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Mss. 76. Box 75, folder 1371. Wilkinson, Marguerite. “New Voices: The Reader’s Approach to Contemporary Poetry.” New Voices: An Introduction to Contemporary Poetry. New York: Macmillan, 1919. 1–14. Wood, Clement. Poets of America. New York: Dutton, 1925. Zug, George B. “By George B. Zug.” Chicago Inter-Ocean, 16 Mar. 1913. Art Institute of Chicago Scrapbooks, Ryerson Library, Art Institute of Chicago.

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Reception and Authenticity Danny Santiago’s Famous All over Town MARCIAL GONZÁLEZ

In one of the many theme-packed scenes in Danny Santiago’s Famous All over Town, the novel’s fourteen-year-old Chicano narrator, Chato, pays a visit to Max Pilger, a sympathetic but somewhat idealistic school counselor. Pilger recognizes Chato’s academic potential, despite the boy’s poor grades. But the counselor remains puzzled by a dramatic drop in Chato’s IQ test scores from 135 to 95 in just one year. He decides to examine Chato himself with a series of Rorschach inkblot tests and other images. Chato reads all the images pessimistically, while Pilger counters with more optimistic interpretations. The boy says of one image, “A giant man-eating butterfly [with] blood dripping from its mouth” (67). The counselor explains that most people see “happy dancing girls.” Pilger asks Chato why he sees sadness in all the pictures; the boy replies that all the pictures are sad. “The sadness is in you, son,” Pilger says. “I don’t see sadness at all.” Then Chato blurts out, “You’re not a Mexican” (67). Without understanding the profundity of his brusque comment, rooted in the practical experience of growing up Chicano in East Los Angeles

during the 1950s and early 1960s, Chato insinuates that Pilger cannot comprehend what it means to be a Chicano because he comes from a different, more privileged background. Pilger pauses before responding with his own equally incisive words: “No, Rudy. I’m not a Mexican. I’m a Jew” (68). He describes his experience growing up poor in New York City tenements, having to fight the anti-Semitism of teachers who would make fun of his “Jewboy haircut” and “oiyoi accent.” Even as Pilger recognizes his lack of firsthand knowledge of what it means to live as a Chicano, he suggests that his background as a Jew enables him to form knowledgeable opinions about the experiences of others. Pilger raises an extremely important issue: If we fail to recognize a common ground from which the experiences of others can be represented, interpreted, and comprehended, we will remain forever locked in a quagmire of cultural relativism, where epistemic access remains primarily, if not entirely, the property of those who possess firsthand experience. We can safely assume that the author of Famous reflected on his own situation when he wrote this scene, years before John Gregory Dunne scandalously disclosed Santiago’s “real” identity to the literary world. Dunne published an article in the New York Review of Books sixteen months after the novel’s release, revealing that Santiago’s birth name was Daniel Lewis James and that he was not a young Chicano fiction writer from East Los Angeles, as most readers had assumed, but a “septuagenarian ex-Stalinist aristocrat [originally] from Kansas City,” a “prize-winning playwright,” and a “graduate of Andover and Yale” (47, 23). Moreover, he was an “Anglo” and a former member of the Communist Party. Dunne’s article ignited strong responses from both critics and supporters of the novel; the respondents focused mainly on issues of cultural authenticity and authorship.1 Consequently, scores of critics and educators effectively censored the novel, excluding it from Chicano literature courses and research projects.2 The response to Famous All over Town presents a particularly interesting case because it links the issues of authorship, cultural authenticity, and the politics of reception in literary studies. Famous is a believable novel about a Chicano working-class family living in East Los Angeles in the early 1960s. Notwithstanding the novel’s effectiveness as a representation of Chicano experience, the critics who attacked its author for his use of a Latino pseudonym centered their arguments not on the content or merits of the novel, but almost exclusively on the author’s racial background. In so doing, they effectively ignored the author’s personal history and misread the novel he wrote, overlooking the way James’s experiences provided him with the epistemic grounding to write about working-class Chicano experiences. Granted, James wrote about a reality he had not experienced personally: He did not know what it felt like to be born into a Mexican working-class family or to live in East Los Angeles for the first fourteen years of one’s life. But he was nevertheless able to write persuasively about a Chicano family because of two sets of experiences: his political activism in the Communist Party during his formative years as a writer, prior to being blacklisted by the House Committee on Un-American 180

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Activities (HUAC) in 1951, and his social integration into a Chicano neighborhood from the 1950s to the 1970s. What is tragic but also ironic about the negative reception heaved on Famous All over Town is that the novel centrally critiques the very concept that surfaced as ideology in its rejection and neglect: namely, the standpoint of the reader in literary interpretation. In this essay, I shall summarize the author’s personal history and review the novel’s negative reception before examining the way the novel implicitly calls into question interpretive approaches that are mechanistically and reductively based on the ideological stance of readers and critics.

Politics and Literature The following section focuses on those aspects of James’s life that afford a critical engagement with issues raised by the reception of Famous All over Town. The only child of affluent parents, James was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1911. He graduated from Andover Academy in 1928. Five years later, he received a bachelor’s degree in Greek classics from Yale. During his senior year in college, at the height of the Great Depression, he joined the John Reed Club, a branch of the Communist Party that encouraged young writers to promote working-class culture and politics in their work. A few years later, he joined the Young Communist League, another Party structure. During this time, he was also actively involved in the activities of the Unemployed Council, whose main objective was to win unemployment insurance for workers.3 From the beginning of his career, James’s literary interests were clearly informed by his politics. In 1936, he collaborated with his father in writing a play entitled Pier 17 about the San Francisco longshoreman’s strike of 1934, but the play was never produced. A year later, he played a small part in Marching Song, a play written by John Howard Lawson. Lawson, a Communist, recruited James to the Party in 1938. From 1938 to 1940, James worked with Charlie Chaplin as an assistant screenwriter for the classic film The Great Dictator. His name appears in the credits as “assistant director.” When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, he contributed to the antifascist effort by writing a play entitled Winter Soldiers in which guerilla groups from occupied countries on the eastern front force a six-hour delay of a Nazi train en route to Moscow, thwarting the Nazis’ plans to invade and occupy that city. In his 1984 interview with Jonah Raskin, James described Winter Soldiers as a “bad play that got good reviews. . . . It was art as a social weapon, but there was a lot more weapon than there was art” (“Danny Santiago” 249).4 In 1944, James collaborated with his wife, Lilith James, in writing the play Bloomer Girl. Lilith developed the original idea for the play at a Party workshop on women’s rights. The drama takes place in the antebellum South, where a group of progressive women become politically active, exchanging their hoop skirts for bloomers Reception and Authenticity

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and helping in the operation of an underground railroad. The play opened on 4 October 1944 in New York and ran on Broadway for 654 performances over eighteen months.5 In the late 1940s, James worked with Paul Robeson in writing a dramatic adaptation of Howard Fast’s novel Freedom Road, a fictional account of the Reconstruction era, and in 1948 James wrote a novel entitled The Hockadays, which was never published.6 In 1951, three years after James had severed ties with the Party, Richard Collins, his friend and a former member of the Party, “purged himself ” before HUAC, naming 152 persons in the movie industry as Communist Party members or sympathizers. “In private session, Collins not only named Dan James as a Party member but also suggested that he might be a cooperative witness” (Dunne 31). Subpoenaed in the summer of that year and appearing before HUAC on 19 September 1951, James was subsequently blacklisted and could no longer find work in Hollywood.7 During this time, he first began to use the pseudonym Danny Santiago and to write stories about Mexican American life in East Los Angeles.8 In 1970, three of his short stories were published under the pen name Santiago: “The Somebody” in Redbook and “A Message from Home” and “Goldilocks and the Three Beers” in Playboy. These stories eventually evolved into Famous All over Town, which James began to submit to publishers in 1976. After sixteen rejections, it was accepted by Simon & Schuster in 1982 and published in March 1983. A year later, when Santiago was seventy-three, the novel won the prestigious Richard and Hilda Rosenthal Foundation Award, but the author’s failure to show at the ceremony on 16 May 1984 to receive the award and a $5,000 prize fueled suspicion about his identity (Raskin, “Danny Santiago” 252).9 Two months later, Dunne published his article revealing Santiago’s personal history. For three decades, beginning in the late 1940s, Dan and Lilith James worked as volunteer social workers with the Los Angeles Church Federation. Their work was concentrated in the Lincoln Heights community of East Los Angeles. During those years, they started several youth clubs, which involved young people in social and cultural activities and promoted education as an alternative to gang violence. More important, they established close friendships and kinship ties with a large circle of families in the neighborhood (Dunne 41–43; Huerta 49–50). The Jameses became part of the social fabric in Lincoln Heights, building a base of support and trust in the neighborhood because they were profoundly committed to their beliefs in social responsibility and leading an egalitarian lifestyle. That they integrated themselves into one of the poorest and roughest Latino neighborhoods in East Los Angeles during those years also suggests their strong antiracist sympathies. James himself discloses the change he underwent living in East Los Angeles among working-class Chicanos: “I gradually stopped thinking about abstract ideas. I got rid of the 1930s Marxist insistence on art as a social weapon. I began to use my eyes and ears, to watch and to listen, and out of that process began to emerge the writing that finally was published as Famous All over Town” (qtd. in Raskin, “Danny Santiago” 250). Because of his involvement in helping three generations of 182

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Chicanos overcome the hardships of barrio life, James was posthumously honored by the City of Los Angeles at the Sixth Annual Scholarship Reunion of the Clover Street Club.10 Eight hundred persons attended the event to eulogize him (Huerta 53).

The “Authenticity” of a Latino Pseudonym and the Ire of Critics Despite its author’s social integration into a Chicano community, Famous was not well received by critics and teachers of Chicano literature following Dunne’s revelation. The disclosure ignited the ire of many writers and educators across the country, prompting some of them to state their opinions or write commentaries on the appropriateness of the Santiago pseudonym. On the one hand, this exchange of opinions was useful because it questioned the assumptions of publishers and literary critics in evaluating the work of U.S. ethnic fiction writers. On the other hand, the literary merit of the novel itself was nearly lost in the crossfire between critics and defenders of its author’s use of a Latino pen name. Representatives of the novel’s publisher, Simon & Schuster, insisted that their decision to publish the novel was based on the merits of the writing, not the identity of the author. Julia Knickerbocker, a publicity director for Simon & Schuster, confirmed that the editors thought so highly of the novel they “wanted to submit it for the Pulitzer Prize,” but the Pulitzer rules required submitting a photograph and biography of the author along with the book. “We didn’t have any to submit,” Knickerbocker confessed (qtd. in McDowell, “Publishing”). In an interview, James conceded that he deliberately decided against submitting a biography even though the publishers had requested one because doing so would have meant fabricating his background or disclosing his true identity, neither of which seemed advantageous to him at the time. Even though Famous did not win the Pulitzer, the novel did in fact win the prestigious Rosenthal Award. As Joyce Carol Oates writes, “Though Famous All over Town alone should have been the issue, and not its author’s identity, the [Rosenthal] awards committee confessed that they might have had second thoughts about giving the novel their prize, had they known its author was ‘Anglo’ and not ‘Chicano’ ” (385). But R. W. B. Lewis, chair of the committee that picked Famous for the Rosenthal prize, reports, “I don’t think when I was reading it I was too much concerned with whether the author was a Chicano or not, but now that I know I think I admire the novel all the more” (qtd. in McDowell, “A Noted ‘Hispanic’ ” 44).11 Contrary to the praise lavished on Famous by its publisher, however, some critics have argued that winning the Rosenthal Award and being considered for the Pulitzer do not necessarily provide an accurate assessment of the quality of the novel because of discriminatory attitudes toward the work of minority writers historically. Gerald Haslam asserts that the way many U.S. Reception and Authenticity

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intellectuals evaluate the work of ethnic writers “smacks of elitism” (247). He implies that publishers and critics expect a lower quality of work from minority writers. Consequently, they judge such work by a lower standard than that used for Euro-American writers. By assuming a Latino pen name, Haslam suggests, James gave himself a better chance for publishing his novel and, as it turned out, for winning the Rosenthal Award (247). José M. Ferrer, cofounder of the Latino magazine Nuestro, which published one of Santiago’s stories before Dunne’s article appeared, voices a similar concern. Ferrer wonders if James’s motive in deciding to use the pen name “had to do with cachet, with trying to get onto the bandwagon of minorities who might be more publishable these days” (qtd. in McDowell, “A Noted ‘Hispanic’ ” 44). James responded to Ferrer’s insinuation, pointedly asking “What bandwagon?” (qtd. in Dunne 53). He was referring, no doubt, to the fact that Latino writers during the decades he was writing the novel were largely shunned by mainstream publishers. To some extent, rather than opportunistically jumping on a bandwagon, he might have been running the risk of making his novel susceptible to the publishing industry’s kiss of death by adopting a Latino pen name and writing about a working-class Chicano family living in East Lost Angeles. Notwithstanding the recognition of the Rosenthal Award, a flood of negative comments and reviews appeared in newspapers and journals in the months following the revelation of Santiago’s “secret.” Some of the more agitated critics referred to the author of Famous with such terms as “masquerade,” “fraud,” “fake,” “hoax,” and “deception.” Felipe de Ortego y Gasca accused James of needing “to deceive,” lacking an “insider’s knowledge” of Chicanos, and writing a novel based on a “fable of identity” (51). José Antonio Burciaga, exclaiming that “1951 is a long way from 1970,” rejected the argument that James had been forced to begin using a Latino pseudonym following his testimony before HUAC and his subsequent blacklisting (qtd. in Ortego y Gasca 50). For Burciaga, having been blacklisted in the 1950s for his membership in the Communist Party during the 1930s and 1940s was no excuse for James to assume a Latino pen name in the 1970s and 1980s. Ron Arias, after finding out about Santiago’s real identity, described Santiago’s fiction as “cute but without substance,” and Arturo Islas boldly asserted that Famous “has no literary merit” (qtd. in Ortego y Gasca 50). Similarly, Felix Garcia remarked, “You don’t have to be a Latino to write on the Latino experience,” but, he added, “Dan James should write as Dan James, because a piece should stand on the merit of the writing, not the author’s name” (qtd. in Raskin, “Danny Santiago” 252). Not to be outdone, Ilan Stavans reported that many cases of “imposters” who “take a Hispanic name and pretend to write a realistic account of growing up Hispanic” can be cited, but the case of Santiago was “the most outrageous” case of all (Stavans and Augenbraum, Growing Up xxvii). In 1985, a year after Dunne’s article, Haslam summarized the general reception of Famous: “Presently, an ‘I-disliked-it-before-you-did’ upsmanship seems to be in effect, especially among Chicano scholars” (248). Despite 184

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recognizing the questionable motives behind the attacks on Santiago, Haslam, too, finds fault in Santiago’s constructed identity. He writes that “the deception implicit” in James’s use of a Latino pseudonym must be held in contempt, despite the author’s “genuine commitment to America’s downtrodden, especially poor Chicanos” (247). What seemed to hide behind the ire was not the fact that James had used a Latino pseudonym, but that readers had actually been fooled by the “authenticity” of the writing. Santiago’s editors were quick to point out: James never claimed that Danny Santiago was Mexican-American. He never said that Danny Santiago grew up in the Latino neighborhoods of East Los Angeles. Those were assumptions readers made—largely, many now admit, because the writing was so vivid, so accurate. Who else but a Mexican-American could have written so perceptively about life in a Mexican barrio? (Roark 17) The attacks against Santiago reached their apex six months after his exposure. On 26 January 1985, the Before Columbus Foundation sponsored a symposium entitled “Danny Santiago: Art or Fraud” at the Modern Times Bookstore in San Francisco. Although James was invited to attend, he declined. The panelists included Rudolfo Anaya, Juan Felipe Herrera, Gary Soto, and Tomás Ybarra-Frausto. One hundred twenty persons attended the symposium, including Arturo Islas, professor of English at Stanford, and the Berkeley novelist Ishmael Reed. “With the exception of Soto,” who defended the novel’s integrity, “every one else at the symposium censured James and called him a fraud” (Huerta 51). Despite the nearly total censorship of Famous in Chicano literature courses and research projects and the personal attacks on its author, several writers and educators held a positive view of Famous and its author. Carolyn See, who wrote a generous review of the novel when it first came out, exclaims, “anyone who makes a fuss over the use of a pseudonym doesn’t know diddly about the book world” (qtd. in Roark 17). Thomas Sanchez, author of Zoot Suit Murders, reasons, “I know this whole thing is being politicized, but I think it shouldn’t be. . . . Should we say that Shakespeare shouldn’t have written a certain play located in Verona because he didn’t ‘culturally identify’ with an Italian girl named Juliet?” (qtd. in Roark 17). Richard Rodriguez, who stood at the center of another scandal surrounding issues of ethnicity and authenticity, reports that in a “perverse way” he welcomed the Santiago revelation. “We’ve been working under an assumption for the past 25 years,” Rodriguez argues, “that only Hispanic writers can write about Hispanic experiences, that only black writers can write about black experiences, that only women can write about women. I think those are really dangerous assumptions” (qtd. in Roark 17). The novelist Rolando Hinojosa-Smith comments, “I can understand James taking a pen name after what he’d been through in the 1950s. . . . I don’t think that an injustice was done to the Chicano or the Mexican community. Reception and Authenticity

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It’s a funny novel and it’s authentic” (qtd. in Raskin, “Danny Santiago” 252). Roberto Cantú affirms that “the novel was not accepted by many Chicano critics because [Santiago] was not a Chicano. . . . In fact a colleague of mine and I almost ended our friendship over it.” Cantú expresses hope that Famous will “destroy the myth that only Chicanos can write about Chicanos” (qtd. in Abrams). Alberto Huerta also writes sympathetically of the novel’s author, staunchly opposing those who have censored the book. “James fell into controversy twice,” he proclaims, “first, black-listed by the Communist-hunting House Un-American Activities Committee in 1951 and then, several decades later, ‘brown-listed’ by certain established Hispanic writers” when those writers discovered that Santiago was not Latino but white (48). Arguing that James was “brown-listed” for having the audacity to speak up “for a barrio kid named Chato,” Huerta explains that he knows “of no other activist-writer in California history who suffered such double-jeopardy” (53). Alexander Cockburn makes a similar claim. But rather than voice disagreement with scholars who “brown-listed” James, Cockburn directs his displeasure toward Dunne for the implicit anticommunism of the article he wrote to “expose” James. Cockburn maintains that the way the [New York] Times ran the story from the New York Review [of Books], it seemed a reenactment, a mime, of the ritual of naming names. McCarthyized in 1951 and forced into pseudonymity, James has been McCarthyized all over again in 1984. Dunne’s narrative, selfregarding, contrived and conservative . . . had the whiff of the witch hunter while purporting to be something else. (71) Huerta and Cockburn certainly had good reason to take issue with Dunne and others for their treatment of James. Nevertheless, at the center of the debate about James’s use of a Latino pen name was also the thorny issue of cultural authenticity. Haslam, expressing a commonly held belief with respect to literary representations of ethnicity, writes, “All other things being equal, it is safe to assume that a gifted Chicano will write better novels of Chicano life than will a gifted Anglo” (249). Henry Louis Gates, Jr., disagrees with these kinds of claims. To make his point, Gates tells of the “great black jazz trumpeter Roy Eldridge [who] once made a wager with the critic Leonard Feather that he could distinguish white musicians from black ones—blindfolded.” As the story goes, Eldridge claimed that an essential difference existed in the music of blacks that distinguished it from that of whites. Feather took him up on the bet and played several albums by musicians unknown to Eldridge. “More than half the time, Eldridge guessed wrong” (Gates 1). The story emphasizes the problems with concepts of racial or ethnic authenticity in relation to literary representation. “Our literary judgments,” Gates asserts, “remain hostage to the ideology of authenticity” (1). He sees a huge problem with the contemporary assumption that works categorized according to their authors’ race, ethnicity, 186

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or gender represent the authentic experiences of their social groups in a way that literary works by persons outside the group cannot. For this reason, Gates believes “that exposing the true author of Famous All over Town,” which had been “hailed by Latino critics for its vibrancy and authenticity” prior to the publication of Dunne’s article, “was a form of violence against the book itself ” (29). When its author’s real identity was disclosed, an awful truth was also revealed to many Latino writers and critics: If “blindfolded” to the ethnicity of the author, they could not necessarily tell the difference between a work written by a Chicano author and one written by a non-Chicano about Chicanos. In criticizing James for his use of a Latino pseudonym, critics implicitly posited that fiction writers can represent specific experiences authentically only if they have lived those experiences firsthand. This assertion implies a determinate relation between an author’s personal background and the aesthetic value of the literary work; it also suggests that some critics were unable to engage critically with Famous because of their own ideological positions, despite the fact that the novel represents themes traditionally important to Chicano literature: in particular, critiques of racism, sexism, and class exploitation. From this perspective, Famous All over Town serves as an introspective contemplation of the critical act, affording critics the opportunity not only to illuminate the literary value of Famous but also (if they are willing to extend their critical perceptions beyond the limitations implicit in notions of cultural authenticity) to examine their own ideological presuppositions. In the rest of this essay, I shall focus on Famous as a self-reflexive commentary on the problems of reader-centered literary interpretation.

Reader-Based Interpretation Chato’s narrative self-reflectively critiques the very assumptions of cultural authenticity implied in its reception, and it does so primarily through the narrator’s shortsighted point of view. Raskin points out that “Famous All over Town is a novelist’s novel, a story about the making of a writer” (“Danny Santiago” 251). We could add to his perceptive assessment that Famous is also a narrator’s novel, in which case the interpretation of the novel would then hinge on coming to terms with a fictive world constructed entirely through the problematic consciousness of a naïve narrator. The fact that Chato usually knows less about his world than other characters do produces a formal tension between the text and the reader, who has no choice but to rely on an unreliable narrator. Chato offers no guarantee that his descriptions of the actions and thoughts of other characters are accurate, and he repeatedly reveals that he knows even less about the events he describes than the reader does. The various characters in the novel themselves demonstrate different levels of knowledge about the causes and the effects of events, but no character possesses a comprehensive understanding of the novel’s totality. Chato’s Reception and Authenticity

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narrative does not always correspond to the reality it claims to represent; the truths readers come to discover in the novel are not necessarily revealed (or at least not fully) by the narrator’s description of events. Chato desires to be more knowledgeable about his world and even undergoes a minor change of consciousness during the course of his narration, but that change is limited to a mere suspicion that his strong feelings of despair and social disconnectedness have something to do with the loss of his family and the destruction of his neighborhood. Chato’s naïve point of view in Famous is similar to that of Huck Finn, who expresses a blend of caginess and naïveté that the reader is invited, indeed required, to see through and around to get at the novel’s significance. There is nothing distinctly “Chicano” about the use of a naïve narrator in Famous, or even about the problems it presents, but it is worth noting here that both Daniel James and Mark Twain are white male authors who have written narratives that critique racism and the reification of racial categories. The naïveté of the narrator in both Famous and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn functions as a strategic mechanism that not only makes for a likable protagonist but also produces a tension between the narrator and the reader. Famous produces meaning not only by direct correlation between the consciousness of the storyteller and the object of representation but also— and perhaps primarily—in the tension that develops between the different levels of knowing among the various characters, including the narrator, and in the conflicts that erupt when a character realizes that he or she has been kept in the dark about some event or some crucial bit of information. When Rudy finds out that his daughter has a Mexican boyfriend, he becomes angry more from his realization that the truth has been kept from him than from the fact of the relationship itself. The tension between knowing and not knowing gets played out at many levels in the novel, heightened thematically when the various characters withhold knowledge from one another. For instance, the way Chato’s mother always speaks with guarded words bothers him. “Could there be mysteries in my home I didn’t know about?” (97). Chato senses the sharpening of problems in his home but agonizes over being kept in the dark: “Whenever my mother mentioned my father, her voice got edgy, I wondered why. . . . There were too many secrets in this house” (103). When Chato finds out that his father is having an affair with a woman who lives on “Forney Street” and that the woman is pregnant, he becomes demoralized, and his world begins to fall apart. His anger stems from the fact that everyone knew about his father and the other woman except him. “She knew, they knew, the whole town knew, except only dumb stupid me” (146). The conflict between knowing and not knowing simulates the formal distance between the reader and the text. That simulation does not imply that Santiago/James prognosticated the reception of his novel or consciously wrote a built-in response to that reception in advance. Rather, the novel addresses and critiques the general problem of interpretive approaches informed by limited notions of authenticity—the same problem that produced shortsighted criticisms of the novel and its author based on his racial origin. That James did 188

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not anticipate the novel’s reception does not abrogate the fact that Chato’s naïveté as a storyteller resembles the naïveté of readers who attempt to read a novel transparently but objectify and misinterpret it instead. Through that resemblance, Famous does not overcome the problem of naïveté; it embodies and embraces it, staging the problem and thus exposing it to inspection by perceptive readers and critics. Lauro Flores addresses the problem of the narrator’s naïve point of view, maintaining that the novel can be read as a critique of racism and social injustice, but the critique is formulated from the perspective of a narrator who “apparently lacks any coherent social or political consciousness. This technique is not only consistent with the psychology of the fourteen-year-old narratorprotagonist, but with the reality existing in many barrios where spontaneous outrage sometimes outweighs organized action” (147). I agree with Flores’s assessment, except I would add that the gap between the narrator’s naïve consciousness and the complexity of his social world can be attributed to more than the immaturity of an adolescent narrator or the spontaneous reactions of the victims of racial discrimination; it also reflects the problem of reified consciousness, a condition associated with the logic of commodity fetishism, which can be characterized, in one sense, as a symptom of the general crisis of epistemology in modernity, or as a split between subject and object, consciousness and being, representation and referent, and—in this case—knowing and not knowing. In a different context, Theodor Adorno refers to this split as “the antirealism of the modern novel”; that is, it calls forth “a society in which human beings have been torn from one another and from themselves” (32). Unable to represent the external world as unmediated reflection, the modern novel turns inward to reflect self-consciously on the act of novel writing itself, narrating in effect its own drive to achieve self-knowledge. The self-reflexive structure of the modern novel is not simply a stylistic feature of the narrative; rather, it replicates the process of self-recognition that constitutes subjectivity itself. Adorno finds that “the novel’s true impulse [is] the attempt to decipher the riddle of external life,” which ultimately cannot be solved. Thus the novel qua novel self-consciously reflects on its own inner form—the reification of consciousness—which “itself has become an aesthetic device for the novel” (32). As an aesthetic device, however, reification need not be understood strictly in negative terms. As Fredric Jameson reminds us, reification should not be “overhastily” categorized entirely as “loss and constraint.” Rather, “the effects of reification—the sealing off of the psyche, the division of labor of the mental faculties, the fragmentation of the bodily and perceptual sensorium—also determine the opening up of whole new zones of experience and the production of new types of linguistic content” (160). For the literary critic, the concept of reification allows not only for the acknowledgment that a literary work has partaken in the repression of its own social content but also for conceptual points of entry into the work so as to unveil that which has been obfuscated. Put differently, the concept of reification allows for an interpretation Reception and Authenticity

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of the way the literary work has treated an abstraction of social relations as a concrete reality—as well as the ways readers and critics will sometimes focus on the concrete at the expense of the abstract. Such was the case with those critics who dismissed Famous as inauthentic. Famous, however, thematizes reification, or makes use of this concept as an aesthetic device, in its self-reflexive commentaries on narrative interpretation. I discussed one such moment at the beginning of this essay: Chato’s visit with Max Pilger, a scene in which the two characters differ in their interpretations of various images. Their differences suggest that narratives produce meaning not only internally through symbolic representation, but externally in the subjective viewpoint of the reader as well. The novel’s tendency toward self-reflection is repeated in a number of scenes. In one scene, Chato’s literature teacher, Bontempo, requires her students to read and interpret a predictable story about Pancho, a Mexican boy who overcomes racism by doing well in school and befriending the police. Bontempo, who is as pathetically shallow as the stock characters in the Pancho story she teaches to her students, reveals her own views on the purpose of interpretation in stressing that “we can see how patience is rewarded when [Pancho] proves himself.” Here the novel calls attention to a bad representation of simplistic didacticism and a prescriptive method of interpretation. The Bontempo scene engages in a subtle critique of the kind of fiction that James/Santiago himself sought to avoid writing—fiction that might be considered “more weapon than art.” The scene also indicts theories of interpretation that attempt to draw a clear correlation between the narrative and a “moral” purpose. The Bontempo scene can be interpreted simultaneously as critiquing simplistic didacticism in fiction and as representing a moment of narrative self-consciousness, subjecting Famous itself to its own metacritique. Consider another example: a scene that dramatizes the role of the reader’s ideological standpoint in the interpretive act. When Chato comes home from the hospital after having his appendix removed because of peritonitis, his mother puts him to bed in the bedroom of his sister, Lena, who has recently decorated the room. “The floor was dazzling white, the walls were black, the ceiling was white again,” the curtains black, and the window trim white (40). A white vase with black lilies sits on the black dresser. Chato suspects the bizarre color scheme of Lena’s room has something to do with a boyfriend. To find out, he attempts to interpret the symbolism of her room the way literary critics might analyze the symbols in a narrative. But since Chato lacks the critical skills to arrive at a satisfactory interpretation of the room’s colors, he decides to gain knowledge from a primary source: Lena’s diary. He reads a few entries in it but finds nothing too revealing until 25 September: “It was pure stars and hearts and moons and flowers. The only human word was potato salad. Why? What happened? Was that the day some son of a bitch nailed her?” (42). Chato attempts to analyze the symbolism of his sister’s bedroom, but the static, one-sided outlook of his sexism prevents him from penetrating the significance of the room’s two-sided color scheme. For Lena, the black-white 190

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design of her bedroom represents, somewhat romantically, her desire for a healthy female-male relationship. In the symbolic world of the novel, however, the color-coded room emphasizes the great divide between the family’s patriarchal order and the female characters, who must continuously seek new ways to challenge or escape gender-based oppression. Ultimately, Chato cannot decipher the symbolic colors of Lena’s room, nor can he interpret to his satisfaction the figurative doodles in her diary. For him, the colors suggest “the Los Angeles Police department” (43). As Chato later explains, a “black-andwhite on Shamrock is like a cloud passing across the sun, it chills you. Loud guys get quiet, quiet guys get loud . . . and everybody feels Wanted For Murder” (90). Tellingly, the scene ends with Lena, who has joined her brother on the bed, cutting Chato’s hair. She tickles him and playfully threatens to castrate him with scissors. “Hold real still,” she orders. “I’m gonna make a little girl out of you” (45). The entire scene suggests that before Chato can decode the symbolism of Lena’s room, he must first exorcise his machismo by coming to view the world from a woman’s point of view. But because of his sexism, Chato fails to comprehend that symbolism. It would not be farfetched to draw a parallel between Chato’s reified consciousness and the views of critics who failed to appreciate the significance of Famous. To comprehend the socially symbolic significance of the novel, those critics would need to examine their own ideological presuppositions with a critical microscope. The novel’s author may not have anticipated the negative responses of critics on discovering that he was not a Chicano writer, but the novel nonetheless speaks to those responses. In so doing, it strives to overcome the relativism associated with naïve notions of cultural authenticity. Unlike critics who locate the value of Chato’s narrative in the author’s background, we can conversely conclude—drawing from the symbolic significance of the bedroom scene in Famous—that the value of literary interpretations lies largely in the ideological standpoint of the critic. When Santiago’s identity was revealed in 1984, Chicano critics had reason to be angry, given the many decades of institutionalized racism and neglect toward U.S. Latino writers on the part of the mainstream publishing industry. But the antagonism expressed toward the author of Famous was for the most part misdirected; it needed to be aimed at the systemic causes of racism, rather than at the author or the novel itself. As Rodolfo Acuña observes, the problem is not “with who [Santiago] is or is not. . . . It is more a commentary on our system than anything else” (qtd. in “Young Latin Author” 16). The problem with the concept of cultural authenticity does not lie primarily in the accusations against writers for not possessing the proper credentials or experiences to be able to write about such topics as race and ethnicity—wrongheaded as these accusations may be. It lies instead in the fetishism of literary objects or in the reification of their formal properties and social categories. Through such reification, the critic comes to assume a role similar to that of Chato, whose reified consciousness remains at a considerable distance from the object of contemplation. Reception and Authenticity

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In any case, we could argue that Chicano literature would be enhanced rather than hindered if more non-Chicano writers followed the example of James, who became so deeply immersed in the cultural realities of a Chicano neighborhood that he was able to write about those realities persuasively. Gates offers the same basic assessment succinctly: “No human culture is inaccessible to someone who makes the effort to understand, to learn, to inhabit another world” (30). What enabled James to write a compelling novel about Chicano experiences was not his ethnic origin; it was his social practice, his political convictions, and the fact that he made a conscious choice to live and work in a Chicano community for decades. His writing was also the product of his years in the Communist Party, where he acquired antisexist, antiracist, working-class sympathies. For James, antiracism and class struggle served as the ultimate “common ground” that enabled him to comprehend and write about “a barrio kid named Chato.” His novel critiques the reification inherent in notions of cultural authenticity, which ironically was reflected in the negative reviews of readers who refused to accept it as an “authentic” Chicano novel because he was white. Nevertheless, Famous All over Town can be read as a novel that dereifies notions of “cultural authenticity” in both its fictionalized account of Chato’s family and in its engagement with the assumptions readers and critics may bring to the novel, especially with regard to race and ethnicity.

Notes 1. Dunne’s exposé, entitled “The Secret of Danny Santiago,” originally appeared in the 16 August 1984 issue of the New York Review of Books. Dunne later added a postscript to the article and included it in his book Crooning, retitling the piece “An American Education.” My citations are to this later version. Tellingly, James originally titled the manuscript of his novel My Name Will Follow You Home, an indication that he was cognizant of the problems that could eventually arise from his use of a Latino nom de plume. 2. For the sake of clarity, I shall refer to the author of Famous All over Town interchangeably as Santiago or James, depending on the context. 3. Aside from running his own business, James’s father was an amateur painter and playwright; he was also sympathetic to left politics and enjoyed bringing writers and artists to the family’s summer home in Carmel Highlands on the central coast of California. At Carmel during the 1930s, James met various figures who influenced his views on literature and politics, including Sinclair Lewis, John Steinbeck, Ella Winter, Langston Hughes, Lincoln Steffens, and Charlie Chaplin. 4. A New York Times reviewer wrote that Winter Soldiers is “a perfect portrait of that other column which also carries on the war for freedom” (qtd. in Dunne 34). And in New Masses, Alvah Bessie wrote, “Winter Soldiers possesses values apparent in no other play on the boards today” (31). The play was produced by Erwin Piscator and premiered in the fall of 1942 at the New School of Social Research in New York City,

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where it played twenty-five performances. The same year, Winter Soldiers was awarded the Sidney Howard Memorial Award and a $1500 prize from the Playwrights Company. Not surprisingly, Dunne characterizes the play as “pure propaganda” and “a true Stalinist play” (qtd. in McDowell, “Noted ‘Hispanic’ ” 44). 5. Two professional librettists, Sid Herzig and Fred Saidy, added music and dance to the play, producing the libretto. According to Dunne, Herzig and Saidy’s work on the manuscript “made more room for song and dance by planning away the dialectic” (35). A New Masses reviewer described the play as “a unique freedom-loving musicale” in which “we witness the early efforts of women to achieve both suffrage and dignity” (Taylor 29). Several years later, NBC-TV bought the rights to produce Bloomer Girl for Producer’s Showcase, a television program. When NBC producers became aware of the Jameses’ history, they insisted that their names had to be removed from the program’s credits, or the show would be canceled. Bloomer Girl aired on 28 May 1956. 6. James describes The Hockadays as a “novel of manners.” He explains that he sought “to explore my own background with the tools of Marxism so I set about and wrote a very bad novel about a young girl in upper petit-bourgeois Kansas City circles” (Raskin, “The Man Who Would” 18). 7. James carried a copy of Voltaire’s Candide in his pocket during his testimony: “I had planned to say Voltaire published that work under the pseudonym M. le Docteur Ralph, and that if the Committee was successful, American writers would have to follow in his footsteps and disguise their identities with pen names.” He made no mention of Voltaire in his testimony (Raskin, “Danny Santiago” 250). 8. James also used the pen name Daniel Hyatt in writing the screenplays for two lowbudget monster movies: The Giant Behemoth (1959) and Gorgo (1961). 9. At the ceremony, John Kenneth Galbraith said, “Famous All over Town adds luster to the enlarging literary genre of immigrant experience, of social, cultural and psychological threshold-crossing. . . . The durable young narrator spins across a multicultured scene of crime, racial violence and extremes of dislocation, seeking and perhaps finding his own space” (qtd. in Dunne 22). 10. Clover Street and the Eastside Clover Gang were the inspiration for the novel’s Shamrock Street and Chato’s street gang, the Jesters, respectively. 11. Lewis admitted that had the committee known that Santiago was not Chicano, “it would have given us pause. . . . It does raise all kinds of interesting questions” (qtd. in McDowell, “Noted ‘Hispanic’ ” 44). References Abrams, Garry. “The Three Lives of Dan James.” Los Angeles Times, 19 June 1988, sec. 4, 1. Adorno, Theodor W. Notes to Literature. Vol. 1. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. Bessie, Alvah. “Winter Soldiers.” New Masses, 15 Dec. 1942, 30–31. Cockburn, Alexander. “Naming as Ritual.” Nation, 4–11 Aug. 1984, 71. Dunne, John Gregory. “An American Education.” Crooning: A Collection. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990. 21–56.

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Flores, Lauro. Review of Famous All over Town, by Danny Santiago. Minnesota Review 22 (Spring 1984): 145–48. Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. “ ‘Authenticity’ or the Lesson of Little Tree.” New York Times Book Review, 24 Nov. 1991, 1, 26–30. Haslam, Gerald. “A Question of Authenticity, or, Who Can Write What?” Western American Literature 20 (1985): 246–50. Huerta, Alberto. “Daniel James (1911–1988): Socrates and Santiago in California.” Californians 6 (Dec. 1988): 48–53. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. McDowell, Edwin. “A Noted ‘Hispanic’ Novelist Proves to be Someone Else.” New York Times, 22 July 1984, 1, 44. ———. “Publishing: Endowment Gives Four Writers $25,000.” New York Times, 10 Aug. 1984, C23. Oates, Joyce Carol. “Pseudonym Selves.” (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Dutton, 1988. 383–97. Ortego y Gasca, Felipe de. “Danny Santiago and the Ethics of Deception.” Nuestro 8 (Nov. 1984): 50–51. Raskin, Jonah. “Danny Santiago (Daniel James).” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 122. Detroit: Gale, 1992. 247–54. ———. “The Man Who Would Be Danny Santiago.” San Francisco Bay Guardian, 28 Nov. 1984, 13–14, 18–19. Roark, Anne C. “When Is a Pseudonym a Lie?” San Francisco Chronicle, 12 Aug. 1984, “This World” sec. 17. Santiago, Danny. Famous All over Town. New York: Plume, 1983. Stavans, Ilan, and Harold Augenbraum, eds. Growing Up Latino: Memoirs and Stories. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Taylor, Harry. “On Broadway.” New Masses, 24 Oct. 1944, 29–31. “Young Latin Author Is Neither.” San Francisco Chronicle, 23 July 1984, 1, 16.

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Discourses in Dialogue The Reception of Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen CHARLOTTE TEMPLIN

Alix Kates Shulman’s Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, published in 1972, was the first important novel to emerge from the women’s liberation movement. The early novels of such writers as Shulman, Erica Jong, and Marilyn French were lightning rods—the focus for a multitude of fears about changes in the status quo in a time of significant social transformation. The reception of these novels, and in particular of Shulman’s novel, reveals the complexity of the network of discursive structures and the way they organize aesthetic responses. Theories of discourse are based on the central contention that all discourse is social, located in a particular social context. Sara Mills explains that a discourse consists of groupings of utterances which are “enacted within a social context, which are determined by that social context and which contribute to the way that social context continues its existence” (10). The reviewers of Shulman’s novel fall into two groups and participate in two different discourses. One group forms itself around the new feminist

consciousness, developed in consciousness-raising groups, and embraces literary figures, journalists, and intellectuals. The other group—also literary journalists, cultural critics, and the like who work as reviewers for mainstream publications—represents a more traditional or conservative worldview. The two discourses are diametrically opposed, and I call one the discourse of the new feminist consciousness and the other the discourse of the conventional woman. In their reviews of the novel, both groups focus on the concept of realism. They do not necessarily discuss realism as a theoretical construct, but clearly they have the concept, as scholars and students understand it, in mind. Interestingly, their critiques and evaluations were 180 degrees apart. A study of the reception of the novel provides a glimpse into two different discourse communities and into an interesting moment in the history of the women’s movement, the cultural moment in which second-wave feminism was being constructed. In the comments of people on both sides of the issue, we can discern a discussion of what feminism is and whether it is the harbinger of needed social change or a misguided social protest. We also witness significant efforts to discount feminism. Each of the two discourses discussed here encodes a distinct representation of experience, and the clash between the two reflects a negotiation of power relations. The conventional women saw little literary merit in Shulman’s novel and accused the author and her protagonist of narcissism. They invoked criteria of realism and charged the author with failing to create credible characters and plots. For these readers, the novel, far from being realistic, is thesis driven, and the characters are stick figures. While the feminists saw the novel as a critique of society, the conventional women leveled their critique at the feminist author and the discourse community she represented. The discourse of the conventional woman denies that middle-class women can be oppressed and gives women the responsibility of finding happy lives within patriarchal culture. The reviewers in this group are shocked, horrified, or sometimes merely puzzled by Shulman’s novel. They repudiate Shulman’s take on or representation of the world the protagonist, Sasha Davis, inhabits, and they attack her as a whiner and a loser, denying that her situation and her response to the world can be representative. Feminist reviewers saw in Shulman’s novel a realistic description of social conditions endured by women. Shulman and others introduced into the novel a new discourse involving women’s recognition of themselves, or their self-identification, as an oppressed group. Their discourse articulated women’s right to a social identity not tied to the roles prescribed by patriarchal culture. The feminist discourse focuses on the subordination of women by social structures and hegemonic beliefs, the need to reclaim female sexuality, the social conditioning that creates feminine attitudes and values, and the need for an oppositional stance. In the view of the feminists, Shulman’s protagonist follows a path of increasing estrangement from a patriarchal society. 196

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Feminist critics and others are indebted to Michel Foucault’s idea that power, rather than being a top-down force, is something that circulates in society. According to Foucault, power exists in “a network of relations, constantly in tension, in activity, rather than a privilege that one might possess. . . . One should take as its model a perpetual battle rather than a contract regulating a transaction or the conquest of a territory” (Discipline 26). The exercise of power is not a privilege, acquired or retained and preserved, but rather is subject to constant negotiation and struggle in multiple sites of resistance. Power is implemented through discourse. Foucault explains: “There are manifold relations of power which permeate, characterize, and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse” (Power/Knowledge 93). Knowledge should not be considered as developing in a realm beyond conflict and power negotiations. Instead, “power and knowledge directly imply one another” (Discipline 27). Foucault invents the term “powerknowledge” to describe the process that brings about knowledge. He explains, “It is not the activity of the subject of knowledge that produces a corpus of knowledge, useful or resistant to power, but power-knowledge, the processes and struggles that traverse it and of which it is made up, that determines the forms and possible domains of knowledge” (28). This is the struggle we see enacted in the reviews I focus on. When Shulman’s novel appeared in 1972, the battle (to use Foucault’s metaphor) between the two discourses was intense. The rhetoric on both sides, and in particular the conventional women’s shrill denunciations, reveals the level of antagonism that characterized the dialogue. Conventional women wished to retain the status quo, and feminists sought a shifting of power toward themselves. In Discourse, Sara Mills explores the recurring discursive pattern in which two discourses occur in dialogue with each other. Analyzing the contribution of Foucault and also citing the work of Michel Pecheux, she asserts that discourses exist “in relation to, or more often, in contrast or opposition to other groups of utterances” (10). Clearly, in this view ideological struggle and power relations are at the center of discourse. Truth, Michel Foucault asserts, is something that is created through work. As one example of discursive work, Mills mentions the discursive strategies employed to belittle and impugn alternative medicine so as to protect the “truth” of institutionalized medicine. In the responses to Shulman’s first novel, we see one of those moments Foucault found so interesting: an example of the discontinuity of discourse—the moment of a struggle for power, when one discourse is displaced by another, when, in Foucault’s words, “the choice of truth” is made. In a 1977 interview, Foucault asks, “How is it that at certain moments and in certain orders of knowledge, there are these sudden take-offs, these hastenings of evolution, these transformations which fail to correspond to the calm continuist image that is normally accredited?” (Power/Knowledge 112). Discourses in Dialogue

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In 1973, American society was on the verge of a dramatic shift in cultural values, and the ideas feminists advanced would soon resonate throughout society. At the moment I identify in this essay, Shulman’s novel and the responses to it represented a vanguard of feminist “work.” They confirmed and deepened feminists’ understanding of the world. The novel performed “work” in the sense that feminists who follow Foucault use the term. Jane Tompkins, who employs the term in Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860, says that the value of works of literature lies in their ability to “[provide] society with a means of thinking about itself,” thus “doing work, expressing and shaping the social context that produced them” (200). Similarly, Rita Felski refers to stories operating at the level of the “social imaginary,” defined as “the symbolic frameworks of representation through which cultural meanings are produced and disseminated” (126). Not so long after the time I call attention to here, the feminist discourse became respectable, especially in universities, and to a large extent came to be produced as the dominant discourse. In 1972, the feminists had access only to the alternative press. Their reviews appeared in such papers and journals as off our backs, Second Wave, the Militant, and the Guardian (a socialist review, not the famous daily in England). Most of these journals have ceased publication. Those who participated in the discourse of the conventional woman wrote in mainstream publications, such as the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune, places where a feminist viewpoint is now favorably received. In 1972, the discourse of the conventional woman was the one society “accepts and makes function as true” (Foucault, Power/Knowledge 131). Not too many years later, this discourse had been largely displaced. In their dialogue about realism, the two discourses illustrate Tony Bennett’s point that “different reading formations . . . produce their own text, their own readers, their own contexts” (69). In the reviewers’ accounts of Shulman’s novel, we see what Tony Bennett describes as “that apparently same but different text within different reading formations” (69). As we know, the hallmark of realism is said to be objectivity, the exclusion of subjective views on the part of the author, which allows the reader to experience events through dramatic presentation. In Recent Theories of Narrative, Wallace Martin describes realism as the ability to “capture the truth of experience” by focusing on the concrete, the individual. Martin quotes Eric Auerbach’s statement that realism shows persons “embedded in a total reality, political, social, economic, which is concrete and constantly evolving” (60). William Dean Howells’s often-quoted definition of realism as “nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material” would be acceptable to both groups I identify (qtd. in Cain 11). But Howells and other classic realists also understood that realism is more than just a copy of the world. The artist “renders” but renders in such a way as to illuminate life. Howells regarded realism as implying an “accurate, morally informed, and enlightening depiction of life” (Cain 9). Because both camps of Shulman’s readers 198

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use these criteria for realism, “truth” and “realism” become contested terms, whose meaning differs from one discourse community to another. Meaning is created through the interaction of reader and text. Realism is not an intrinsic property of a given text, but rather a function of how it is read. The conventional women reject Shulman’s rendering of a woman’s life, as it implicitly offers empathy to a protagonist who is uneasy with the circumstances of her existence. Such a portrayal lacks “objectivity.” Jane Larkin Crain (Commentary) apparently considers herself well acquainted with the canons of realistic fiction and assumes such fiction is what the feminist writers are trying for: an “[investigation] of the life of a single heroine who is portrayed as a ‘representative’ of her sex, and whose experiences are meant to illuminate the shared lot of women” (58). However, Crain and other conventional women see Shulman’s fiction as failing to do anything of the kind. According to their evaluations, the thoughts and actions of the female protagonist, Sasha Davis, are incomprehensible, and the men are mere stick figures of villainy. These critics fail to see an adequate embedding of the characters in “a total reality,” to use Auerbach’s terms. If Sasha were properly embedded, the novel should present her as unreasonable and weak, but Shulman is so out of touch that her novel seems to be critiquing her society instead of her protagonist, they assert. The result is “a solipsistic world in which no one exists but the heroine” (Meyer 55) Catherine Belsey identifies a form she calls expressive realism, based on the “theory that literature reflects the reality of experience as it is perceived by one (especially gifted) individual, who expresses it in a discourse which enables other individuals to recognize it as truth” (7). Belsey contends that realism is believable not because it actually presents a mirror of reality but because “it is constructed out of what is discursively familiar”; that is, its patterns “largely confirm the patterns of the world we seem to know” (51). Although it offers itself as transparent, as a discourse it has an ideological component. Its role is to confirm the dominant ideology, and thus it is conservative, according to Belsey. But what the feminists saw as realism was also constructed out of patterns discursively familiar to them or out of the new patterns they were inventing. Rita Felski rejects the view that realism is by its nature conservative and that experimental or innovative modes are intrinsically oppositional. She argues, correctly I believe, that no mode is intrinsically either oppositional or conservative. We must look to the intersection of books and readers to locate oppositional meanings and liberating qualities. Felski comments that “the ‘conservative’ status of realism as a closed form which reflects ruling ideologies has been challenged by its reappropriation in new social contexts” (161). To my mind, that is what the new feminists were doing in the early 1970s. Shulman was herself within the discourse community that produced the reviewers who praised her novel. She was among the first feminist activists in the late 1960s, and the novel reflects the understanding of political aspects of personal life that she and others developed in consciousness-raising (CR) Discourses in Dialogue

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groups during those years. Through CR, women came to understand that the problems of women were the result of deep social, cultural, and economic conditions, arising out of fundamental assumptions and so pervasive as to seem “natural” (Rosen 196–200). Shulman participated in the now famous demonstrations at the Miss America Pageant in 1968.1 Many of the reviewers refer to Shulman’s involvement in the women’s liberation movement, since she was known at the time for an article on marriage contracts that got national publicity (“A Marriage Disagreement”).2 According to Shulman, the novel was a product of her urgent need to describe female experience from a feminist viewpoint—to articulate the “truth” she and others were discovering (or inventing) within their community. She explains, “I knew that there was another view of women’s experience that hadn’t been expressed in fiction, or hardly ever, a view that was just beginning to take hold in this country. I wanted to dramatize it” (Interview 105). She had doubts about reaching an audience: “When I first wrote Prom Queen, I thought the only people who would get it (because I meant it to be funny) would be the ten women in my women’s group. I was writing it for them. And then a lot of people got it” (116). Given the revolutionary nature of Shulman’s ideas in 1972, it is not surprising that reviews of the novel became the site of an important struggle over “truth.” In their remarks about realism, the two groups were engaged in a struggle over power and over words, over whether feminists could lay claim to the term “realism.” In Shulman’s novel, Sasha is deeply influenced by society’s prescriptions for women. The dominant focus of her life is her quest for beauty or, in other words, male approval. Sasha believes that “there was only one thing worth bothering about: being beautiful” (22). In spite of the fact that men are alternately nuisance, threat, and disappointment, she will do anything for their approval. She sacrifices her ambitions for men again and again, not gaining a sense of her self until beauty fades. Shulman uses humor, which many reviewers fail to grasp. In the episode in which Sasha is chosen queen of the Bunny Hop, for example, feminists saw an ironic, tongue-in-cheek critique, while the conventional women failed to detect irony. The feminist reviewers noted that the protagonist follows a path of increasing estrangement from a patriarchal society and makes gestures of resistance, while the conventional women saw only a weak, spoiled woman, unable to connect with reality. The women who participated in the discourse of the conventional woman formed a coherent and unified discourse community. They had a common view that the novel was ideological, that the characters, in particular the protagonist, were unconvincing, and that the novelist had failed to write about the real world. A common criticism of conventional reviewers was that the novel was ideological—that characters and events were depicted in such a way as to fly in the face of the “objectivity” that is fundamental to realism. Tom Nolan (Los Angeles Times) stated the point succinctly: “The author, in an attempt to 200

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document one woman’s life with all its oppressions—major and minor— imposed by a male-oriented society, falls prey to the obvious problem of polemical art: Events are made to fit a thesis.” In a roundup review of several feminist novelists, Jane Larkin Crain made the same point in Commentary: “Taken one by one, no feminist novel really rewards critical scrutiny—they are all too steeped in ideology to pay the elementary respect to human complexity that good fiction demands” (59). Crain found a “one-sided absorption in the woman’s point of view, especially when that point of view is one of helplessness” (58). She had no patience with the feminist protagonists and expressed her disgust with the idea that “the narrow preoccupations of miserable women constitute a world that is large as life” (62). As the author develops her story of female misery, “less and less effort gets invested in the depiction of reality” (62). Finally, “the writer falsifies reality irrevocably” (60). The novels fail in exactly that thing that is the essence of the novel form: “imparting particularity and concreteness to universal experience” (60). Other reviewers present a similar view. Ellen Meyer (Nation) says that narcissism is the problem: Feminist novels, including Shulman’s, are “usually distinguished by having no characters in them whatsoever, except for the central figure, whose imperfect and totally egocentric perception of people in her life is entertaining only so long a we are willing to suspend our interest in the outside world” (55). The author is unable to write about the real world because “she is unable to get out of the prison of herself ” (56). Millicent Dillon (Nation) agrees: “In [the authors’] personal protest, they force, they wrench” (220). Dillon provides a little lesson in the novel form: “Character and theme must be inseparable. Paradox must have its logical consistency. Contradiction within character must arise out of a deeply rooted conceptualization” (220). But Shulman has not succeeded in writing a novel, Dillon suggests. Her protagonist, like other feminist characters, has bought into the idea that she can have everything. Crain concludes, “It is as if they have no window on the world” (61). According to these reviewers, Shulman’s skewed perception of reality makes it impossible for her to create realistic characters or plots. Crain believes that characters in novels such as Prom Queen “are all too steeped in ideology to pay the elementary respect to human complexity that good fiction demands” (59). For Crain, “Characters in these books take onedimensional shapes more appropriate to figures in an allegory, or a burlesque, than a novel” (61). Meyer says that Prom Queen’s characters “exist only in the author’s mind” (56). And feminist authors have an inadequate understanding of the laws of causality. They have created female protagonists who, instead of being up against a powerful oppressive society as the feminists suggest, are in fact responsible for their own unhappiness. Clearly, a common problem conventional reviewers have with Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen is disdain for the protagonist. While the feminists praise the characterization of Sasha, she comes in for a lot of criticism from the other Discourses in Dialogue

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camp. Later the protagonists of novels by Erica Jong, Marilyn French, and others got similar criticism. The conventional women call Sasha a wimp, a whiner, self-indulgent, narcissistic. She is afflicted with “pathological passivity” (Crain 60), and her problems result from her stupidity or lack of character, not her gender. Sasha and others like her are, in the words of Barbara Howar in the Washington Post, “overeducated, undermotivated women who can’t cope”; or, according to Crain, “cowards, cripples and losers” (62). For Marilyn Bender (New York Times), Sasha is “a sap, a born loser, or both.” Implicitly denying that women’s positioning in society and the family is oppressive, these reviewers declare that Shulman’s female protagonist and the novel cannot be accepted as representative. Crain mocks the unhappiness of protagonists such as Sasha, calling it a “pathological passivity,” and criticizes the novel for ascribing that unhappiness to a culture “designed by men for the purpose of keeping women in a state of servitude” (59). Crain finds it unreasonable that “affluent, sophisticated, and intelligent women, themselves blameless, would suffer in silence” the indignities dramatized in novels such as Shulman’s (59). She concludes that the female protagonists have not “the slightest idea of what it means to take responsibility for one’s own life” (61). The tone of Crain’s piece is noteworthy for its hostility and disdain. She is put off by the fact that, unlike the old “woman’s novel,” which was addressed to women only, the new feminist novel aspires to a place in the literary mainstream. The characters lack credibility, and the plots fail in their handling of causality: “no connection is made between the situations these women find themselves in and the decisions they have made in their lives to land themselves in exactly those situations” (Crain 61). Suggesting that the protagonist is “caught in the grip of forces that swamp and transcend [her]” is a falsification of reality. The issues of power and authority are quite evident, as Crain and others seem especially aware of their status as brokers of value and apparently consciously use their authority to denounce feminism in an attempt to contain and subvert it. Sara Blackburn (Chicago Tribune) can see Sasha only as a spoiled middleclass Jewish girl, not an “oppressed woman”: “her life emerges here as more shallow and self-indulgent than the actual limited and deprived phenomenon the author meant to develop and emphasize.” Sasha fares no better in the responses of Marilyn Bender, who wrote for the influential New York Times. Bender calls her a “pushover,” a silly girl who makes a series of incomprehensible mistakes that “can’t be totally blamed on a sexist society.” The question is “where to place the blame for knuckling under to [men],” as Howar puts it in the Washington Post, and the answer is obvious to these women. Blackburn and some others deny Shulman’s novel the status of fiction altogether and assign it to the category of memoir, viewing memoir as a form that need not conform to the realism demanded of fiction. According to Sally Helgesen (Village Voice) the book, though “difficult to justify as a novel, . . . is 202

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wonderful when read simply as a memoir.’ ” A memoir is the report of an exotic figure or someone who has departed from the norm, and to this reviewer, Sasha is apparently such a figure. (Helgeson mentions the memoirist Lady Asquith, who wrote about her experiences as a big-game hunter.) Ellen Hope Meyer (Nation) identifies the feminist novel as belonging to the “Dear Diary” genre, completely lacking in distance between author and subject. Blackburn suggests that Shulman’s novel is authentic only if read as the memoir of a middle-class Jewish girl: The novel is a “smashing disappointment . . . chiefly because it is actually more a memoir of a middle-class Jewish girlhood than it is a book about being female and thus tracked into American Womanhood.” Blackburn’s review seems more than a little anti-Semitic, with the reviewer invoking the stereotype of the Jewish American princess. Finally, Blackburn criticizes Sasha for not being more concerned about women outside her class and directs the reader’s compassion to poor women. We see here one issue in the construction of feminism: the matter of whether middle-class women can be considered oppressed. Those who claim to be are “spoiled” and cannot embody the individuality that is also representative, as required by realistic fiction. They may express themselves in memoir, but they may not claim the authority of a realistic form.3 Clearly, for reviewers who disliked the novel, Sasha makes a mess of her life, but what should Sasha (and other feminist protagonists) do? The answer is clear for these reviewers: She should not disturb the universe. She should stop complaining and find her proper niche in society. Dillon is disgusted by the protagonist’s (and by implication the novelist’s) presumptuous belief that she can have it all: “pleasure, brilliance, creativity, understanding, vulgarity, and truth” (220). Both want “instant liberation,” she says. Such a protagonist (like such an author) is vulgar, and not just because she speaks out about her sexual desires. As a traditional woman, Bender (New York Times) is not surprised that Sasha values beauty above all else. Such an attitude seems normal to her: “Few women, not even mandarins and anarchists, escape that conviction.” What Sasha does wrong is to “collapse under that conviction.” For Helgesen, the appropriate plot for the women’s novel is one in which the protagonist undertakes to change herself rather than the world, to moderate her desires, to be understanding in her relationships with men, to realize that the “beast lies within the woman herself.” As Alden Whitman (Los Angeles Times) puts it, she should realize that “the cultural template that produced Sasha Davis is also responsible for her husbands and lovers.” If she is oppressed, so is everyone else. Howar makes a similar point, stating that Sasha “refuses to see that her parents as well as the goodly number of men in her life are victimized by the same system that did her in, that we are all in the soup together.” Not surprisingly, the reviewers who participate in the discourse of the conventional woman tend to side with the men in the novel. Bender finds it quite understandable that Sasha’s husband is “poised for flight as this woeful tale ends.” Crain, who is highly incensed that men in feminist novels are “cads Discourses in Dialogue

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and brutes” (60), finds an inherent contradiction in the portrayal of men who “supposedly harbor an inveterate disdain for women and never have anything but their own benefits in mind, yet . . . toil ceaselessly to provide luxurious apartments, servants, private schools, and European vacations” (61). According to Whitman, Shulman “has given men the back of her typewriter” in “striving to score a feminist point.” He advises Shulman to look to George Eliot for models of male characters with depth and complexity. Shulman needs male characters who are “more sensitively drawn.” In Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women’s Liberation Movement, Lisa Maria Hogeland points out that reviewers, in setting standards for feminist novels, place great importance on authors’ handling of male characters. In examples from responses to Marilyn French’s 1977 novel The Women’s Room and other feminist fiction, Hogeland illustrates that mainstream reviewers invoked standards of realism to criticize authors’ presentation of male characters, insisting, in Hogeland’s paraphrase, that “men can’t be that bad” (85). This strategy, implicitly suggesting that women’s problems were with the women themselves, had a clear goal: “to delegitimate critiques of men’s behavior between men and women” (86). Such an approach “situated feminism, but not anti-feminism as a ‘special interest group,’ and facilitated the imaging of feminism as ‘man-hating’ (and, again, not of anti-feminism as misogyny)” (85). Judging from Hogeland’s reports on the responses to numerous novels from the 1970s, reviews of Shulman’s first novel established the agenda for a discussion of feminism. One feature of the discourse of the subordinate woman is to protect the status quo—hence the image of men—by policing female novelists’ portrayals of male characters. The feminist reviewers, who were already becoming adept at a new discourse, based their high praise for the novel on its success in representing women’s situations with realism. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith explains, a subject experiences any object in particular circumstances with certain needs, interests, and purposes, and the positioning of the subject affects aesthetic judgments. Aesthetic responses cannot be isolated from a broader range of factors. While the conventional women were unable to see the novel as a success aesthetically, the feminists, who had different interests and needs, quite consistently praised the novel for its aesthetic qualities.4 The feminist reviewers, again and again, call attention to the novel’s success precisely in its handling of realism: the truthfulness of the representation and success in illuminating life. Marge Piercy, who reviewed the novel for Second Wave, notes with approval the “wry, jagged, progression” of Sasha’s life: Shulman “touches all the likely bases between being a child in a middle-class suburb, and becoming the mother of young children.” Praising Shulman’s ability to capture the texture of real life, Piercy comments, “Truly, I had forgotten about how grisly it was to be of high-school age in the fifties; I had forgotten how we were wrong whatever we did, and wrong without dignity.” Piercy’s praise also invokes a central criterion for realism in her claim that Sasha is “many-sided.” 204

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Debby Woodroofe’s comments (Militant) bring to mind Auerbach’s description of realism as showing people embedded in a concrete reality with political, social, and economic dimensions. Woodroofe praises Shulman for “[getting] it all in,” that is, dealing with all the ways society disadvantages women, from grade-school bullies to the male authorities (a psychiatrist, in this case) who enforce sex roles. Norma Allen Lesser is equally enthusiastic in off our backs. Implicitly accepting the realism of Shulman’s account, Lesser notes that Sasha’s life is “not terribly exciting or unusual.” Sasha is caught between wanting to please by doing what is expected and trying to rebel and be her own person. She knows that “being a piece of meat is not all she wants,” but she struggles unsuccessfully to find any other way to be. Renee Blakken’s Guardian review likewise finds Sasha a sympathetic character. Blakken notes that Sasha does not yet realize that she is “dominated by men in all her thoughts and actions” and gives an account of the novel that highlights Sasha’s acceptance of the identity and the role placed on her by society: “She is not yet enraged at her own belief that, as she puts it, she must repay any man who even buys her a cup of coffee by going to bed with him.” Through her writing skill, Shulman turns “daily oppressions into fascinating reading.” Blakken’s comments illustrate that to feminists Shulman’s novel conforms to the canons of realism, conveying universality or representativeness through unique and particular examples. Blakken (whose piece appeared in a socialist publication) looks forward to the day when prom queens and wasted years seeking beauty will be “another relic on the garbage heap of history.” In its analysis, the feminist discourse has different assumptions about the reality fiction should depict. Feminists expect to see protagonists embedded in a social reality that reflects the oppression they experience, and they demand a novel that points to the need for social change and eschews mere personal solutions. Shulman’s feminist readers insist that realism requires the exploration of a dimension beyond the personal or a recognition of the “political” dimensions of so-called private life. The feminists’ response to the character Sasha is diametrically opposed to that of the conventional women and is dominated by sympathy and even admiration. Piercy comments that “The tenor of the novel doesn’t treat Sasha as a stupid bitch to have married her first rigid, smug husband, or to have gone through analysis wondering only if her analyst found her attractive.” Piercy admires Sasha for moving “against the ruts that surround her.” A number of the feminist reviewers note that Shulman’s representation of a woman’s life is something very new. In these reviews, we see the precise moment when the choice of truth is made, when one discourse begins to displace another. Piercy remarks that “five years ago this novel would have been written with a Muriel Spark distancing satirizing Sasha.” Woodroofe surmises that if Memoirs had appeared five years earlier, it would have been ignored: “It is only when filtered through the prism of consciousness created by the women’s liberation movement that Memoirs attains its significance.” Diane K. Shah’s review in the National Observer also welcomes Memoirs as the “fictional Discourses in Dialogue

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manifestation” of women’s liberation. A number of reviewers (Woodroofe, Piercy, Rosenthal, Lesser) connect the “truth” of the novel with the work that was going on in the CR groups of the time. Shulman’s novel appeared in the moment in which feminism was first purveyed to the public through feminist fiction. The reception of the novel shows us how evaluation and interpretation of feminist works is articulated within a given social formation and connected to the social reception and construction of feminism. The reviews of Shulman’s novel provide a dramatic example of conflict and power negotiations between two distinct discourse communities. Conventional women attempted to contain and discount a feminist vision by invoking the criteria of realism. Admirers of the novel invoked the same criteria to praise the novel as pointing to a new way of viewing the social world. In these responses we see the “work” of producing “truth” close up. Notes 1. During the first years of the women’s liberation movement, the general public did not really comprehend the activists’ critique. Shulman wrote later of the response to the demonstrations at the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City in 1968: “Many onlookers and reporters were incensed; it was at that demonstration that feminists became known as ‘crazy bra burners,’ though no bra was burnt. So acceptable was the practice of valuing women for their sexual attractiveness that many people genuinely believed that the demonstrators must be ugly women, motivated by simple jealousy of the contestants, proclaiming a politics of sour grapes” (“Sex and Power” 595). It was on the boardwalk that Shulman got the idea for her first novel: “I suddenly could see my life in terms of our junior and high school beauty focus. I was never a prom queen myself, but I knew that milieu very well” (Shulman, Interview 114). 2. The conventional women would have approved of Shulman in her prefeminist days. She explained to Leora Tannenbaum that until she encountered feminism, she felt her lot as a woman was inevitable and that she had to accept it: “Until then, I only felt the anguish of it, and felt that it was demeaning to complain. This was my fate: I was a woman, I was a mother, and to complain about it would be beneath me” (82). 3. It is not uncommon for reviewers to comment on what they see as a confessional element in the book. Those who would like to examine Shulman’s use of autobiographical experience might compare the treatment of Sasha’s affair with her philosophy professor in the novel and the affair as presented in Shulman’s memoir A Good Enough Daughter. There is little similarity between the two accounts, except in the passion, amounting to adoration, the student has for the rather ungainly professor, who represents the excitement of philosophical thinking along with male approval of a particularly valuable kind. In real life, the affair ended with Shulman under the threat of violence, while in the novel the relationship is much more benign. 4. See my Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation for further discussion of social location, experience, education, and other factors contributing to literary evaluation.

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References Belsey, Catherine. Critical Practice. London: Methuen, 1980. Bender, Marilyn. “The Girl Who Couldn’t Say No.” Review of Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. New York Times Book Review, 23 Apr. 1972, 34. Bennett, Tony. “Texts in History: The Determinations of Readings and Their Texts.” Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies. Ed. James L. Machor and Philip Goldstein. New York: Routledge, 2001. 61–74. Blackburn, Sara. Review of Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. Chicago Tribune Books, 14 May 1972, 13. Blakken, Renee. “The Diary Doesn’t Tell All.” Review of Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. Guardian, 30 Aug. 1972, 14. Cain, William E., ed. American Literature. Vol. 2. New York: Penguin, 2004. Crain, Jane Larkin. “Feminist Fiction.” Commentary, Dec. 1974, 58–62. Dillon, Millicent. “Literature and the New Bawd.” Nation, 22 Feb. 1975, 219–21. Felski, Rita. Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Random House, 1995. ———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977. Ed. Colin Gordon. Trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Sopher. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Helgesen, Sally. “Seven Ages of Woman.” Review of Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. Village Voice, 21 Sept. 1972, 32. Hogeland, Lisa Maria. Feminism and Its Fictions: The Consciousness-Raising Novel and the Women’s Liberation Movement. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. Howar, Barbara. “A Woman Wondering Who She Is.” Review of Memoirs of an Ex– Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. Washington Post, 26 Aug. 1972, D4. Lesser, Norma Allen. Review of Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. off our backs, May–June 1972, 7. Martin. Wallace. Recent Theories of Narrative. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1986. Meyer, Ellen Hope. “The Aesthetics of ‘Dear Diary.’ ” Nation, 12 Jan. 1974, 55–56. Mills, Sara. Discourse. London: Routledge, 1997. Nolan, Tim. “A Woman in Need of Liberation.” Review of Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. Los Angeles Times Calendar, 6 Aug. 1972, 49. Piercy, Marge. Review of Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. Second Wave 2.1 (1972): 46. Rosen, Ruth. The World Split Open: How the Modern Women’s Movement Changed America. New York: Viking, 2000. Rosenthal, Lucy. Review of Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. Saturday Review, 20 May 1972, 76–77. Shah, Diane K. “An Outspoken Fictional Manifesto Catalogs Everylibber’s Complaint.” National Observer, 20 May 1972, 23.

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Shulman, Alix Kates. A Good Enough Daughter. New York: Schocken, 1999. ———. Interview by Charlotte Templin. Missouri Review 24.1 (2001): 103–21. ———. “A Marriage Disagreement: Or Marriage by Other Means.” Feminist Memoir Project: Voices from Women’s Liberation. Ed. Rachael DuPlessis and Ann Snitow. New York: Three Rivers, 1998. ———. Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen. New York: Penguin, 1977. ———. “Sex and Power: Sexual Bases of Radical Feminism.” Signs 5 (1980): 590–604. Smith, Barbara Herrnstein. Contingencies of Value: Alternate Perspectives for Critical Theory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988. Tanenbaum, Leora. “The Liberation of an Ex–Prom Queen.” Ms., Nov.–Dec. 1997, 82–84. Templin, Charlotte. Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation: The Example of Erica Jong. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1995. Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790– 1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Whitman, Alden. “Wife’s Eye View of Matrimony.” Review of Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. Los Angeles Times Book Review, 21 May 1972, 2. Woodroofe, Debby. Review of Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, by Alix Kates Shulman. Militant, 7 July 1972, 20.

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III Books, Print Culture, and Historical Sites of Reception

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The Power of Recirculation Scrapbooks and the Reception of the Nineteenth-Century Press ELLEN GRUBER GARVEY

Recovering the reading practices of actual readers anchors the more theoretical considerations of reception. Present-day readers can be interviewed and surveyed (Radway; Long), but traces of historical readers have to be sought in diaries, reviews, letters, and even court records (Sicherman; Zboray and Zboray; Augst; Ginsburg). Many nineteenth-century readers, male and female, kept scrapbooks of items clipped from their newspaper reading. The scrapbooks reflect that readers were not only saving reading, but passing it along. In some cases, they passed it to another reader or readers, as is true of homemade historiographies tracking newspaper coverage of assaults on the black community; in others, possibly to a movement or to family members, as is true of at least some of the suffragists who tracked press coverage of their speeches and writing. We might think of saving material for one’s own future reading as a form of recirculation, too—passing it to a future version of oneself, as did Frances Smith, Willa Cather’s aunt, a schoolteacher

in the East who prepared for her move to isolated homesteading in Nebraska by making a compendium of farm and household advice from newspapers, so that she would know how to cure poultry diseases of her future livestock and the possible scaly rashes of her future children and be able to read poems she would not be able to find again. They all betoken a desire to pass reading along—sometimes to family, sometimes to a larger community, sometimes to an older self, and sometimes to posterity. Though made up of materials from the press that may have no biographical connection to the scrapbook maker, scrapbooks can be remarkably personal records of reading. Even scrapbooks for which the only apparent unifying thread is their origin in newspapers remind us how varied newspaper reading was, how important newspapers were to Americans, especially during and following the Civil War, and how nineteenth-century readers both expected poetry to be mingled with war news, religious items, and facetiae and categorized their readings according to standards we may not readily recognize.

1 Although much reception study has been associated with literary works, scrapbooks let us see the larger context of reading. Attention to the nonliterary does not dilute understanding of literary texts but reveals patterns of reading they were part of. Reading often carries awareness of other readers reading the same work. Benedict Anderson’s work highlights the communityand even nation-building function of such awareness, but studying recirculation lets us focus on how individual readers read with and against awareness of other readers. Nineteenth-century clipping scrapbooks have the special quality of revealing reading practices of nonprofessional readers who did not write about their reading, as they show what readers valued enough to cut out, save, and organize in a book that they wrote with their scissors. Scrapbook making not only created a record of reception but contributes to our understanding of readers’ roles in recirculating both the items they read and their own readings or interpretations of those items. I want to consider the scrapbooks of three readers as both evidence of and an element in their responses to material in the newspaper and their entrance into recirculation and shaping other people’s readings. Recirculation is a crucial element left out of Robert Darnton’s influential circuit of communication (12), yet from the readers’ point of view, it is important to how texts may reach them. While reprinting has begun to receive scholarly attention (McGill; Homestead), the broader practice of recirculation has rarely been considered as part of reception. Recirculation encompasses reprinting works in newspapers and magazines, passing along works from hand to hand, passing along works into scrapbooks, and responding to, reworking, and passing along works from private circulation back into the 212

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press. Nineteenth-century scrapbook makers are analogous to twenty-firstcentury bloggers, who excerpt, comment on, and create links to pass along their reading as they read. All three of the nineteenth-century readers whose reading and scrapbooks I analyze here were activists intervening in the press to make political change; all engaged with critical close reading of the press and passing their readings along to others; two engaged with both literary and nonliterary texts, using some of the same techniques. All were writers as well as readers, but I will foreground their work as recirculators to highlight this underexplored element of reception that shows readers making meaning, endorsing the power of reading, and advocating for their interpretations. These readers shared common basic practices with one another and with other scrapbook makers: They cut items out of the press, they responded to items in the press, and they cut out and saved the responses when they appeared in the press. In concert with recirculation, scrapbooks help us to understand reception as an active phenomenon. When a reader likes a work well enough to save it in a scrapbook or to pass it along to a newspaper editor, its continued availability for rereading or reappearance in the press has an impact on other readers. Readers have a role in the circulation of work beyond simply buying the book or magazine. They may even create new attributions for anonymous poetry, in a sense voting for their choice of author. Sometimes readers assume theirs is the only plausible reading and want to give the work and that reading wider circulation, but at other times they transmit their readings as critique or intervention. This essay considers how late nineteenth-century readers promulgated their readings by recirculating items clipped from periodicals into scrapbooks and into the press.

2 From the earliest years of the women’s suffrage movement, activists understood the importance of addressing and influencing public opinion. They not only read but clipped newspapers to follow the coverage they received. For women who appeared on the lecture platform, clipping the newspaper also created a record of their activities and the public response, which helped them strategize about what to do about the considerable disapproval of women lecturing. The Boston writer, lecturer, abolitionist, and women’s rights pioneer Caroline Wells Healey Dall was typical of writers and public speakers in reading the paper for notices of her own talks and books. She also addressed the slant of the writing, reading it as closely as a media studies scholar to take apart its assumptions. Her January 1856 letter to the Boston Daily Evening Traveller takes the newspaper editors to task for the wording of a headline of a notice of her talk, which she assumes is meant as a slur. Her letter reads in part, The Power of Recirculation

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“Lecture by a female.” Female what? Parrot, popinjay, or monkey? This phrase does not hurt me on my own account, but I confess that I am weary of this popular coarseness. I suppose you will acknowledge, Messrs. Editors, that there are women who feel it their duty to address public audiences. If so, why add to the painful notoriety, which circumstances at present ensure them? If, after a brilliant political dinner, you were to see this caption—Fine speech by a male—what should you think? That your compositor had gone crazy, I am sure. (Letter) This letter’s place in Dall’s scrapbook, along with the considerably shorter notice of her talk of 21 January 1856 which elicited it, has a story behind it. Dall was an energetic Boston reformer and Unitarian who wrote, lectured, and agitated for women’s rights, had thorny relationships with most of her associates, and kept a journal from age fifteen to her death at age ninety. Dall’s lecturing career began after her husband had a mental breakdown, lost his pulpit, and left for India, where he remained for most of his life. She began speaking in public in fall 1855 at a women’s rights convention in Boston and very soon considered lecturing as a way to earn money for her family, as she raised her two children essentially as a single mother. But public speaking, especially addressing mixed audiences for pay, was at the border of propriety for women—hence the “painful notoriety.” A communications historian notes that “intense resistance to women’s public speaking continued well into the 1860s, although a number of women had broken the sound barrier in their efforts to abolish slavery and in support of other reforms” (Campbell 156). Women who lectured on abolition, for example, continued to meet sometimes violent resistance through the mid–nineteenth century, directed not only at the abolitionist content of their talks but at their gender. Women’s rights advocates had to fight to speak as well, and they recognized public speaking as a move out of second-class status. A synchronic slice through Dall’s scrapbook, correspondence, and diary in the period when she became a public speaker reveals her own anxiety and moments of self-confidence and finds her sometimes drawing energy in response to opposition. She turned down writing requests that did not pay; her diary shows her, after attending a lecture by a male friend, speculating about how much he was paid and wondering if she could lecture as well. Correspondence shows her asking friends for help gaining lecture engagements and promoting them; the scrapbook finds her collecting unsigned newspaper announcements of her forthcoming lectures and annotating them with the names of the people she has reason to think wrote them. The scrapbook shows the more public results of the behind-the-scenes work and emotions of the diary and letters. All three finally recirculate into the archive for more rereading—in Dall’s case, as the fruit of her campaign against those who belittled her efforts to place her papers in the Massachusetts Historical Society (Deese ix–x). 214

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In the case of the aforementioned letter to the editor, the diary tells of a friend bringing her a one-paragraph notice of her lecture in the Boston Daily Evening Traveller: “It did not please me—I scribbled a little note wh[ich] I hope the Editor will print” (Journals, 28 Jan. 1856). Dall was disturbed because she believed that the Traveller editors had mischaracterized her position when they wrote, “In respect to the right and duties of the female sex, [Dall’s] position was materially different from those of the so-called Woman’s Rights Advocates.” Dall may have been concerned that the mischaracterization might cost her lecture engagements. The scrapbook shows that the Traveller published an eight-paragraph critique she wrote of their brief notice in which she takes apart nearly every word of it, including the heading “lecture by a female.” She then mailed out copies of the newspaper containing her letter, though not the original notice—presumably sending them to other sources of lecturing engagements. While Dall in one sense simply offers an interpretation of the article in the Traveller, her reasons for doing so deserve analysis. Dall’s sense of a community of readers includes her awareness of how others will read the same article she is reading, and in this case, she needs to prevent a reading she believes will be damaging from taking hold. The writer may write for an assumed reader, but the reader reads with or against a community whose traits he or she imagines. A reader such as Dall fears that other readers of the Traveller are uncritically reading the material that distresses her, without realizing how politically charged its phrases are. Imagining such an uncritical reader and the effect the Traveller article will have on him or her sparks Dall’s letter: She heads off the misreading and heightens the reader’s attention to the editors’ hostile intent, expressed through their phrasing, while countering damaging statements. After her response to its initial depreciatory notice of her lecture, the Traveller printed more respectful notices, one published anonymously but authored by her friend James Freeman Clarke, according to her penciled annotation in the scrapbook. With the experience of the potentially damaging first notice in the Traveller behind her, she may have decided to use the press more strategically as she developed her lecturing business. Glowing notices for subsequent lectures read like testimonials, but anonymity was evidently considered more persuasive than publishing signed notices, or notices signed by Dall’s contacts; only Dall’s scrapbook annotations reveal that it is “Garrison” who calls her a “superior lecturer” or that T. S. King is the writer who regards her as “amply qualified by abilities, by faithful preparation, and enthusiasm for her subject, to do justice to the themes she will treat.” The scrapbook serves as an account book, tracking favorable notices written by friends and acquaintances. What we might call her “strong reading” of the Traveller’s notice reverberated in her home circle. Her diary records that not long after the exchange in the Traveller, “Dr. [William F.] Channing came in. . . . We had some pleasant general talk.” And then, teasingly borrowing the Traveller’s objectionable use of female as a noun, spotlighted by Dall’s critique, “Dr. Channing wished The Power of Recirculation

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I would write an article for Putnam on the Rights of Women, even—as he says—if I am a female!” (Journals, 3 Feb. 1856). Other women’s rights activists clipped and recirculated material on a larger scale. Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, a suffragist born in Indiana and active in Illinois, began her scrapbook in the 1860s in her early twenties. As the author of the weekly column “Woman’s Kingdom” in the Chicago Inter-Ocean, a general daily newspaper, she collected many of her columns from 1877 to 1884. Her column itself embodied clipping and recirculating material as she printed excerpts from the books she read. I will focus here on the way her excerpting comments on reading and access to it and the way her work creates a community of readers. From its first announcement, “The Woman’s Kingdom” implicitly critiqued other newspaper “women’s” columns: It was to be a “department not devoted to Fashion or Cookery, but . . . in lieu of ‘what she wears’ and ‘what she eats,’ will oftener contain account of ‘what she says,’ and ‘what she does’ ” (Harbert, “Our Young Women”). The column is presented as a “conversation,” with readers contributing questions and materials. Outside the Inter-Ocean itself, where she receives a simple byline, Harbert is sometimes referred to as the column’s editor rather than its author. Harbert had been a suffrage speaker and writer for suffrage papers from an early age. In this general newspaper, she writes to attract and respond to a larger group. The column creates a sense of a community of readers in a variety of ways. When Harbert reports receiving “hundreds of letters” from readers on a subject, she concretizes the “imagined community” of her column’s readers, to use Benedict Anderson’s concept of newspaper readers’ awareness of one another as having significant interests in common. Anderson’s theory of nationhood forged by newspaper reading elucidates Harbert’s work in her newspaper column for Midwestern women. Her readers become aware of other Midwestern women, many on farms, seeking a larger role for women and thereby gain both a regional identity and a sense of being part of the larger world’s struggles. The community gains a voice through Harbert’s writing and through reading the column. Even readers who do not write letters to her themselves learn that such letters would be welcome and that others have expressed some of their thoughts. Harbert’s column connects them not just to one another, but to the women of exemplary accomplishments about whom she writes and to a literary world in the Midwest and beyond. Readers helped to keep the community going. Clara Berwick Colby, vice president of the Nebraska Woman Suffrage Association, wrote to Harbert that she told the editors of the Inter-Ocean that she was resubscribing specifically because of Harbert’s column and that she recommended it to other Nebraska women. Harbert’s work inspired other columnists, such as Carrie Chapman (later Catt), whose column “Woman’s World” in the Mason City (Iowa) Republican similarly “listed conspicuous accomplishments of women, . . . harvested notes of feminist interest from other publications,” and advocated organizing

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for suffrage (Van Voris 11). Catt wrote to Harbert more than thirty years later, reflecting on Harbert’s effect on her: When I was a young girl in Iowa, you were editor of the woman’s column in the Interocean which came weekly to our home. I never failed to read those columns and I have always felt that your words at that time made a very great impression upon me in determining to work for woman suffrage. (Letter) But for its imagined community of newspaper-reading women to exist at all, Harbert’s column had to advocate for the importance of reading newspapers. The miscellaneousness of late nineteenth-century newspapers meant that reading them granted access to a range of materials; their cheapness gave them broad readership. But their worldly role as the daily press could make them less accepted as women’s reading. Harbert tackles the subject from several directions. The assertion that “The Women’s Kingdom” will displace women’s columns that discuss “what she wears” initiates her analysis of competition for women’s time. A few months later, Harbert’s column tells of recommending a book to a friend to read to her children: “ ‘Don’t say read it to the children to me,’ was the reply. ‘I have not a minute to read the daily papers.’ And then I looked at her six ruffles and unnumbered yards of knife pleating on her own dress and tucks and puffs ad infinitum on the child’s dress” (Harbert, “Woman’s Kingdom,” 12 May 1877). Harbert relies on her readers’ understanding that creating and maintaining elaborate clothing is more labor intensive than work on simpler styles to suggest that women do have time that they can control and use for reading: Women’s fashion choices extend beyond reading about fashion to reading at all. When a reader with two young children writes to object that she has no time to read the newspaper, Harbert makes the unusual move of referring to her own household and her three children by name as a warrant for her domestic expertise: “I for the first time lift the veil of the kingdom most sacred to every true woman, the sacred shrine of home,” to advocate simplified housekeeping and the husband’s cooperation; “thanks to the kindly thoughtfulness and unselfishness of the father, the piano has not been . . . closed nor the morning paper unread; although, pies have been almost unknown quantities and very many Mrs. Grundys have taken exception to the methods adopted” (“Letters to Young Mothers”). Harbert recirculates the work of other writers and speakers who advocate women’s newspaper reading, especially for farm women. She excerpts a speech given at the Nebraska State Fair by Mrs. Matilda Fletcher, contrasting a poor family with a broken, miserable rich family whose hard-driving father possesses much land and livestock but no graces or pleasures. He owns only religious books and “a few interesting volumes upon horse-doctoring and sheep-raising.” The poor household, however, has made their small farm

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park-like, and the family reads together. Moreover, “there was a liberal supply of books, but their real library consisted in an excellent array of papers” (“The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man”). Widely dispersed sources thus join Harbert in advocating newspaper reading to promote the family’s well-being: It is not an act of individualist withdrawal but rather a way to enhance family relationships. Fletcher’s talk’s place at an agricultural fair gives it special authority for Harbert’s rural readers, and Harbert spreads this portion of Fletcher’s talk through her amplified podium, while she positions herself as a useful conduit of commentary to which they may not have had access. Exchanges and recirculation were important elements making the press into “that Corliss engine of public sentiment,” as Harbert called it in a handbill introducing the column (“To All Women’s Clubs”). Just as the Corliss engine circulated steam and turned it into power, the press circulated articles and converted them into “public sentiment.” Harbert creates a sense of community and readers’ participation in it by offering a digest of her own reading: Like her readers, she is a reader and passes along what has been useful or important to her. Her column points outward as it samples her reading, expressing regret that she does not have space to reprint an entire work and suggesting that readers will want to read further. “The Woman’s Kingdom” joins her readers with authors and doers through a particular form of celebrity information: She tells of illnesses and deaths among authors. For example, following her report of the death of May Alcott Nieriker, Louisa May Alcott’s sister and the model for Amy of Little Women, Harbert coincidentally offers a quotation from Nieriker’s book Studying Art Abroad. Harbert presents this report as an element of participation in community rather than celebrity peeping, with the information that Nieriker was attended in her last illness by her mother- and sister-in-law (“Woman’s Kingdom,” 19 Jan. 1880). Harbert maintains a distinction between avidity for celebrity information and a sense of protective, almost familial community, assuming her readers will naturally join in outraged distress at learning that Fannie Fern’s monument at Mt. Auburn Cemetery has been mutilated by “trophy-gleaners” (“Woman’s Kingdom,” 14 Apr. 1877). At the same time, she builds the reputations of women writers. She reprints Whittier’s poem “The Singer” on the death of the Ohio poet Alice Cary, followed by Horace Greeley’s impression of Alice and Phoebe Cary. Recognition of these rural Midwestern writers by authoritative Easterners was a special reason to reprint these works. Harbert’s columns circulated into the world, where others excerpted and quoted them, and they circulated privately, into other people’s scrapbooks and her own—some preserved for herself, one made specially for her mother, and at least one explicitly intended for her children to read as they grew up. She enhances the value of this private circulation by writing about making scrapbooks from newspaper clippings and the worth those scrapbooks might accumulate. She reports that the day after the fall of Fort Sumter, Mrs. G. S. Orth of Indiana 218

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commenced carefully selecting the best editorials, letters, etc. from the current newspaper literature of the day. As the months passed on, special prominence was given to the letters from the “Boys in Blue” [particularly from local papers]. . . . Nine volumes were thus collected, and notwithstanding the fact that the same material might have been saved in thousands of homes, so valuable are these volumes on account of their rarity that Mrs. Orth declined a request to send them to a European exposition because her friends protested that they might be lost. The scrapbooks were read by visitors to her library, where “the first books to arrest attention are these nine volumes of letters from the ‘Boys in Blue’ ” (“Family Scrapbook,” 10 Jan. 1880). Harbert thus asserts that scrapbooks of news clippings could both be made up of commonly available mass-produced materials and be valuable for the unique stamp the reader has put on them by selecting them and saving them. She affirms that reading, leaving traces of reading, and passing traces of that reading along are meaningful, meaning-making activities. Orth’s scrapbook, though “valuable on account of [its] rarity,” was one of probably thousands of Civil War scrapbooks Northerners and Southerners made. These scrapbooks were personal and idiosyncratic, but also represented a general surge in newspaper reading and scrapbook making during the Civil War, when people who often had not previously read a daily paper became avid newspaper readers. Anxious to hear news of loved ones at the front, these new readers were called out to buy the newspaper “at unusual hours . . . by the divine right of its telegraphic dispatches,” as Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., remarked. Many people made scrapbooks from Civil War news, sometimes with the sense that they were living through momentous times of which they ought to have a record. Some scrapbooks followed the activities of specific regiments; others focused on catching the opposing side’s lies about how well the war was progressing, while a good number collected the newspaper poetry of the period, sometimes mixed in with other matter and sometimes compiled as a kind of anthology. But the organization of many of these scrapbooks suggests that the record they wished to preserve was of the experience of reading the news or other material collected. Because they literally—materially—categorize, scrapbooks can reveal something of how readers read and thought of the works they saved; because they mirrored and brought into the home the practices of recirculation that were common in the press, where editors sifted through the newspapers they received via what were known as “exchanges” and reprinted news items, poetry, and other sorts of reports, scrapbooks show us readers’ participation in print culture (Garvey, “Scissoring”). Scrapbook makers were engaged in homemade archive creation or do-it-yourself historiography. They were demonstrating their own literary discriminations and decision making, not just producing meanings but literally producing a new text. Like editors, they reThe Power of Recirculation

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circulated the materials they had collected, making the text available at least to their future selves and often to others. As it was for Dall and Harbert, Henry Ingersoll Bowditch’s scrapbook making was part of a larger enterprise. While Dall and Harbert collected material in scrapbooks, responded to it, and clipped the responses in their scrapbooks, Bowditch’s scrapbooks were part of a project of mourning his oldest son, Nat, killed in the Civil War. His scrapbooks reveal the reflexive quality of recirculation at work: They preserve a record of reading and reading practices—subject to interpretation, of course—and display a conscious decision to frame a history. His scrapbook making also comments retrospectively on his actions and his readings, yielding an unusual record of a nonprofessional reader considering what moved him and why. Bowditch was a Boston physician and abolitionist most publicly active during the 1840s, when he worked on a petition campaign and newspaper in response to the capture of George Latimer, an escaped slave, who was incarcerated in a Boston jail. (One version of the petition successfully persuaded the Massachusetts legislature to make it illegal to use the state’s jails to hold escaped slaves.) After Nat died, Bowditch began to clip from the newspapers poetry that moved him. Soon after, he created what he called a Memorial Cabinet, enshrining items and writings connected with his son. He began making scrapbooks with more and less obvious connections to Nat, intended for the Memorial Cabinet—one, a book of Nat’s letters to the family during his time in the army, recopied and illustrated by his father with photos, newspaper pictures, and other items; another, a scrapbook of the Martyr Soldiers of Massachusetts, collecting material about officers who had died in battle or of disease. About ten years after Nat’s death, he started making other scrapbooks—two of his work on the Latimer case, another of the poetry that had moved him during the war. These were also intended for the memorial to Nat, since Bowditch saw the Civil War as a war against slavery and so could claim it for his abolitionist work. His understanding of the meaning of the war thus shaped his rereading of his own writing and writing that he had earlier edited. Since the poetry had moved him after Nat’s death, it also entered into the Memorial Cabinet. The Latimer scrapbooks and the poetry collections show how recirculation within the press and into the home archive of the scrapbook allowed a reader not only to make meaning, but to continue to make his reading meaningful in his dialog with an earlier version of himself as reader. The Latimer scrapbooks preserve a complete run of the Latimer Gazette and Northstar, the paper issued by the group that coalesced around the project of freeing Latimer and ensuring that Massachusetts prisons would not be used to hold slaves again. But even those distinctly historical scrapbooks were of greatest interest to Bowditch as a retrospective reflection on his feelings about the work he was involved in thirty or forty years before. The scrapbooks display his attempts to affix his memories to printed matter written by others. In his scrapbooks, the case echoes down the years for him and 220

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becomes a scaffolding for reminiscence and introspection on his involvement in this movement, through his choice of what to save and his annotation of it. Bowditch’s animating questions are notably personal, not about how best to conduct a movement and persuade others, but about how he learned to feel well by doing good. The scrapbook becomes both an alternative history—a historical record of an episode in abolition made from such public materials as newspaper clippings—and a personal record and occasion for reflection, the story of a man’s spiritual development within that movement and his own wonder, as an elderly man, commenting through marginal glosses on his own youthful energy. In one of his Latimer scrapbooks, he saved clippings of letters in the press between himself and James Gray, the slaveholder who claimed Latimer, and his own article in the Boston Courier in which he wrote that Gray “has seen fit to bring forward my name as one of the many who endeavored to prevent him from prostrating, in the case of Latimer, the dearest rights of the citizens of Massachusetts.” Bowditch annotates this 1840s printed material, writing on 15 February 1888, “I read this today as the work of another man and I feel refreshed at thinking that I was once capable of writing such a letter—But what tame times the young men have now[;] where is there now any moral fight equal to the anti slavery battle?” (“Papers Related” 51). Bowditch’s method of responding to Gray’s letter in the 1840s—spinning out the dialog in the press, having it reprinted, and then saving the documents in his scrapbook—followed the path of the abolitionist press’s strategic twist on the use of exchanges (sending copies of a newspaper to other papers and freely reprinting items from them). For most newspaper editors, exchanges enabled greater coverage of news and allowed them to reprint poetry, fiction, and other items without paying authors, while incidentally publicizing authors and the papers that originally published their work by giving them a broader reputation.1 Augusta Rohrbach notes that William Lloyd Garrison, publisher of the Liberator, turned this practice to political use, sending his paper to Southern editors to provoke them. Southern editors reprinted sections of the Liberator to show how threatening abolitionists could be. When Southern readers responded, “Northern papers would reprint the Southern responses for their sensationalist value. Garrison, of course, would reprint everything” (730). The Liberator reprinted Bowditch’s exchange with Gray from the Boston Courier, and Bowditch circulated it into his own records alongside other Latimer work, by pasting it into his scrapbook. Bowditch worked similarly with correspondence he had exchanged with Lawrence Ricaud, from Maryland, who had asked to buy one of the respirators Bowditch had invented; he had replied that he had been too busy to answer earlier because of his work on the Latimer Committee, which would “prevent our laws from being prostrated to support slavery.” Though he offered to tell Ricaud how to construct this medical device, Bowditch asserted he would not “agree to have any commercial relations, whereby I may be benefitted, with anyone south of Mason and Dixon’s line, who is not a decided The Power of Recirculation

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opponent of slavery.” Ricaud then sent Bowditch’s letter to his local paper, the Kent News, writing, “His sentiments deserve our unique condemnation,” and he asked the editor to publish such a condemnation and send the paper to Bowditch. The editor had reprinted it with a long attack on Bowditch and abolitionists for “officious and intemperate intermeddling” in slavery, which the Kent News’s editor sent to Bowditch. This attack then served as the occasion for Bowditch’s far lengthier reply to Ricaud, pointing to an ad for the sale of slaves that had appeared in the issue the editor had sent him. While the Kent News was unlikely to have reprinted Bowditch’s reply to Ricaud, Bowditch had not waited for them to do so but had recirculated into the Liberator the Kent News item, along with his lengthy reply and an introductory letter expressing shock that Ricaud had forwarded his original private letter to a newspaper (“Communications”). Bowditch then saved the versions of the exchange that had appeared in the proslavery papers the Baltimore American and the Atlas, along with the fuller version from the Liberator, in his Latimer scrapbook in the Memorial Cabinet. In this interchange as a whole, we see Bowditch first reading a piece of routine correspondence as an opportunity to express opposition to slavery to a Southern reader who either might prove to be an ally in an unexpected place, where he could be valuable, or might turn out to be offended by Bowditch’s statements, as Ricaud was. In the latter case, although Bowditch’s assumed reader would not have been willing to read through an abolitionist editorial, Bowditch’s placement of his argument in business correspondence initiated by Ricaud assures him of at least one reader. The letter is even more successful, in that it provokes Ricaud to forward it to a newspaper, which not only gives Bowditch’s letter a larger audience but accords him both a chance to read and critique a copy of that newspaper and an occasion to respond. Bowditch’s reply, which might otherwise disappear, reappears in the abolitionist press as a response to inflammatory Southern rhetoric. The entire exchange printed in the Liberator also encourages readers to bring up the subject of slavery at all possible times and to turn slaveholders’ arguments against themselves. The scrapbook preserves a record of the exchange, and the scrapbook’s preservation at the Massachusetts Historical Society—another form of circulation, enabled by his son, after Bowditch’s death—moves it into the historical record. Made in the 1870s, the saved record of discussion becomes part of Bowditch’s personal history. Bowditch’s experience fighting slavery shaped his life and character and endowed him with the sense that he had spent his life well. But these two types of alternative history—a historical record and a personal history that tells about his reading and writing—can be at cross-purposes. Following the narrative arc of individual development blocks off the narrative of political change. While Bowditch’s scrapbook traces his own development and friendships in the abolitionist movement, he does not follow what happened to George Latimer or his wife Rebecca, or to other black abolitionists Bowditch knew, 222

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who faced harder times by the time he made his scrapbook. His choice of what to include and his reading of the events following the war contrast with what other people selected for their scrapbooks from the same newspapers about continuing attacks on blacks. For example, William and Ellen Craft, prominent fugitive slaves in Boston in the 1840s, whom Bowditch helped escape from slave catchers and who subsequently left for England, returned after the war to found a cooperative farm and school in Georgia, for which William Craft raised funds in the North. When whites burned down the first farm and school, William continued to raise funds for a somewhat scaled-back undertaking. Their white neighbors in Georgia conducted a carefully plotted and concerted campaign to discredit William Craft by accusing him of using the money for himself, in a claim printed in the Boston papers. The accusations effectively dried up contributions from his Boston supporters (Blackett 98–99). Henry Bowditch’s nephew, Charles Pickering Bowditch, who served in the same regiment with Nat and later was an officer of a black regiment, documented part of Craft’s unsuccessful libel suit against his accusers in his own scrapbooks of the late 1870s but stopped pasting in clippings on the case short of its even more demoralizing conclusion. He collected other materials suggesting the struggle was hardly over as well. Perhaps he did not share Henry’s stake in seeing success. Although both men read the same newspapers, shared many of the same concerns, and shared some historiographic interests, the selections they made from the same newspapers—based on the interests and needs they brought to their reading of the press—mark their different orientations. Henry Bowditch brought his particular orientation and uses of newspaper reading to bear on literary works in his poetry scrapbook entitled “Waifs: Chiefly Poetic, Gathered During the Rebellion.” This scrapbook is a complex meditation and mediation on his own reading and its meaning to him. He organized the poetry and some other writing into categories and considered the book part of his memorial to Nat, dating his introduction of 17 March 1875 as the “12th anniversary of Nat’s fatal wound.” Bowditch discusses his response to the time- and occasion-bound quality of the poetry he collected. Although in the 1870s the poems were still important enough to Bowditch for him to make the scrapbook, he was also suspicious of the operation of sentiment: The poems, he acknowledges, touched him because of the emotional state he was in at the time, and reading them later brings back memories of that state. He seems surprised, perhaps even embarrassed, by the poetry that moved him ten and twelve years before. I present these waifs of poetry etc., which I gathered during the Rebellion, not as specimens of the divine art of poesy, though some of them are worthy of all praise, but simply to illustrate the tendency of the times. . . . These various moods of the popular heart are shadowed out in the poetry, that sprang up everywhere. . . . In all seasons of great joy [and] in great sorrow, the heart finds relief in poetry. Many write The Power of Recirculation

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at those periods who never [illegible] . . . at other times. It is true the poetry is often very poor, maybe absurd. I had almost said ridiculous, but one cannot ridicule a great woe and we feel a pity for the sufferer. (“Waifs”) Bowditch participated in familiar practices of sentimental reading: For twentyfive years he carried in his pocket a lock of hair from the head of the subject of a Robert Burns poem, so he was surely not embarrassed by sentiment, but he does seem uneasy with it. He shifts between distancing himself from the work (the poems “illustrate the tendency of the times”) and presenting himself as a representative specimen of someone who was moved. Accordingly, the first of the sections into which he has divided the poems is expressive of Religious trust and confidence that under God, all events would ultimately be for our best good. They seem to me, all of them, beautiful, though some of them do not allude to passing events, and were written before the war began, they, nevertheless, appear to me appropriate for all times, and therefore I caught them as they floated by during the Rebellion. Each and all, every time I read them, bring back the religious aspirations of my* heart, which, I think, were never stronger than at times, during the war. [*not alone mine but in the nation’s heart.](“Waifs”) His footnote, linking his own sentiments to the nation’s, both enhances the significance of his emotions and points to the sense of emotional unity with others that was part of his experience of wartime. Mary Louise Kete has discussed the writing and circulation of mourning poetry in a nineteenth-century Vermont town as a mode of linking the community via sentimental bonds. Bowditch’s scrapbook shows that sense of community, experienced as emotional unity with others, circulating through the press and provides evidence of a reader tapping into it and finding the emotions experienced through his reading so important that he preserves the works that stirred them and expressed them for him in an elaborately bound book. His post–Civil War use of the word nation rather than union even retroactively extends his sense of a community of feeling to Southerners, acknowledging that they might have felt the same emotions. His comments on his readings of the poems remind us that a particular reader’s reception of a work is tied not just to that reader’s social, economic, and gender location but also to narrower specifics of his or her personal situation at the moment of reading it. Beyond that personal reading history is a historical moment, even a brief one, that may shape the reading desires and responses of many. Henry Bowditch’s collection was selective. He largely excluded poems exhorting men to enlist, poems about the home front (such as the many poems about women knitting for soldiers, which attracted another scrapbook maker 224

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clipping some of the same newspapers), and the popular Civil War poems about soldiers missing their mothers; hence Elizabeth Akers Allen’s “Rock Me to Sleep” is absent. His omission of one poem that was particularly important to him but that he recirculated in other ways (and which Charles Pickering Bowditch did save in his scrapbook), as I will discuss, suggests that passing along his poetry reading to a later version of himself was one of the functions of this scrapbook. Civil War scrapbook makers not only sought to save the sense of living through momentous times but seem to have wanted to preserve a record of apprehending those events through their reading of specific newspaper articles. Henry Bowditch’s poetry scrapbook suggests that readers also sought to preserve the emotional experience of reading particular poems when they first encountered them. Although his household subscribed to magazines such as the Atlantic Monthly, where some of these poems originally appeared, he clipped for the scrapbooks only the newspapers that reprinted the poems. The close relationship between the emotion and the experience of reading the poetry in its newspaper setting may be one explanation for Lawrence Buell’s finding that collections of Civil War poetry, especially those by individual poets, did not sell well. Collecting the poems into scrapbooks, however, thrived. Bowditch’s poetry scrapbook could be studied in isolation, as his record of reading, but without an understanding that thousands of other Americans were reading the newspaper and saving records of their reading during the Civil War, we miss much of the social dimension of it; without knowing more about poetry scrapbooks and Civil War poetry scrapbooks in particular, we miss the social practice in which it was embedded and from which it departs—information that allows us to understand its special qualities. Beyond war news, battlefield maps, letters from camp, lists of the dead, and accounts of heroism, the daily papers contained poetry, much of it related to the war or brought into a relationship to the war via its title or notes. Many Civil War scrapbook makers included poetry; others created scrapbooks that collected it exclusively, perhaps because much newspaper poetry was unlikely to appear in books. Alice Fahs asserts that “the many scrapbooks kept by Southerners are an important indication of how precious the print culture of the war was to a widespread Southern reading public” (30). Northerners, with many more papers to clip, were equally avid scrapbook keepers. The contents of scrapbooks were understood as an index to the popular heart: Critics complained that deserving American poets had never received book publication and therefore, as one put it, had “no habitation but the corner of a newspaper, or the scrapbook of a friend” (“Melaia” 168). Admiration for a poem was expressed by saying that it would be clipped for many scrapbooks, while writer-characters in several stories and poems find having their work in someone’s scrapbook the highest tribute. In 1856 the popular writer Gail Hamilton, for example, protested against attacks on women’s amateur poetry, arguing for its ultimate value as something the poet’s daughter will The Power of Recirculation

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have after her mother’s death, to “cut . . . out and paste it in her scrapbook. What is fame, more than this?” (185). The scrapbook asserted nondominant, if not subversive readings. In fact, the acclaim of the scrapbook was sometimes set against the judgment of more prestigious authorities: “If the scrap-books of the land could to-day be drawn forth from their receptacles, we should find that Alice Cary has a place as a poet in the hearts of the people, which no mere critic in his grandeur has ever allowed,” says one writer in a typical version of this move (Clemmer 45). Scrapbooks, in other words, were recognized as a record of reception. Most scrapbooks are without commentary; perhaps the maker assumes that the scrapbook maker is the ultimate reader or will always be at the elbow of another reader to explain the choices. But Bowditch classified his poems into categories and commented on most of the categories. His categories include, for example, Sixth: Elegiac, or mourning for the dead, slain in battle or by disease in camp. The whole nation seemed to find comfort in song, good, bad or indifferent. The deep underlying thought of heartfelt sorrow seemed to sanctify even the least worthy. As I read these poems again, after the lapse of ten years, I am glad that I saved them from the fleeting tide of time, and I am ready to place them one and all here in memory of the noble dead. Among them will be found not a few dedicated to the memory of the 2nd father of his country—Abraham Lincoln. (“Waifs”) Bowditch thus linked mourning for his son with mourning for Lincoln. One poem that moved him but evidently escaped easy categorization appears in this and in two other sections, taken from three different sources. “Mortally Wounded” by Mary Woolsey Howland was published anonymously; its frequent attribution to a dying soldier gave it special power and fueled both its multiple reprinting and Bowditch’s desire to save it repeatedly, as I discuss elsewhere (“Anonymity”). Two of Bowditch’s scrapbook copies use the headnote/title it frequently carried: “The following lines were found under the pillow of a soldier who was lying dead in a hospital near Port Royal, South Carolina.” The poem, in the voice of a soldier, begins, “I lay me down to rest” and expresses a proper Protestant resignation to God’s will for life or death (qtd. in Garvey, “Anonymity” 166). His fifth section, “The Joys of the Returning Volunteer,” makes evident the contextual quality of his reading and categorization of poems. It is one of only two sections on which his heading list makes no comment. His inclusion of such a section, in a book whose genesis is in his son’s death and failure to return, seems a remarkable effort. The section notably excludes mentions of sons returning to parents. Its first item is “Returned” by Kate Putnam (later Kate Putnam Osgood), a poet with the same name as Nat’s fiancée, whom Henry came to think of as a second daughter; the fiancée had died by the time 226

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he made the scrapbook. Putnam’s poem concerns a woman waiting for her absent, imprisoned lover, who returns at its conclusion. Two others celebrate the return of husbands to wives; another, “When the Boys Come Home” by John Hay, exults in general terms about the “happy time coming” at the boys’ arrival, while another, “The Joy-Gun” by Lieutenant Richard Beale, celebrates the Emancipation. Kate Putnam’s “Driving Home the Cows,” a wish-fulfillment poem in which a father who believes he has lost all three of his sons in the war is surprised when the youngest arrives maimed but alive, would seem to also belong in this section. But Bowditch mutes the pain of that fantasy by placing it in section 2, entitled “Loyal.” Unlike most bereaved parents of Civil War soldiers, whose sons’ bodies remained close to the battlefield, Henry had traveled south to bring Nat’s body back to Massachusetts. Along with Nat’s body, Bowditch brought back his effects, including a poem that Nat had carried in his pocket and that had great meaning for Henry: Theodor Koerner’s “Battle Prayer” of the Napoleonic War. It begins, “Father I call on thee! / Round me the cannon its thick smoke is pouring / Round me sharp flashing the volley is roaring, / Ruler of Battle, I call on Thee / Father, oh guide Thou me!” Bowditch had it printed and distributed to the Fifty-fifth Massachusetts Regiment, the black regiment training near his house in Milton in July 1863, a few months after Nat’s death. He read it aloud to them with the information that it was “found lying close by a small wooden cross . . . near the heart of [a] young soldier, who, under the influence of a perfect trust in God the Father, bravely did his work, and now sleeps in peace by the side of others who have fallen in our noble cause.” He suggested that those who could read should teach it to the others and that all should “Keep it, if possible, somewhere about your person. Use it for no purpose save to do you good unless, perchance, you at any time need it as a wadding for your rifle; then in God’s name use it, and may it reach the heart of any man who would impiously enslave another” (Vincent Bowditch 46). The young soldier referred to is Nat.2 Since the poem seemed to Henry to have extraordinary power, direction would be needed to be sure soldiers used it for good and not ill and, if necessary, for concrete but exalted use in battle: reaching the enemy’s heart with a bullet, not the touch of sympathy. As in the many Civil War accounts of Bibles carried in a pocket stopping a bullet, the poetic text is accorded sacred, talismanic power. The exclusion of Koerner’s “Battle Prayer” from the scrapbook and Bowditch’s distribution of it elsewhere reveal his sense of the power of poetry. Koerner’s poem, originating in a war fifty years earlier, points to a commonality of soldiers’ experience across wars: Any soldier could carry this poem and say this prayer, whether fighting Napoleon, fighting for the slaves’ freedom, or fighting for the independence of the Confederacy. Bowditch headed off the latter likelihood by printing and distributing it with the heading “Respectfully presented to the Officers and Soldiers of the 55th Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers. / By a friend of the regiment. July 14, 1863.” His nephew Charles The Power of Recirculation

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Pickering Bowditch, who had become an officer in the regiment, pasted into his 1870s scrapbook this printing of the poem. But Koerner’s poem, beginning “Father I call on thee!” had a special status for Henry Bowditch as the literal father who might be called on, as he imagines his son’s voice speaking the poem/prayer. Although the actual copy Nat carried went into the Memorial Cabinet, the “Lines found under a pillow” perhaps substitute in the scrapbook for the lines found “lying close by.” Although Koerner’s poem, like Howland’s, expresses submission to God’s will, it does it with disturbingly graphic battlefield imagery, ending with “When death, to greet me, in thunder is rushing; / When life’s failing stream from my veins is gushing / My God, I resign myself to Thee / Father, I call on Thee” (Charles Bowditch). Henry passed along the poem to the black regiment, seeing it as expressing the right spirit in which to do battle perhaps, while also positioning Nat’s service and death as a fitting example for them to follow. But the doctor-father who did not reach his son in time to treat his fatal wounds might no longer have wished to continue to contemplate that prayer once the war was over. The bodies of Civil War soldiers were often found with photographs of their loved ones surrounding them, evidence that the dying men had tried to recreate the domestic deathbed scene by communing with those images as they died (Faust). Bowditch’s description of Nat’s death makes the poem and cross his witnesses and elevates his death to an act of religious faith and self-sacrifice, which black soldiers are asked to admire or emulate, following the thread of noble death that leads from the friend whose enlistment and death inspired Nat, to Nat, and on from there. Bowditch believes states of elevated feeling leave traces in print—not only by the poet, but by past readers who have “used it for no purpose save to do . . . good”—and those noble states of feeling and their traces or residues in print can be transmitted from one set of readers to another. Thus motivated, this energetic reader passes his interpretation of poetry along by privately printing a poem, giving it out, collecting other poems, and having them elaborately bound in his scrapbook, where they circulate to a later version of himself, to his family, and ultimately to a repository. The three examples of scrapbooks and their makers examined here find readers recirculating their reading matter to endow their understanding of what they have read with greater power by making sure others can know of and share their interpretation. Their activities straddle literary and nonliterary material and do not always distinguish the two. They establish that readings are critiques, and they help to produce and reproduce readings as the work of critical readers. These readers assert their way into the press and into other modes of circulation to put forward their readings of texts and to encourage others both to share those readings and to share in the practices of reading and critiquing. If the scrapbooks of Dall, Harbert, and Bowditch simply provided substantial traces of their reading, that legacy would be remark-

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able enough. But these scrapbooks were also part of a circuit of recirculation, through which each reader passed along his or her readings and then left records of that work in what was essentially a form of private publication: a unique text written with mass-produced materials and passed along to a later self, to the family, and finally to repositories where others could read them and learn of their readings.

Acknowledgment I am grateful for an NEH fellowship at the Massachusetts Historical Society that enabled me to research this material.

Notes 1. For more on reprinting and exchanges, see McGill, esp. 141–86; Homestead. 2. Information that the soldier was Nat is in the catalog of the Memorial Cabinet, which held Nat’s copy of the poem.

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Catt, Carrie Chapman. Letter to Elizabeth Boynton Harbert, 13 Jan. 1921. Elizabeth Boynton Harbert Papers, Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, series 2, 1870–1939. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Clemmer, Mary. The Poetical Works of Alice and Phoebe Cary with a Memorial of Their Lives. 1876. New York: Hurd and Houghton, 1885. “Communications: Letter from Dr. Bowditch.” Liberator, 24 Feb. 1843, 30. Dall, Caroline Wells Healey. Journals. Dall-Healey Family Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. ———. Letter to Boston Daily Evening Traveller, 30 Jan. 1856. Dall scrapbook. Dall Family Papers. Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston. Darnton, Robert. “What Is the History of Books?” The Book History Reader. Ed. David Finkelstein and Alastair McCleery. London: Routledge, 2002. 9–26. Deese, Helen R. Introduction. Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteenth-century Woman, Caroline Healy Dall. Ed. Helen R. Deese. Boston: Beacon, 2005. Fahs, Alice. The Imagined Civil War: Popular Literature of North and South 1861–1865. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Faust, Drew Gilpin. “The Civil War Soldier and the Art of Dying.” Journal of Southern History 67 (2001): 1–19. Garvey, Ellen Gruber. “Anonymity, Authorship, and Recirculation: A Civil War Episode.” Book History 9 (2006): 159–78. ———. “Scissorizing and Scrapbooks: Nineteenth-Century Reading, Remaking, and Recirculating.” New Media: 1740–1915. Ed. Lisa Gitelman and Geoff Pingree. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. 207–27. Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Hamilton, Gail. “Cant Again.” National Era, 20 Nov. 1856, 185. Harbert, Elizabeth Boynton. “The Family Scrapbook.” “Woman’s Kingdom.” Chicago InterOcean, 10 Jan. 1880. Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, series 2, 1870–1939. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. ———. “Letters to Young Mothers.” “Woman’s Kingdom.” Chicago InterOcean, n.d. Harbert scrapbook. Vol. 1. General Scrapbook Collection 97. Huntington Library, Huntington, Calif. ———. “Our Young Women.” [Periodical not indicated], 6 Jan. 1877. Harbert scrapbook. Vol. 1. General Scrapbook Collection 97. Huntington Library, Huntington, Calif. ———. “The Poor Rich Man and the Rich Poor Man.” “Woman’s Kingdom.” Chicago InterOcean, 2 Nov. 1878. Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, series 2, 1870–1939. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. ———. “To All Woman’s Clubs and Conventions, Philanthropic, Educational or Political.” Handbill, Chicago, July 1877. Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, series 2, 1870– 1939. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. ———. “Woman’s Kingdom.” Chicago InterOcean, 12 May 1877. Harbert scrapbook Vol. 1. General Scrapbook Collection 97. Huntington Library, Huntington, Calif.

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———. “Woman’s Kingdom.” Chicago InterOcean, 14 Apr. 1877. Harbert scrapbook. Vol. 1. General Scrapbook Collection 97. Huntington Library, Huntington, Calif. ———. “Woman’s Kingdom.” Chicago InterOcean, 19 Jan 1880. Mary Earhart Dillon Collection, series 2, 1870–1939. Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Holmes, Oliver Wendell. “Bread and the Newspaper.” Atlantic, Sept. 1861, 348. Homestead, Melissa. “ ‘Every Body Sees the Theft’: Fanny Fern and Literary Proprietorship in Antebellum America.” New England Quarterly 74 (2001): 210–37. Kete, Mary Louise. Sentimental Collaborations: Mourning and Middle-Class Identity in Nineteenth-Century America. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2000. Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. McGill, Meredith. American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. “Melaia and Other Poems.” Southern Literary Messenger, Mar. 1844, 168. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Rohrbach, Augusta. “Truth Stronger and Stranger Than Fiction: Reexamining William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator.” American Literature 73 (2001): 727–55. Sicherman, Barbara. “Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Book.” U.S. History as Women’s History. Ed. Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 245–66. Van Voris, Jacqueline. Carrie Chapman Catt: A Public Life. New York: Feminist Press, 1987. Zboray, Ronald J., and Mary Saracino Zboray. Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People’s History of the Mass Market Book. New York: Routledge, 2005.

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Accuracy or Fair Play? Complaining about the Newspaper in Early Twentieth-Century New York DAVID PAUL NORD

When Isaac Russell noticed a small story in the New York World of 24 April 1916, he did something countless newspaper readers have done over the centuries: He got angry. He dashed off a letter denouncing the “defamatory tone” of the story, the “distorted words,” and the lack of context for quotations. “What good does it possibly do the world,” he wrote, “to wrench words far away from the situation that was proper, respectful, and in taste, into something wild-eyed, intemperate and unseemly?” (26 Apr. 1916).1 Though anger has always been a fairly typical reader response to newspaper journalism, Isaac Russell was no typical reader. He was himself a newspaper reporter, and the person whose words were “raided and distorted” in the World were his own. The story quoted from a speech that Russell had given the evening before, assailing the New York papers for their unfair treatment of antiwar activists. Though Russell was familiar with the “reportorial game,” as he called it, his target was not the reporter on the story but the entire

newspaper system of editors, rewrite men, and headline writers who routinely “crooked the news” to punch up a story’s appeal or to twist it to fit the fancies of plutocratic publishers. “It is time for the blame for this sort of treason to the truth to be shifted from reportorial shoulders to the place where it belongs,” he wrote in another scathing letter. “When newspapers can conduct themselves as you have in this matter it is no wonder the representatives of labor and the understratas in general screech out against the press and claim it is censored and twisted in the interests of plutocracy, and must be brought to book for the general good” (22 Apr. 1916). Unlike most of the complaints that have rained down on the desks of newspaper editors over the centuries, Isaac Russell’s letters were not treated as subsidies to “help maintain the postal service through their contributions to the waste-paper basket,” as one contemporary editor put it (Keeley, Speech). Russell’s letters were taken seriously (at least somewhat seriously) because they did not go to a city editor or managing editor in the usual way. They were referred to a novel institution in the American newspaper business, the New York World’s Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, which had been launched in 1913 by Ralph Pulitzer, publisher of the World, and long-time World staffer Isaac White. The bureau was, in effect, an ombudsman service, as it would be called today. Its mission was to receive reader complaints, to investigate them, and to correct errors (Nemeth, News 23; Nemeth, “Bellwether”; Marzolf 66– 68; Dorroh). As plans for the bureau were being formulated, both Pulitzer and White invoked the spirit of Joseph Pulitzer, the great World publisher who had died in 1911. “Accuracy in newspaper writing was, with him, a religion,” his son Ralph declared in a speech in December 1912. “He had a ravenous craving for information. . . . This craving for exact facts naturally carried with it an insistence on accuracy and an utter detestation of inaccuracy” (3). White reiterated the same theme in a lengthy World editorial a couple of weeks later. “Joseph Pulitzer preached accuracy,” he wrote. “He endeavored to impress the idea permanently by placarding ‘Accuracy, Terseness, Accuracy’ upon the walls of the editorial rooms and upon the desks of editors, reporters, and copy readers” (Accuracy 3). But what is “accuracy”? What is “fair play”? It turned out that the meaning of the terms varied considerably across the World’s constituencies of managers, reporters, and readers. The newspaper’s managers (the publisher and top editors) worried most about libels, naturally, but they also condemned “fakes”—that is, phony stories or story details fabricated by reporters or freelance correspondents. Like Isaac Russell, reporters and correspondents had a somewhat different view. They condemned the sensationalism and bias introduced into their stories by rewrite men, desk editors, and headline writers. Readers also complained about factual errors, especially those that touched them directly, but more often they were concerned about emphasis and tone and decontextualized story elements. For readers, “fairness” often seemed quite different from and more important than “accuracy.” A distinction between the two was true for individual readers, but it was perhaps even more 234

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important for readers who represented interest groups seeking to establish their cultural legitimacy through the press. These variant understandings of the concepts “accuracy” and “fair play” can be traced in the World archives because, like any good Progressive Era bureaucracy, the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play was as dedicated to careful record-keeping as to professional performance. The different meanings of accuracy and fairness for the managers, reporters, and readers at the New York World a century ago are important because that was a formative era in the history of American journalism. In 1912, newspapers were reeling from a decade of criticism. Rapid growth in the size and power of newspaper corporations, rising influence of big advertisers and commercial interests, ugly circulation wars in major cities, and reckless sensationalism, especially in the New York press, had combined to bring the industry under fire from all sides. Muckrakers and reformers denounced the power of money in the manufacture of news (Irwin, “American Newspaper: Part IX”). They spoke of journalism in the language they used to describe sausage and milk: “tainted” and “adulterated” by advertising and commercialism (Irwin, “American Newspaper: Part XIII” 15; Gladden). Meanwhile, government officials openly voiced the word that made powerful publishers cringe: regulation. In August 1912, Congress passed a set of regulations known at the Newspaper Publicity Act, the most sweeping effort in U.S. history to regulate the business practices of the newspaper press. The act required newspapers to reveal secret ownerships, to label covert advertisements disguised as news, and to report true circulation figures (Lawson ch. 5; Thorpe). Not surprisingly, newspaper publishers scrambled to persuade a wary public that they were honest, independent, and public spirited. A common response to the attacks on the newspaper business was increased stress on professionalism, including formal codes of professional conduct (“First National”; Lee). The World’s Joseph Pulitzer had long been a proponent of the idea that journalism should be a profession like law and medicine and that “a great newspaper must be a public institution for the public good.” In September 1912, Columbia University opened its soon-to-be-famous School of Journalism, which Pulitzer had lavishly endowed (Boylan 4–5, 31). Around the country, editors and publishers began to emphasize direct “public service”— what marketers today would call “news you can use”—as the way to curry readers’ favor (Keeley, Newspaper Work; Blanchard). Perhaps the most common refrain from the chorus of nervous editors and publishers was “independence.” “What the public wants is an independent newspaper,” wrote one New York editor—a newspaper not in the pocket of political interests or “governed by its advertisers” (“Is an Honest”; Nord 257–58; Marzolf chs. 4–5). These recurrent themes of 1912—professionalism, transparency in the handling of advertising and circulation, independence and impartiality, service to readers, honesty, accuracy, and fair play—were to become the trademarks of the modern American newspaper, or at least of the modern American newspaper’s public relations. But just what it all meant or should mean for Accuracy or Fair Play?

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reporting the news was still uncertain when the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play was launched in the summer of 1913. Each constituency of the newspaper had its own ideas. All agreed that newspapers should tell the truth. But, as Pilate said, what is truth?

1 To the founders of the World’s Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, truth meant getting the facts right. In their initial discussions of the project in late 1912, both Ralph Pulitzer and Isaac White dwelled entirely on the problem of inaccuracy, not unfairness (and certainly not dishonesty, in the sense of obeisance to advertisers). Pulitzer described the “fearful pressure” in a modern newspaper plant such as the World’s, where every day more than 160,000 words written by 2,000 different contributors were reduced to 60,000 words by a large staff of rewrite men and desk editors and set into type by 56 linotype operators. “You can see,” he told an audience of students at Columbia’s new School of Journalism, “how discouragingly great the chances are for honest inaccuracies.” But Pulitzer devoted most of his speech to denouncing, not “innocent inaccuracies,” but “deliberate fakes” (4–5). Similarly, in a World editorial, Isaac White focused entirely on the problem of inaccuracy, which he called “the greatest peril that newspapers have to overcome.” Like his boss, White blamed most factual errors on the “faster pace” of the modern newspaper. But he, too, condemned faked news: both “scandalous fakes” and “harmless fakes” (Accuracy 3–4, 6–9). Pulitzer and White had nothing to say about fairness, except to equate it with accuracy. “Without accuracy you cannot have fair play,” White said. “Accuracy is the keynote” (Accuracy 3–4). After the bureau was underway, White told a reporter for a newspaper trade magazine that he and Pulitzer had been tempted to leave the phrase “and fair play” out of the bureau’s name but had then decided to keep it. “Accuracy and fair play are inseparable in journalism,” he said, “because inaccuracy often results in unfairness” (Haeselbarth). In the bureau’s first report, White said nearly the same thing, but with a slight and telling change in wording. “Accuracy and fair play are inseparable in journalism,” he wrote. “Inaccuracy often means injury to innocent persons” (World’s Bureau). In other words, inaccuracy often means libel, and libel was clearly the most pressing concern of the founders of the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play. Like most major newspapers, the World was routinely sued for libel. Fourteen lawsuits were filed against the paper in 1912, twenty-two in 1913, and sixteen in 1914. In 1913, the year the bureau was founded, the Legal Department of the World had thirty-eight cases pending (“Report” 1912; “Report” 1913; “Report” 1914). The head of the Legal Department was none other than

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Isaac White. Not surprisingly, the two-hatted White understood the missions of the Legal Department and Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play to be essentially the same. “The words ‘accuracy and fair play’ sum up the law of libel,” he wrote. “If what is published is true and fair the writer need not worry about the libel law, civil or criminal” (“Appendix” 322). For White, the work of the bureau was about business: “building up influence, creating good will, decreasing libel suits.” And the road to that end was scrupulous accuracy. In the bureau’s first biennial report, all of the examples in which the paper dodged libel suits involved the speedy correction of factual errors. Avoiding libel judgments, White scarcely needed to point out, meant “a saving in hard cash” (Biennial Report 18–22). The World managers’ obsession with libel is easy to understand; their abhorrence of “fakes” is less so. In that era, many editors and publishers still viewed faked stories as simple entertainment, a harmless newspaper tradition. In September 1913, White sent a circular letter to World correspondents announcing the creation of the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play and asking them what they thought of the idea (22 Sept. 1913). He collected their replies in a folder called “Initial Reactions.” Most of these correspondents were editors of small papers or minor news bureaus who regularly tried to sell news items to the World, so most dutifully congratulated White on his splendid new project. But a substantial number of these World stringers defended “harmless fakes,” and some laughed (or scoffed) at the notion of the World, of all papers, creating an “anti-fake department,” as one correspondent called it (H. N. Gardner, 27 Sept. 1913). “I follow the idea that it is better to pass up a good story than risk a libel suit,” a Chicago editor wrote in reply to White’s circular letter. “But the ‘harmless fake’ is something [else] again. What are you to do with your Winstead man?” (John Fay, 26 Sept. 1913). Another correspondent wrote, While I approve of the bureau in a general way, I shouldn’t think it necessary to eliminate such obvious fakes as come out of Winstead. All normal readers of the World know these exaggerations are intended to amuse. The fact that they do amuse constitutes a good reason for their publication. . . . I for one will miss the Winstead effusion. (Peter Carroll, 15 Oct. 1913) The “Winstead man” was L. T. Stone of the Herald and Evening Citizen in Winstead, Connecticut. Winstead was well known to World readers as a wondrous place where astonishing things happened, where hens laid eggs six inches long and snapping turtles the size of barrel heads towed boats around ponds (L. T. Stone, 18 July 1913, 30 Sept. 1913, 4 Oct. 1913). Stone was the classic American newspaper faker, and correspondent after correspondent invoked the Winstead dateline in their letters to White. Some gently chided White. “I have noticed some of the very best, readable Winstead lies since the bureau

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inauguration,” said one (W. A. Sheehan, [1913]). But Isaac White was not amused. He wrote back to these correspondents to proclaim: The “harmless fake” does not exist. In order that you may know Ralph Pulitzer’s very pronounced views on so-called harmless fakes I am sending you a copy of the address on Accuracy he delivered a short time ago at the School of Journalism at Columbia University, also a copy of an article written by me and published in the editorial section, with Mr. Pulitzer’s approval, in December last. (4 Oct. 1913) To the Chicago editor who had mentioned the Winstead fakes he added: “As for the Winstead man, we are ‘laying for him’ ” (29 Sept. 1913). And indeed they were. During its first couple of years of operation, Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play staffers were as diligent in ferreting out fakes and fakers as they were in responding to readers’ complaints. In its report for the two years ending 30 June 1915, the bureau reported that 787 cases had been investigated, 498 complaints sustained, and 291 corrections published (Biennial Report 5, 8–10). The records of many of these cases are missing, so it is impossible to say precisely what proportion fell into various categories of error. It is clear, however, that errors of fact predominated. The surviving records and the 1915 report tell the same story: Libel and fakery drove the work of the bureau. Though bureau staff fielded outside complaints, they also did their own close reading of the proofs of every edition of the World, trolling for fakes and errors (Haeselbarth).2 But despite the eagle-eyed proofreading of associate directors Richard Linthicum and James Frazee, who was a lawyer as well as a journalist, libels and fakes still slipped into print. A typical example of a harmless fake was a little item from Pittsburgh about an egg on which was embossed a dire warning: “The end of time—1916” (“Wonders”). Another item described a wondrous snake a Kansas farmer named Enoch Chase had chopped into pieces with a spade. The story’s headline told the tale: “Disjointed Snake Gets Together Again—Chase Says Head Whistled and Other Parts Came Back and Linked Themselves On” (“Disjointed”). Though these were obvious fakes dropped into the paper for amusement only, the bureau took them seriously and soberly. White wrote to the manager of the Tri-State News Bureau, the source of the prophetic egg story, that the World no longer tolerated “harmless fakes,” that Ralph Pulitzer himself had come out strongly against them. “Harmless fakes had done more to destroy confidence in the newspapers and to detract from their influence than all unintentional errors combined,” White wrote (BAFP Report, 26 Feb. 1916). Whose confidence was at risk here is uncertain. No evidence appears in the bureau’s files that any actual reader ever complained about a “harmless fake.” All of the cases were exposed by the bureau’s own audits. Fakes and fakers loomed large for the New York World because, as the managers well understood, the work routines of the modern metropolitan 238

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newspaper encouraged them—and encouraged other forms of cheating as well. The speedup of newspaper work caused inadvertent errors, while work routines caused deliberate fakes, harmless and otherwise (Smythe; Fedler). In the bureau’s 1915 report, in a section on stamping out fakers, White wrote: The general run of correspondents, except in the big city centres, are connected with local papers in their home towns and are paid by The World at space rates for whatever they contribute that is published. In order to increase his revenue the correspondent may sometimes be tempted to improve on the facts or even to manufacture “fakes” out of whole cloth. One correspondent we know about had a regular supply of stock fakes that, with slight variations, he worked off year after year on the metropolitan dailies. (Biennial Report 6–9) In other words, the pay system itself offered real economic incentives to exaggerators, fakers, liars, padders, and cheaters of all sorts.3 Ralph Pulitzer himself had described the system as a slippery slope, a bit like alcohol addiction. The “Fake’s Progress” begins, he said, with a trivial story, embroidered slightly with an invented detail or two. But this “is apt to be the first step to worse things.” Next comes the “harmless fake” in which the whole story is “a work of comic fiction.” This is followed by the fabrication of a serious story (12–13). And it gets worse: The last step of our reporter, now grown hopelessly irresponsible, unscrupulous and cynical, is a fake that bespatters some honest man’s character, or besmirches some virtuous woman’s reputation, which ruins spotless lives and has led innocent people to self-inflicted deaths. The reporter who has sunk to this depth of degradation might just as well be a murderer. (13–14) But rather than change the system of payment, the World employed the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play to police its correspondents and its own staff reporters and to prevent them from committing journalistic murder for a few pieces of silver. From the beginning, the bureau kept a card file on those men responsible for errors, and Pulitzer himself made it clear that “the penalty for chronic carelessness and deliberate faking is dismissal.” In the first two years of operation, three men in the home office and many more distant correspondents were fired (Biennial Report 6). In one case, for example, a correspondent was dismissed for inserting a revolver into a routine burglary story at the country estate of Harry F. Guggenheim (there was no revolver) and for getting the name of the Long Island town wrong (it was at Great Neck, not Little Neck) (“Mrs. Guggenheim”). To the man’s boss at the Standard News Association, Isaac White wrote: “While these discrepancies may not appear to be of any great importance, the fact remains that if my information is correct, persons who read your report and knew the facts would have their respect for Accuracy or Fair Play?

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newspapers and newspaper reporters lessened” (Isaac White, 18 Nov. 1915). Though he did not say so, White was probably especially concerned when the persons who knew the facts were Guggenheims. In short, for the publisher and top editors at the New York World, the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play was, to be sure, a public relations operation. But mainly it was an adjunct to the legal department and a department of labor police.

2 Reporters and correspondents had a different understanding of “accuracy” and “fair play.” Though no one defended inaccuracy, some did defend “harmless fakes,” and many defended themselves against the new accuracy police at the New York World. They argued that fakes and inaccuracies were usually introduced, not by them, but by rewrite men, desk editors, and headline writers. These in-house inaccuracies were often not inadvertent but were consciously designed to sensationalize the story or to shape it to fit the editors’ biases. Perhaps more important, these alterations involved not just factual inaccuracy but elements of tone and shading. In other words, reporters and correspondents held a more subtle understanding of accuracy and fair play than did their bosses at the World. And yet, given the legalistic climate at the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, most reporters and correspondents in their memos to Isaac White on specific cases couched their defense in the language of accuracy, not fair play. The fair play they sought was fair play for themselves. In their initial reactions to the founding of the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, some correspondents were skeptical, even hostile. For example, H. N. Gardner, editor of the Walton (NY) Chronicle, wrote: I know of no newspaper where such a department is more needed. While the Hearst papers have always led the World in its inaccurate and faked reports, I think the World can truthfully be said to come in a good second among leading newspapers of the country that “never permit the truth to spoil a good story.” (27 Sept. 1913) Gardner described his own experience in wiring the World a runaway train story. “The story, in the truthful and accurate form in which I sent it, was thrilling enough,” he wrote; “but in the manner in which it was published after one of the World re-write men had ‘faked it up’ it was wonderful to behold.” But for Gardner, such “harmless fakes” concocted by World desk men were minor irritations. He was more concerned about a more insidious distortion: In starting out upon this new course, I hope The World will also change its long established custom of “coloring” its stories . . . [that] cannot be exactly called fakes or inaccuracies, but which through half 240

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truths or distorted “shadings” are made to be extremely misleading, in efforts to influence or prejudice its readers against people whom the World wishes to injure. (27 Sept. 1913) Gardner was not alone. Other correspondents also blamed the rewrite man and desk editor. F. A. Winslow wrote from a small paper in Rockland, Maine: I suppose the rewrite man is a necessity on the staff of a metropolitan newspaper, but in my opinion he is responsible for more inaccuracies and faking than any other class of newspaper workers. The correspondent in Squeedunk, Me., sends the truth about a tragedy in his town, rudely framed perhaps, but the rewrite man in throwing it into readable newspaper English injects theories and fancies into it that oftentimes nullify its real news value. (7 Oct. 1913) Winslow’s phrase “injects theories and fancies” is telling, suggesting something more subtle than simple fabrication of fact. Two of the World’s foreign correspondents, writing in response to White’s circular letter, complained about how their cables were reshaped in the New York office. Writing from London, John Tuohy charged that rewriting cables usually made them not just “inaccurate” but “misleading.” “In the last Sunday paper I received,” he wrote, “I noticed that a cable of mine about Winston Churchill was taken in hand and made a complete hash of ” (22 Oct. 1913). Harrison Reeves, a Paris correspondent, said explicitly that editors’ “policy” often shaped foreign news, especially financial news. “Policy” exerted influence not only through the rewrite system but through the pay system, he said. Reporters write to please editors and, thereby, to get their stories into print (28 Oct. 1913). Though in the beginning reporters and correspondents grumbled about half truths, shadings, and editors’ “policies,” their memos to the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play over the next few years focused almost entirely on factual accuracy. When caught in an error or fabrication that could not be explained away, correspondents still pleaded that most of the facts were correct or that the errors were trivial or unintentional (Frank Baldwin, 23 Feb. 1914, 25 Feb. 1914). More often, they defended themselves vigorously, arguing that the facts as published were exactly as they had happened. Some of the reporters’ memos to the bureau were very brief. In the case of Isaac Russell, for example, who had complained about how his speech on newspaper bias was covered, the reporter’s memo to White said, in its entirety: “I heard Russell use the word ‘damnably’ in describing his complaint to the World. All that my story says he said he said, in my presence, in the sense in which he is represented to have said it” (F. E. Cooper, 28 Apr. 1916). Most of the memos from reporters were much longer; most were detailed rehashings of facts, facts, and more facts. Sometimes when facts could not be verified, reporters described at length “the careful and methodical procedures” they had used to get the facts as Accuracy or Fair Play?

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correct as possible. The reporter who covered a legal battle among members of the wealthy du Pont family, for example, explained to White his meticulous note-taking methods for handling reams of legal documents, financial statements, and interviews. At the end of his memo, he wrote: In submitting this story I want to add that I am satisfied as to its truth and safety in every minute respect. I am mindful of the fact that there is a bitter and violent fight going on between the DuPont factions. The fight involves hundreds of millions. The other side is sure to pick up and object to the slightest inaccuracy. (Edward H. Smith, 26 June 1916) In another long memo, a reporter explained why the facts in his story about an uptown fire differed from the facts in an account written up by a student journalist from New York University. After chiding the student for depending on the word of the building superintendent, who was probably lying, the reporter described in detail exactly how he had gotten the story, exactly what he had seen and heard. “As to which one of us is right, I beg to state that I think we are both telling the truth,” he wrote, with a touch of sarcasm. “The ‘student’ gave a true account of an interview he had with the Superintendent, and I think I sent in a fairly accurate report of the fire” (Philip Shorey, 13 Nov. 1914). On occasion, a reporter or correspondent struggled valiantly to prove to the bureau that what seemed to be an obvious fake was actually true. In 1914, for example, the Tri-State News Bureau of Pittsburgh sent the World a story about a barroom stunt in which a man drank twelve glasses of beer and then at the stroke of midnight swallowed his pocket watch, gripping the chain end in his teeth, while the amazed saloon patrons listened to the ticking through the walls of his chest. The Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play branded this “a fake on its face,” but the Tri-State correspondent insisted that it was absolutely true. To make that case, he gathered corroborating statements from witnesses, including at least one formal, notarized affidavit attesting to the accuracy of every fact in the story. C. A. Evans, general manager of the Tri-State News Bureau, was angry. “I do not like that the Bureau, of which I am manager, should be accused of faking,” he wrote to White. Continuing a long tirade, he added: Does your bureau of accuracy and fair play recognize in any way a correspondent against whom complaint has been made and yet who proves that he was correct or at least was not at fault. . . . We endeavor to give the World and every other paper a prompt and accurate service, but if we find that we are the object of suspicion at frequent intervals it might be better for us to minimize or discontinue our service until the hoodoo, if such it is, disappears. (8 Apr. 1914) As it happened, the accuracy hoodoo at the New York World would hang on for some time, as the Tri-State News Bureau itself discovered two years later in the 1916 prophetic egg imbroglio. 242

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3 The records of the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play suggest that no ordinary reader ever objected to a story like the swallowed watch stunt, whether fake or not. Fakes may have mattered to some readers, but there is no evidence of it. Readers had other concerns. As the founders of the bureau already knew, readers were most ardently concerned about themselves, about individual defamation. Isaac White claimed that many libel suits were avoided by prompt intervention by the bureau, but the parade of litigants was merely reduced, not eliminated. Readers were also concerned about nonlibelous factual errors and sometimes about obviously truthful stories that hurt their reputations or feelings. But often readers complained about forms of unfairness more subtle than factual inaccuracy. They wrote about exaggeration, emphasis, and story tone. On occasion they lectured White on proper journalistic method. In short, ordinary readers understood accuracy and fair play rather differently than did Ralph Pulitzer and Isaac White. The files of the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play also reveal something even more important about the readership of the New York World in 1913–15. Many of the complaints did not come from ordinary readers at all, but from members of interest groups. Bureau records offer a glimpse into a new world of interest group politics that was emerging in America at that time (Bentley 208–9; McGerr; Rogers). Many letters in the bureau’s files came from readers who spotted factual inaccuracies in items about themselves. Their letters were frequently hostile, threatening libel suits. But these were the kind of reader complaints the bureau was set up to address. White immediately responded to these letters, and nearly three hundred corrections and clarifications were published in the paper in the first two years of the bureau’s work. “Fair treatment and ‘soft answers’ have turned away the wrath of some who were quite bitter in their complaints,” he wrote in the bureau’s 1915 report (Biennial Report 18), and he recounted a dozen or so success stories. In one typical case, a World story had inadvertently and incorrectly linked an innocent man to a crime. The man’s attorney quickly demanded a retraction, which was just as quickly published. Later the lawyer wrote, “The correction was very satisfactory, although Mr. Barnes felt very much put out over the error in your Sunday paper. Still, in view of the fact that you have acted fairly in the matter, he wishes me to state that he is completely satisfied” (Biennial Report 21). Sometimes it was the opposite: Readers were annoyed at the World for telling the truth about them with exact, if unpleasant, accuracy. In 1914, a former mayor of Yonkers got into a fistfight with a political rival at a local café, and a World correspondent wrote it up for the paper. The ex-mayor was angry and complained that he had not been treated fairly. But after an exchange of letters with White, he conceded that it was all true and that the correspondent had behaved honestly and honorably throughout the whole sordid mess. In the end, he thanked the bureau and the correspondent for their “friendly Accuracy or Fair Play?

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interest.” “I hope to profit by this experience, and a man will have to call me a good many names hereafter before I lose my temper,” the former mayor wrote, adding, “We prefer to say nothing further about the incident” (Leslie Sutherland, 28 Oct. 1914). Surely the outcome Isaac White most relished came when a reader mistakenly accused the World of an outrage committed by a rival paper. In one such case, a navy officer lambasted a story about an army-navy football game. He sent in the clipping with the words “false,” “outrageous,” and “lie” scrawled across it. “We sent this clipping back to Lieut. Commander Fairfield with the information that it was from another newspaper and not The World, and he sent us a very courteous note of regret,” White said in his report (Biennial Report 18). Between factual error and exact truth, however, lay a broad terrain. Readers often saw unfairness in stories even when no specific factual inaccuracy could be proved, at least to the satisfaction of the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play. In several cases involving conflict or controversy, readers complained that reporters blew the story out of proportion. A story in 1915, for example, reported on the “tumult” that had broken out at a public meeting on the issue of religion in public schools. The reporter recounted a hostile exchange between a school principal and a Congregational minister. “Hisses and applause sounded,” the story said, “arguments criss-crossed and the Chairman, despairing of bringing about order, declared the meeting adjourned” (“Calls Pastor”). In a letter to the bureau, the minister denounced the story as deliberately false and declared himself and the school principal old friends. “Whoever wrote this report of the meeting was evidently trying to make a sensation out of what simply was a real, live, earnest, and serious meeting,” he added (William H. Hess, 10 Nov. 1915). White would have none of it. After reviewing the case in his usual meticulous way, he sided with the reporter. There was “tumult”; there were “hisses”; the meeting did adjourn in disorder. White replied to the minister: I do not see how we can publish your letter in view of the fact that you accuse us in the opening paragraph of making a “deliberately false statement” in our news report. If we printed your letter it would be in effect an admission on our part that we had published a deliberately false statement, which is not the fact. (13 Nov. 1915)4 Readers also criticized story tone and nuance. Political radicals and labor activists often saw bias in World reporting, perhaps especially in the heated political climate after the outbreak of World War I. Sometimes the bureau sympathized enough to publish a complaint as a letter to the editor. In one case, White agreed to stop calling a certain prominent minister a “Christian socialist,” even though the World’s religion editor (citing the Century Dictionary) argued that a Christian socialist was exactly what he was (Mary H. Spencer, 25 Apr. 1916; Isaac White, 25 Apr. 1916). But often political and labor radicals got no satisfaction. In a long letter in 1914, a reader complained that two recent stories had misrepresented confrontations between police 244

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and members of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). The stories implied that the IWW, not the police, had caused the disorder, he charged. He also complained about tone: “Your story about the affair which aimed at being funny was absurd and inaccurate” (Bjornson Cahill, 5 Apr. 1914). White was unimpressed. He replied: Your letter of recent date has been turned over to this Bureau. In the interests of accuracy we must decline to publish it. It would not be fair to our readers nor to the reporter who wrote the articles you criticise. . . . If the printed report concerning Dixon appears to you as “absurd” it is possible it is because Dixon’s conduct was absurd. (10 Apr. 1914) Readers even lectured White and the World on journalistic method. In the complex case of the du Pont family litigation, White and the publicity manager for the DuPont Company, Charles Weston, argued over whether a disparaging remark about Pierre du Pont was a statement of “fact” or a statement of “opinion” and whether it was ethical to publish a false statement simply because it was enclosed in quotation marks and attributed to a source. White declared that it was (16 Aug. 1916). Weston disagreed. In his final letter to White, Weston wrote, “I do not think that even you believe that to use quotation marks gives a paper license to make false statements about an individual, especially when the person quoted is notoriously and openly in opposition to the person about whom he is speaking” (18 Aug. 1916). Both did agree, however, that professional journalistic standards required that both sides to a story be told. White refused to bend before Weston’s threats, but he did note in his final report on the matter that “the Du Pont case illustrates the advantages of offering both sides an opportunity to have their say before publication” (BAFP Report, 30 July 1916). Another reader, Robert Ross, made a plea to the World for balance and fairness in handling a very different kind of story: death among Christian Scientists. Why does the World publish stories under headlines such as “Boy Dies in ‘Healers’ Care,” but they never publish stories that smear regular doctors who lose patients, Ross asked. “Were the newspapers to begin publishing items headed for instance as follows, ‘Child, Attended by Doctors, is Dead,’ the astonishing frequency of these items would soon show up the injustice and absurdity of the present-day tendency to single out Christian Science for attack” (13 June 1916). That Weston and Ross couched their claims in the language of professional standards of reporting suggests that those two readers knew something about journalism. And indeed they did. They were not ordinary readers at all; they were the media spokesmen for special interests, and their complaints (and ones like them) represent some of the most subtle, yet forceful, criticism of the World preserved in the files of the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play. By 1913, something new was afoot in the world of journalism: press criticism as cultural politics. Early twentieth-century press critics, such as Will Irwin, wrote much about the influence of “the interests” on newspaper Accuracy or Fair Play?

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content (“American Newspaper: Part XIII” 15; Rogers 93–94). Sometimes they meant partisan political interests; usually they meant commercial interests, especially big advertisers. Hamilton Holt of the magazine the Independent, for example, argued that the American press had “jumped out of the fryingpan of politics into the fire of commercialism, and the fight of the future will therefore be to extricate ourselves from the fetters of commercialism” (56–57). That sentiment was typical of press criticism in the progressive era (Sinclair). But behind the scenes, new kinds of pressure groups—neither political parties nor business firms—were organizing, and one of their favorite targets was the metropolitan daily newspaper. The interest groups that pressured the World ranged from the Daughters of the American Revolution to the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. They also included religious denominations that found themselves on the fringe (or beyond the fringe) of cultural legitimacy—Catholics, of course, but also Jews, Mormons, and Christian Scientists. The files of the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play include several cases involving the Jewish Congress Organizing Committee and the Eastern States Mission of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints complaining about the tone or emphasis of World stories. The most active denominational interest group, the one that badgered the bureau most incessantly, was the Christian Science Committee on Publication for the State of New York, which was based in Manhattan. The mission of the Committee was broadly cultural: to move Christian Science into the American mainstream. Its method was persistent, but cordial, pressure on the newspaper press. Christian Science cropped up in the news most commonly in cases of death and suicide. Newspaper stories routinely mentioned that a Christian Scientist who had died had been in the care of a healer or at least had declined treatment by a regular doctor. Suicide stories also sometimes linked the deceased to Christian Science. In a sensational story in 1917, a dead woman was found, or so said the reporter, with an open copy of “a textbook on Christian Science” in her lifeless hand (“Selected”). The Christian Science Committee on Publication pounced on such stories immediately. If possible, the Committee’s spokesman, Robert Ross, disputed the facts of the case; he correctly understood this strategy to be the best route to redress at the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, where facts were golden. He sometimes argued that a victim was not a Christian Scientist or that other facts in the story were in error (11 Jan. 1915). In the 1917 suicide story, for example, he asserted that no evidence existed that the dead woman had held a copy of any Christian Science book in her hand (11 May 1917). The Committee’s primary strategy, though, was to press for fairness, for equity, for consistency, in the handling of medical treatment stories. For example, in 1915 Ross wrote to the World: A few days ago an item appeared in your paper which stated that because a resident of Yonkers, who was a Christian Scientist, had died 246

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without medical treatment the coroner was making an investigation. On the same day the newspapers of New York, Yonkers, and other places in the State contained in the aggregate hundreds of notices of deaths under licensed medical treatment; but up to the present, I have not heard that the coroners have taken steps to investigate any of these cases. Doubtless your readers will see the inconsistency. . . . Christian Scientists see no valid reason for subjecting them to abuse because of an occasional failure while multitudinous failures of materia medica are permitted to pass practically unnoticed. Furthermore, they predict that the time is not far distant when this inconsistency will be recognized and rectified by a justice loving public. (29 Apr. 1915) In this letter and others, too, Ross criticized the coroner more than the newspaper, though he did push the World to reconsider its own unbalanced treatment of Christian Science (13 June 1916). The aim of the Committee on Publication was to instruct the public and the newspaper. In letters to the bureau, Ross carefully explained Christian Science doctrine on matters such as suicide and “faith healing” (11 Jan. 1915). He was pushy but always polite. In one letter the World published, Ross congratulated the paper on a story that drew a clear distinction between Christian Science and a “faith cure.” “This was a very thoughtful thing for The World to do,” he wrote, “and I am sure it was deeply appreciated by all Christian Scientists who saw the item” (“Faith Cure”). The World declined to publish most of Ross’s corrections and letters to the editor, but the steady pressure had an impact. The newspaper did publish some of them and on occasion even handled them as press releases, writing them up as full-fledged stories, not just brief letters to the editor. In a story in 1915 headlined “‘Why Not Blame Doctors When Patients Die?’” the World gave Ross free rein to have his say: There are approximately 5,500 deaths by pneumonia in Greater New York in a single year under one form or another of medical treatment. If Coroners feel it is their duty to “investigate” occasional cases of failure where materia medica is not employed, why do they not act on the 5,500 failures that occur annually where materia medica is employed? (“Why Not Blame”) Perhaps more important, Ross insinuated Christian Science into the daily routines of World reporters and White himself. In the 1917 suicide story, for example, the reporter, Oscar Armes, told White that he had been especially careful to ascertain the facts of the matter, and to not exaggerate anything because he knew “how touchy the Christian Science crowd is” (14 May 1917). Some years later, when the Christian Science Committee on Publication apAccuracy or Fair Play?

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pointed a new director, White recalled how “pleasant and cordial” his long relationship with Ross had been, even when they disagreed (1 Dec. 1927; Nemeth, “Bellwether”). Robert Ross, then, was no ordinary newspaper reader. Like many readers, he was concerned about facts and accuracy, but he was more concerned about the cultural legitimacy of the group he represented. For him, the route to legitimacy ran through the columns of the daily newspaper. And readers like Robert Ross would become increasingly common and influential in the newspaper world over the course of the twentieth century.

4 After lambasting the World in the spring of 1916, Isaac Russell, the disgruntled newspaper reporter, got only more angry. When he heard that the American Magazine was planning a puff piece on the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, he wrote to the editor there to denounce the bureau as “a pure piece of bunk.” “Crooking the news” was a real problem, Russell said, but it was not what Ralph Pulitzer and Isaac White made it out to be. With an insider’s cynical insight, Russell explained the scam, as he saw it: Now there is a certain kind of crookedness that was innocent imposition—Winfield [sic] Conn. stories and the like—and the Ike White game could get them. No issue was involved particularly and it cost the paper little or nothing to flay reporters for developing a technique the city editors had taught them in a past day. Thus the Ike White Bunk Bureau flashed up in the pan and tried to unload on reporters the crimes of the newspaper offices themselves in faking for “color,” for “incident” and for “sob squad stuff.” All that was easy. It in no way affected the genuine issue of crooked news. (Letter) And what was the genuine issue of crooked news? For Russell, it was political and class bias: bias against labor, bias against peace radicals, bias against anyone who would dare to raise a voice against plutocracy. Russell rolled politics, economics, ideology, and professional standards into one big censorious bundle. The World refused to publish Russell’s letters. White found them inaccurate and therefore unprintable. “To publish your letter would be unfair to the reporter who wrote the article complained of,” White wrote in response to one of them (3 May 1916). Russell was not surprised. “Of course you will not publish my letter,” he replied. “I was well prepared of that in advance and so made other and very ample arrangements to give it publicity even wider than that which you yourself command” (5 May 1916).

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Did Ralph Pulitzer and Isaac White really believe that the chief problem of American journalism was factual inaccuracy? Did they imagine that shutting down L. T. Stone’s fake factory in Winstead, Connecticut, would save the World? They spoke as if they did. Their words evoke the kind of rough-andready epistemology that Michael Schudson has labeled “naïve empiricism”— that is, the belief that facts could speak for themselves, that facts alone could carry the journalistic load (Schudson, Discovering 121–22; Schudson, Good Citizen ch. 5). But if they ever truly believed in Father Pulitzer’s religion of “exact facts,” as son Ralph called it, they must have had some doubts after the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play got underway in 1913. From the beginning, accuracy and fair play proved to be vastly more complex than mere fakes and libels. Looking back, it seems quaint to hear Isaac White say that World managers nearly left off the phrase “and fair play” from the name of the bureau because it was redundant. As Russell and other readers knew, accuracy and fair play were often two very different things. But I am skeptical that these seasoned newspapermen were ever so naïve as they pretended to be. For them, it was a practical business strategy to turn public dissatisfaction with newspapers into something measurable and manageable: factual accuracy. In other words, it was not “naïve empiricism” but “strategic ritual,” to borrow another classic phrase from the history of journalistic method (Tuchman, “Objectivity”; Tuchman, Making News). As they preached the gospel of accuracy, the World managers surely understood that new economic, political, and cultural forces were growing and would pressure newspapers in far more subtle ways. The rising power of government propaganda and the ubiquity of corporate public relations are well-known chapters in the history of American journalism during the Progressive Era and after (Schudson, Discovering ch. 4; Lippmann ch. 24; Steele ch. 14). Less well known, but perhaps more important, is the history of interest group influence on journalism. These were the readers who mattered. For interest groups, accuracy claims could be useful tools for picking at the press, but they were instrumental only, and minor. In the culture wars, then and now, the goal was legitimacy, and the route to legitimacy ran through the media. To gain access to newspapers and magazines (and later to radio and television), groups made claims of fairness. The kind of interest group criticism and pressure that emerged in the early years of the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play would become the standard for a century to come. Through incessant argument and pressure, as well as the simple provision of information, the Christian Science Committee on Publication and similar groups nudged newspapers into a new ethic of journalistic objectivity, where objectivity meant fairness, balance, evenhandedness, and access—not mere factual accuracy (Schudson, Discovering ch. 4–5; Marzolf ch. 9; Mindich). For newspapers, as for every political and cultural institution in America, the twentieth century was the era of interest group organization (Cobb and Elder; Berry), and as the political scientist E. E. Schattschneider so nicely put

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it, “organization is the mobilization of bias” (69). If their purpose were to sidestep the difficult issue of fairness and to steer their readers’ attention toward the simpler problem of factual accuracy, then Pulitzer and White probably should have left “fair play” out of the name of their “bunk bureau,” for the main concern of journalism criticism and journalism politics in the twentieth century would never be accuracy but always fair play.

Notes 1. This essay is based on the records of the New York World’s Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play, founded by the World’s publisher, Ralph Pulitzer, in 1913. The early years, 1913 to 1917, have the most complete files, and those are the files I used. The bureau’s work seems to have fallen off during and after World War I; it ended entirely when the World was sold in 1931. The files of the Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play are in the New York World Papers, archived at Columbia University, New York. Unless otherwise noted, all letters and reports cited parenthetically are from this archive. For the early years, a complete bureau file consists of (1) a letter of complaint from a reader, usually addressed to the editor of the World or to the bureau’s director, Isaac White; (2) a clipping of the story in question; (3) a memo to White from the reporter or correspondent who wrote the story; (4) a copy of a letter from White to the complainant describing the resolution of the case; and (5) a brief summary report. Many of the files are incomplete. After World War I, most files consist only of the brief summary report. The World Papers are arranged in boxes roughly by date. The bureau records I consulted for this essay run from box 55 to box 61. Because nearly all the incoming letters were addressed to White or to the editor, I cite letters by author and date but not by recipient. Outgoing letters were essentially all from White, and I have cited them by his name. Reporters’ memos to the bureau are cited by their names and dates. The bureau’s summary reports on the cases are cited as “BAFP Report,” also by date. All of the citations to published World stories are based on clippings in the files. I list these stories separately in the references list. The bureau’s records also include copies of several annual reports, which I also list separately in the references. 2. Bureau staffers also sleuthed out fakes in rival papers. The World Papers have several folders marked “Hearst Papers.” 3. For the way pay policies shaped news-gathering in big-city papers, see Fedler, 66–69; Smythe. 4. It is worth noting that White rebuffed at least sixty-eight complaints from 1913 to 1915.

References Bentley, Arthur F. The Process of Government: A Study of Social Pressures. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1908. 250

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Berry, Jeffrey M. The Interest Group Society. 3rd ed. New York: Longman, 1997. Biennial Report: World’s Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play for Two Years Ending June 30, 1915. New York World Papers. Box 57. Blanchard, Frank LeRoy. “Community Service.” The Coming Newspaper. Ed. Merle Thorpe. New York: Holt, 1915. 205–22. Boylan, James. Pulitzer’s School: Columbia University’s School of Journalism, 1903–2003. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. “Calls Pastor Liar in Church Tumult over Gary Plan.” New York World, 10 Nov. 1915. New York World Papers. Box 58. Cobb, Roger W., and Charles D. Elder. Participation in American Politics: The Dynamics of Agenda-Building. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983. “Disjointed Snake Gets Together Again—Chase Says Head Whistled and Other Parts Came Back and Linked Themselves On.” New York World, 30 July 1916. New York World Papers. Box 59. Dorroh, Jennifer. “The Ombudsman Puzzle.” American Journalism Review, Feb.–Mar. 2005, 48–53. Ettema, James S., and Theodore L. Glasser. Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue. New York: Columbia University Press, 1998. “Faith Cure, Not Christian Science.” New York World, 29 Dec. 1915. New York World Papers. Box 57. Fedler, Fred. Lessons from the Past: Journalists’ Lives and Work, 1850–1950. Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 2000. “The First National Newspaper Conference.” Outlook, 17 Aug. 1912, 847. Gladden, Washington. “Tainted Journalism, Good and Bad.” The Coming Newspaper. Ed. Merle Thorpe. New York: Holt, 1915. 27–50. Haeselbarth, A. C. “World’s Bureau of Accuracy.” Editor and Publisher and Journalist, 15 Nov. 1913, 436. Holt, Hamilton. Commercialism and Journalism. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909. Irwin, Will. “The American Newspaper: Part IX—The Advertising Influence.” Collier’s, 20 May 1911, 15–16, 23–25. ———. “The American Newspaper: Part XIII—The New Era.” Collier’s, 8 July 1911, 15–16, 25. “Is an Honest Newspaper Possible?” Atlantic, Oct. 1908, 441. Keeley, James. Newspaper Work: An Address Delivered before the Students in the Course of Journalism at Notre Dame University, Nov. 26, 1912. n.p., n.d. ———. Speech to the Michigan Press Association. Galley proof [1915]. James Keeley Papers. Chicago Historical Society, Chicago. Folder 6. Lawson, Linda. Truth in Publishing: Federal Regulation of the Press’s Business Practices, 1880–1920. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993. Lee, James Melvin. “A Code of Ethics for Newspaper Men.” The Coming Newspaper. Ed. Merle Thorpe. New York: Holt, 1915. 171–87. Lippmann, Walter. Public Opinion. New York: Harcourt, Brace, [1922]. Manning, Paul. News and News Sources: A Critical Introduction. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2001. Marzolf, Marion Tuttle. Civilizing Voices: American Press Criticism, 1880–1950. New York: Longman, 1991. Accuracy or Fair Play?

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Mindich, David T. Z. Just the Facts: How “Objectivity” Came to Define American Journalism. New York: New York University Press, 1998. McGerr, Michael. A Fierce Discontent: The Rise and Fall of the Progressive Movement in America, 1870–1920. New York: Free Press, 2003. “Mrs. Guggenheim Scorned Pistol in Burglar’s Hand.” New York World, 16 Nov. 1915. New York World Papers. Box 58. Nemeth, Neil. “A Bellwether in Media Accountability: The Work of the New York World’s Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play.” Paper presented to the annual meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. Kansas City, Mo., 31 July 2003. ———. News Ombudsmen in North America: Assessing an Experiment in Social Responsibility. Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 2003. New York World Papers. Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Butler Library. Columbia University, New York. Nord, David Paul. Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001. Pulitzer, Ralph. The Profession of Journalism: Accuracy in the News. New York: World, 1912. “Report of the Legal Department for the Year Ending December 31, 1912.” Typescript. [1913]. New York World Papers. Box 54. “Report of the Legal Department for the Year Ending December 31, 1913.” Typescript. [1914]. New York World Papers. Box 55. “Report of the Legal Department for the Year Ending December 31, 1914.” Typescript. [1915]. New York World Papers. Box 57. Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. Rogers, James Edward. The American Newspaper. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1909. Russell, Isaac. Letter. American Magazine, 6 Nov. 1916. New York World Papers. Box 60. Schattschneider, E. E. The Semisovereign People: A Realist’s View of Democracy in America. Hinsdale, Ill.: Dryden, 1975. Schudson, Michael. Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers. New York: Basic Books, 1978. ———. The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998. ———. Sociology of News. New York: Norton, 2003. Scott, William R. Scientific Circulation Management for Newspapers. New York: Ronald, 1915. “Selected a Text for Her Suicide.” New York World, 7 May 1917. New York World Papers. Box 61. Sinclair, Upton. The Brass Check. Privately printed, 1919. Smythe, Ted Curtis. “The Reporter, 1880–1900: Working Conditions and Their Influence on the News.” Journalism History 7 (1980): 1–10. Steele, Ronald. Walter Lippmann and the American Century. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980. 252

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Thorpe, Merle. “The Coming Newspaper.” The Coming Newspaper. Ed. Merle Thorpe. New York: Holt, 1915. 1–16. Tuchman, Gaye. Making News: A Study in the Construction of Reality. New York: Free Press, 1978. ———. “Objectivity as Strategic Ritual: An Examination of Newsmen’s Notions of Objectivity.” American Journal of Sociology 77 (1971): 660–79. White, Isaac DeForest. Accuracy and Fair Play in the New Journalism. New York: World, 1913. Reprint of “Accuracy and Fair Play in the New Journalism.” New York World, 29 Dec. 1912, 1E. ———. “Appendix: Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play.” The Coming Newspaper. Ed. Merle Thorpe. New York: Holt, 1915. 321–23. “Why Not Blame Doctors When Patients Die?” New York World, 27 Dec. 1915. New York World Papers. Box 57. “Wonders Never Cease!” New York World, 26 Feb. 1916. New York World Papers. Box 60. World’s Bureau of Accuracy and Fair Play: First Report, July to Dec. 1913. New York World Papers. Box 55.

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Sentiment without Tears Uncle Tom’s Cabin as History in the 1890s BARBARA HOCHMAN

Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an unprecedented success when first published in 1852, but by the 1860s interest in the book had diminished; it was infrequently reprinted either during the war or the postwar years (Winship; Parfait). Stowe’s novel gained a new lease on life in the 1880s and especially the 1890s, however; new editions appeared, and there is good evidence for saying that the book was, once again, widely read.1 This essay explores the renewed appeal of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for commentators, editors, publishers, and other readers of this period. The essay also addresses two methodological issues: How can attention to the paratextual materials of individual editions (prefaces, introductions, illustrations) serve as a basis for general claims about the way a text was read and used at a particular historical moment? To what extent can we see the comments and editorial choices of literary professionals as evidence of culturally typical reading practices and as factors in shaping the responses of others?

Editions are no direct proof of reading habits; readers often resist the interpretive guidelines inscribed in textual accompaniments (as they often reject a text’s overt didactic or moral messages). Over the last twenty-five years, scholars from a variety of disciplines (history, literature, sociology) have analyzed historically specific acts of reading and effectively explored some of the gaps between a text’s manifest content and the diverse meanings readers have derived from it (Ginzburg; Radway; Long; Sicherman, “Reading Little Women”). As Roger Chartier suggests, “readers use infinite . . . subterfuges to . . . read between the lines, and to subvert the lessons imposed on them” (viii). Readers may reject, recast, or misunderstand not only guidelines for reading implicit in a literary text but also more explicit prescriptions formulated by teachers, reviewers, and writers of advice literature. Nonetheless, prescribed modes of reading are useful indicators of a cultural climate, and when set in diachronic perspective they reflect changes in the literary marketplace as well as shifts in social and interpretive conventions. In the 1880s and 1890s, a new consensus emerged among professional white readers about why and how Uncle Tom’s Cabin should be read. The reasons for paying attention to Stowe’s novel at the end of the nineteenth century were quite different from those given by commentators of the antebellum period. In 1852, the novel was widely understood to be an evangelical abolitionist text that represented slavery as a sin and enjoined every reader to look inward, to the state of his or her soul, as well as outward, to dangerous rifts in the nation’s moral and social fabric. By the 1880s, the institution of slavery had been a thing of the past for a generation. Yet despite official claims of peaceful reunion—“one nation, indivisible,” in the words of the Pledge of Allegiance, penned in 1892—sectional and racial conflict persisted. Discrimination increased in the North and racial violence in the South; lynchings reached an “all time peak” in 1892 (Fredrickson 273). Interest in Uncle Tom’s Cabin revived in this context. Reawakened attention to the novel was nurtured by fresh marketing strategies. Repackaging was essential, for while many elder statesmen, men of letters, and other readers fondly recalled the excitement with which they had first read the novel in the 1850s, the book did not have a similar appeal for men and women born during and after the war. As one edition noted, “the great emancipation question of a few decades ago” did not sustain “all the old interest” for men and women of the 1890s (Uncle Tom’s Cabin [UTC], Eaton and Mains xvii). Many commentators suggested that the present generation did not read the book “with the intensity of other days” (Knight 24–25; see McCray 100, 118). The somewhat uncomfortable sense that “the stir which the book made at its birth” was not palpable to contemporary readers (Knight 24–25) was a muted but recurrent refrain in numerous introductions and discussions of the book toward the end of the century. But if the novel did not elicit “all the old interest” it had once held for readers, what were the sources of the book’s renewed popularity? I suggest that a revised “protocol of reading” adapted the novel to the needs of an increasingly secular, white, primarily Northern, middle-class 256

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reading public that was learning to be suspicious of sentimental fiction, was no longer interested in social reform (Coontz), and was riddled by anxiety about racial tensions. Three recurrent prescriptions for reading the novel in the 1880s and 1890s repay consideration here: Readers were urged to see it as a historical artifact, an important reminder of the national past, but also as a historical agent, a book that had shaped significant events. These two emphases dovetailed with another: the injunction to consume Stowe’s novel “without torture and tears” (Knight 100). “Feeling right” now referred neither to faith nor to sentiment. The novel remained a “thrilling” tale, but it no longer required religious contemplation, self-criticism, or action on the reader’s part. Most of all, it now appeared to have no relevance to persistent social (especially racial) problems. In what follows I offer a brief historical overview within which I place the reemergence of Stowe’s novel as a popular book. I examine two failed arguments and one influential argument through which commentators of the 1890s made a case for the enduring value of the novel. Neither the idea of the book as a “classic” nor the idea of it as a “great purpose novel” had much success in restoring the book’s waning fortunes. The idea of its historical significance, however, gained growing attention toward the end of the century. In multiple contexts, Stowe’s novel was offered as evidence of the moral, social, and cultural progress of the United States as a nation. This strategy marked the Stowe display at the World’s Columbian Exposition (1893) as well as paratextual material for reprints of the period. Prefaces, introductions, and illustrations represent the novel as a trigger of the Civil War and an agent of emancipation. At the same time, these texts carefully avoid the suggestion that Stowe’s book might have implications for contemporary racial issues. An edition of the novel published by Appleton in 1898 deserves special attention. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, editor, former abolitionist, and (white) commander of a black unit during the Civil War, wrote the introduction to this edition. Higginson was one of the few men of letters to suggest that Stowe’s novel had begun some still unfinished business. Yet the Appleton edition, too, praises the great cultural work the book accomplished; its accompanying illustrations emphasize its place in an optimistic account not only of social and moral but also of technological improvements in American culture. African Americans themselves play a marginal role in this narrative.

Looking Backward: A New Context for Uncle Tom Public interest in the Civil War declined sharply after the end of hostilities: The photographer Matthew Brady spent a decade trying to persuade Congress to purchase his photos of the battlefield (Trachtenberg 77). Immediately after the war, slave culture and sectional strife were not popular subjects. Later, when Reconstruction ended, hopes for social stability in both the North and the Sentiment without Tears

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South were accompanied by a desire to look forward, not back. After Reconstruction, developments in African American education and free enterprise in the “New South” generated guarded optimism among editors, educators, and former abolitionists (McPherson 107–20; Fredrickson; Blight). Before long, however, this optimism dissipated, replaced either by regret for a vanished way of life or by heightened concern that the legacy of slavery and the Civil War might be long-lasting racial and sectional discord (Blight; Silber). In the course of the 1880s and 1890s, unanswered questions about the future of race relations in the United States sparked curiosity about the prewar past. As interest in the peculiar institution and the war itself began to revive, collections of battlefield photographs were sold in a variety of formats, accompanied by a rhetoric of heroism, sacrifice, and national unity. In November 1887, the Century began publishing a popular series entitled “Battles and Leaders of the Civil War.” The popularity of the Uncle Remus tales, romantic plantation novels, and the conjure tales of Charles Chesnutt attests to renewed fascination with the antebellum South. Photographers, artists, and correspondents went South in the mid-1880s, seeking to capture an image of rural black culture before all traces of slavery had vanished. Editors of pictorial weeklies and illustrated monthlies perceived (and cultivated) a growing demand for glimpses of the South—a world that “amounted to terra incognita for most northern readers” (Brown 115). The institution of slavery had disappeared, but it had shaped Southern life, and its vestiges could still be recaptured in words and pictures. In 1887, the Kentucky writer James Lane Allen reported on his visit to a Southern “negro town,” stressing the importance of scanning this “landscape of the past . . . before it grows remoter and is finally hidden by the mists of forgetfulness” (854). Journalistic accounts such as Allen’s often included visual accompaniments, in this case by E. W. Kemble, illustrator of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) and, later, of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1891). Allen’s article offered stereotypical views of barefoot black children and perpetuated time-honored icons labeled “the Mammy” or “the Cook.” Images of elderly black women tending white children or of a white woman at the bedside of a frail black one graphically suggest the passing of a population characterized by devotion, represented here as reciprocal. Like much fiction of the period, such accounts render a lost world, where African Americans “remain content with their inferiority” and have no higher ambitions (867). Allen’s purported account of present-day Southern reality is entitled “Mrs. Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’ at Home in Kentucky.” Allen (or the editors) apparently assumed that this title would speak for itself, as if “Mrs. Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’ ” were an appropriate generic label for all African Americans. In relying on this reductive association, Allen, like other readers and writers of the period, adapted Stowe’s text to specific contemporary needs and transformed its cultural function. Tom became the epitome of the loyal servant, Aunt Chloe the “despot in the kitchen” (862), Mrs. Shelby the exemplary mistress, all in an idealized rendering of Southern ways. In the name of history, providing an 258

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account of the past, Allen incorporated Stowe’s imaginary figures into a story of race relations for the present and implicitly the future. Allen thus anticipated a reading strategy that came to dominate discussions and editions of Stowe’s novel in the 1890s. Insofar as Uncle Tom’s Cabin could be read as a guide to the enduring simplicity, ready affection, and natural devotion of African Americans, it offered a reassuring story to Southern as well as Northern readers. As what one edition called “a homely plantation story” (UTC, Eaton and Mains vii), Stowe’s novel could even be read as an image of a gracious world, unfortunately lost—a perspective that might appeal particularly to Southern readers. Yet most new editions of this period were published in the North. The strategies for packaging, marketing, and illustrating the novel were geared primarily to the lucrative Northeastern and the growing Western market.

Framing Reprints for the 1880s: Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a Classic In 1893, Stowe’s novel entered the public domain. In 1896, Stowe’s eighty-fifth birthday was widely publicized; her death soon followed. These events provided the impetus for retrospectives as well as reprints of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. During the 1880s, Northern publishers and editors had begun to envision fresh opportunities for profit in Stowe’s book. Anticipating the expiration of copyright, they had asked themselves how to make the novel attractive to a new generation of readers. By 1890, the status of fiction as a genre had risen considerably in American literary culture. While antebellum discussions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had avoided the word “fiction” and had often used religious terminology in praising the book’s holy mission, its narrative was emphatically a secular fictional work in editions and discussions of the 1890s. In the antebellum period, Stowe’s novel had often been advertised with sermons; now it was advertised with other novels. At the end of the century, it was a “remarkable piece of fiction,” whose initial impact was “almost beyond precedent in the history of fiction” (UTC, Eaton and Mains ix). Fiction had become not only a respectable genre but one with a past worthy of consideration. “Masterpiece” and “novel” were no longer contradictory terms. Indeed, in commemorative articles and in prefatory material for new editions, Uncle Tom’s Cabin had become a “classic.”2 But the mantle of literary greatness did not rest easily on Stowe’s novel. For one thing, fiction as a genre and American fiction in particular continued to suffer from what Harold Bloom has called belatedness. When James Russell Lowell celebrated “Five Indispensable Authors” in 1896, the only “indispensable” novelist in the group was Cervantes. Even advocates of Uncle Tom’s Cabin tended to assume a generic hierarchy in which fiction was positioned beneath older, more distinguished literary forms. Although Stowe’s novel was Sentiment without Tears

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now understood to have been popular in the 1850s precisely because it was fiction (“its power as a novel . . . carried it . . . through the land,” as the Art Memorial edition put it [UTC, Art 29]), its very popularity testified to its “lowly” origins. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin ranks among the world’s wonderful books. Like Robinson Crusoe and the Pilgrim’s Progress it stands out among myriads of works of infinitely higher aim and ambition” (UTC, Eaton and Mains xvii). Terms such as “wonderful” or “marvelous” (Knight 22, 26, 94) identified Stowe’s novel as a fictional text characterized not by the high seriousness deemed appropriate to works of art but by its capacity to engage and divert a reader, often a woman or a child.3 By the 1890s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (like Robinson Crusoe and Pilgrim’s Progress) was widely read as a children’s book and frequently republished as such.4 Young people, especially girls, were often taken as a standard for judging the appropriateness (if not the ultimate value) of literature. As William Dean Howells famously put it, the novel in America was partly intended “for young girls to read” (149–50). Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with its domestic and relational emphasis, its piety, and its moral rigor, met the standard for entry into the white middle-class parlor. But in the 1880s and 1890s, some commentators, especially advocates of “realism,” attacked the young girl—“the iron Madonna”—as an inadequate gauge of literary value, indeed as a measure of all that was wrong with American literature (Boyeson 615). Thus, while the identification of Stowe’s novel with children and young women helped promote the image of the book as wholesome reading matter, it also preserved its inferior status. Efforts to propel it into the emerging canon of literary masterworks labored under a considerable handicap. Toward the turn of the century, proponents of Stowe’s novel tried to bolster their case by associating it with older literary forms and other acknowledged “classics,” ancient and modern. In 1896, Richard Burton, writing in the Century, called Uncle Tom’s Cabin the “epic of the slave” (699). The same year, Charles Dudley Warner linked Stowe with Homer, Cervantes, and Turgenieff (484, 487). Yet the very designation “classic” risked associating Stowe’s novel with the ossified or the dead. “Soon I will become a classic,” one writer tells another in a 1901 Wharton story: “Bound in sets and kept on the top shelf . . . brrr, doesn’t that sound freezing?” (113). Classics occupied a tenuous position in literary culture. In the words of one typical turn-of-the-century editorial, “Homer, Virgil, Dante, Shakespeare and Milton are shelved classics”— respected from a safe distance, rather than read (“Editor’s Study” 103). The most enthusiastic defenders of Stowe’s novel were surviving literary figures of her generation. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a “very great novel . . . still perhaps our chief fiction,” William Dean Howells declared in 1895 (qtd. in Moers [vii]). A year later Warner suggested that Stowe’s novel fulfilled “the one indispensable requisite of a great work of imaginative fiction. . . . It appeal[s] to universal human nature in all races and situations and climates” (487). For Warner and others, the novel was great because it was timeless; in the words of Walter Besant, it attracts “every age and all ages” (qtd. in Knight 26). 260

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The emphasis on universality and timelessness had considerable appeal in a society torn by class and racial conflict. If, as Lowell suggested, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a literary masterpiece despite Stowe’s social and moral purpose, not because of it (Burton 699), the book could be read without reference to America’s social problems. But Stowe’s moral and political aims were difficult to ignore. Thus some critics insisted that what accounted for the novel’s significance was not its “universality” but its “purposiveness.”

Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a “Purpose Novel” Contemporary literary and critical voices as varied as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Frank Norris, and Grant Allen took ethical and social “purposiveness” as a crucial component of literary value. In “Novels without a Purpose,” an article published in the North American Review and reprinted in Current Literature, Allen wrote: “All the most successful novels of the last half-century from Uncle Tom’s Cabin to Jude the Obscure, have been novels with a purpose.” Suggesting that even “classics” could be purposive, Allen claimed that the three “great epics of the world,” the Aeneid, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost, must all “plead . . . guilty to purposiveness”; he concluded that “the novel without a purpose stands condemned . . . to . . . the infancy of humanity.” The idea of purposiveness as a value in fiction had many proponents at the turn of the century and deep roots in American culture. The idea of active and purposeful reading had long served as an antidote to anxieties about fictionreading as rooted in idleness; some commentators, educators, and men of letters still accused fiction of encouraging passivity, foolishness, and a distorted sense of reality.5 Purposive reading was a gendered concept identified with manliness, seriousness, maturity, and success. Toward the end of the century, the idea of “purposive” literature gained additional resonance: The “novel with a purpose” was celebrated not only as a higher kind of fiction but also as an antidote to the “poor little formula of ‘Art for art’s Sake’ ” (Grant Allen). Yet the idea of Stowe’s novel as a “purpose novel” was difficult to reconcile with the idea of it as a classic. To read it for its “purposiveness” was to emphasize both its political commitments and its critical perspective on American society. The book’s direct attack on the peculiar institution subverted its claim to timelessness. Insofar as it critiqued a social evil in a particular historical period, the novel did not transcend its own cultural moment. But the emerging canon of great literature was heavily weighted toward the universal and “transcendent.” As a “great book,” the novel thus remained an anomaly. Consideration of Stowe’s purposiveness, moreover, necessarily drew attention to the problem of race, a problem that seemed all the more intractable as the institution of slavery receded into the past. Although racial issues loomed large in society, they were widely neglected in literary discourse. As Richard Ohmann notes, popular journals avoided the subject of race altogether: “race Sentiment without Tears

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was not exactly unmentionable, and black people were not literally invisible; but race—what was elsewhere called ‘the Negro problem’—made no appearance as a constituted issue” (255–56). In keeping with this strategy, new editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin assiduously avoided the implication that there might be a connection between the history of slavery and the problem of race at the turn of the century. But the idea of Stowe’s novel as a “great purpose novel” made it especially difficult to keep this issue out of the field of vision. Several tactics gradually emerged for promoting the novel without raising the question of contemporary race relations. Stowe’s “purpose” and even the novel’s “outdatedness” could be turned to good account with a subtle shift of emphasis. If the novel’s thematic implications were restricted to the American past, the discussion could be prevented from veering too close to volatile contemporary issues. As publishers and editors of the 1890s sought additional grounds for claiming the cultural significance of Stowe’s novel, they hit on the idea of history.

The Novel as Historical Document: Uncle Tom’s Cabin without Race The idea that Uncle Tom’s Cabin played an important role in the history of the United States provided a way around many of the problems posed by the novel’s uneasy position in literary culture.6 When Houghton Mifflin began reissuing the novel in the 1880s and 1890s, paratextual material included in the book was designed to reflect its literary, scholarly, and especially historical importance.7 The redefinition of it as a historical document gave it new stature in the age of American realism and the “culture of professionalism.” The alliance with history suggested not only objectivity, truth, and professional authority but also American progress. Unlike the idea of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a “marvelous,” even “purposive” novel, the idea of its historical importance gave it amplitude. It had accomplished significant cultural work and deserved attention precisely for that reason: “Changes Wrought by One Book” one headline of 1911 proclaimed, marking the centenary of Stowe’s birth. During the 1890s, the historical significance of the novel became the most popular strategy for promoting it. Anticipating that a flood of reprints would follow the expiration of copyright in 1893, Houghton Mifflin put out a number of new editions at the end of the 1880s and in the early 1890s, hoping to “fill as many market niches as possible” (Winship 330). When the novel entered the public domain, other publishers were ready with new editions of their own. Reprints of Stowe’s novel in this period included an array of paratextual materials that attributed the book’s national and international stature to its historical function. Introductions and other commentaries proclaimed Stowe’s novel an event in American history and a milestone in the irresistible march of American progress. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the book that “first brought the 262

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iniquity of slavery prominently before the people of the North” and “one of the great forces that led to the Civil War” (UTC, Art 24–25). It was a novel that helped “chang[e] the Constitution of the United States” (Burton 699). Abraham Lincoln’s purported words on meeting Harriet Beecher Stowe— “So you’re the little lady who started this great war”—were widely quoted at the end of the century.8 Some editions printed the Emancipation Proclamation as part of the prefatory matter (UTC, Art). The widely shared view of Stowe’s novel as a work of and for the past had multiple advantages. By using it to celebrate cultural achievements already accomplished, editions of this period distanced it from racial anxieties of the 1880s and 1890s. If its original publication had been “an event of national importance” and had helped slavery become “only a historic thing” in a nation subsequently characterized by “peace and complete reunion” (Beadle 286–87), then Stowe’s novel could be read without reference to the racial tensions of the present. The emphasis on historical distance diverted attention from contemporary racial issues and neatly transformed the liability of datedness into an asset; it also averted the need to address questions of literary form. Downplaying the aesthetic issue was important, because sentiment was no longer attractive (at least to literary commentators).9 The “technical” and “artistic” defects of Uncle Tom’s Cabin were often noted (Beadle 287; De Forest 28; McCray 98; Wendell 354), but they could be regarded with tolerance when positioned within a historical narrative that implied that contemporary literature had risen above such flaws. Both the aesthetic and the social failings of an earlier period lost their edge when the long view was taken. Moreover, the responses typically noted by antebellum (Northern) readers of Uncle Tom’s Cabin—pain, sympathy, outrage, anger—were no longer considered appropriate or desirable. The framing of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the Stowe exhibit at the Columbian Exposition is illuminating in this context. The Harriet Beecher Stowe display was the centerpiece of the Connecticut Women’s Exhibit in the library of the Woman’s Building. Describing the Stowe display in a report on the work of Connecticut women at the fair, Kate Brannon Knight, president of the Board of Lady Managers of the World’s Fair, asserts “Mrs. Stowe’s unique place in literature” (94) and emphasizes the role of Stowe’s novel in the history of America as a nation. In the bookcase at the World’s Fair, as elsewhere throughout the 1890s, the novel was employed to support an optimistic narrative of literary and social achievements in U.S. culture. The exhibit reflects a growing consensus about how to read Stowe’s novel. The collection of books in the Stowe display occupied a bookcase of mahogany and glass (Knight 93). The exhibit also included an early portrait of the author, a marble bust of her on a pedestal, and a “beautiful silver inkstand” (see fig. 1) representing “two slaves freed from their shackles” (93–94). All of these artifacts created a decorous museum-like setting for the contemplation of precious objects from the past. The image of Uncle Tom’s Cabin as both historical artifact and historical agent gave it an important place in the master-narrative of the fair—a success story that positioned the United States Sentiment without Tears

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on the top rung of the evolutionary ladder of nations.10 Stowe’s novel had helped raise the level of American literature; it also reflected America’s moral and social maturity. Like new editions of the period, the Stowe exhibit emphasized the novel’s role in the emergence of the United States as a virtuous and internationally respected nation. The Stowe display presented her novel as a text that faithfully exposed the social fault lines of a bygone era. According to this narrative, things had significantly changed for the better since her day. She had depicted the antebellum U.S. as a time of injustice and discord; commentators emphasized that this experience was alien to contemporary Americans. A sketch of her, published in 1889, claims that contemporary readers in the peaceful, reunified United States would find it difficult even to comprehend the tendentiousness of her work. Underscoring the distance between the antebellum and the postwar nation, the article notes that her “intellect reached its maturity in an age of most furious controversy. . . . Slavery and temperance, the divine Unity or Trinity, grace, free will and predestination, were debated with a heat and bitterness to which this generation is happily a stranger” (Beadle 285; see McCray 100). “Now the war is over,” Knight wrote in her report on the Stowe display, and “slavery is a thing of the past; slave-pens, blood-hounds, whips, and slave coffles are only bad dreams of the night; and now the humane reader can afford to read ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ without an expenditure of torture and tears” (100). Dismissed as a “bad dream of the night,” slavery itself might never have

Figure 1. “Mrs. Stowe’s silver inkstand.” From History of the Work of Connecticut Women at the World’s Columbian Exposition by Kate Brannon Knight, 1898. (General Research Division; The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) 264

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existed. The fact of emancipation took center stage in the narrative of progress foregrounded by the Stowe exhibit, and by the fair generally. Although the end of slavery was not represented in Uncle Tom’s Cabin itself, this triumphant event was regularly privileged in discussions of the novel. Lincoln’s description of Stowe as having “started” the Civil War may be apocryphal, but serious historians of the period made similar claims. In the 1880s and 1890s, history books credited Stowe’s novel with a significant influence on events (Wilson 519; Eggleston 296; Schouler 247; Rhodes 284–85). The moment of emancipation became a metonymy for the important role of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in U.S. culture. Emphasis on this moment concertedly ignored any action taken by African Americans themselves and reinforced popular assumptions about black people’s childlike dependence. Within the Stowe exhibit, the idea that her novel had helped put an end to slavery was summed up visually by the broken chains on the silver inkstand, where a white man is represented as savior and hero, breaking the shackles of a slave. The slave is immobilized in a posture of submission or prayer; a second slave stands in the background, hands folded on his breast. The role of African Americans had been radically circumscribed at the fair itself. Despite “Colored People’s Day,” African Americans were denied the opportunity to frame exhibits of their own. Ida B. Wells published a stinging commentary in a pamphlet entitled The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the Columbian Exposition; she also refused to participate in the fair (Rydell 145–50). Frederick Douglass attended but gave a speech entitled “The Race Problem in America.” The tensions surrounding the question of African American participation in the Exposition reflected the growing conflict about African Americans’ control over their own future. White Americans still held the purse strings of black institutions, dominated the boards of trustees, established the curriculum, set the goals, and framed the images that represented African American progress to both black and white America. In this context, it is unsurprising that the Stowe exhibit should have been one of the few displays within the White City to acknowledge the existence of African Americans. Yet by celebrating Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a great book that had helped to solve the nation’s former problems, the exhibit also diverted attention from racial issues of the present. Framing Stowe’s novel as an agent in freeing the slaves and stopping the narrative there elided not only African American agency but also the problematic postwar history of the South, as well as many unresolved, ongoing questions about the future of African Americans. The exhibit minimized uncertainty about how the novel was to be read in the 1890s.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin without Tears Stowe’s narrative itself—plot, characters, dialogue, imagery—was not visible in the exhibit. This absence served a revised protocol of reading for the novel Sentiment without Tears

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that is even more apparent in paratextual materials of new editions. It was not now expected to elicit the intense, emotional, contemplative mode of reading prescribed by Stowe and embraced by many of her first readers. Instead, readers were encouraged to maintain the decorum of historical distance and experience a feeling of cultural pride when reading Stowe’s novel. In the age of “realism,” tears were no longer a sign of either literary or political right-mindedness. Realism affirmed the elevated taste of the reader and eschewed both narrative strategies and reading practices identified with sentiment. In a typical formulation of the period, the introduction to the “Art and Memorial” edition of the novel notes: since it was written a new generation has grown up and the state of affairs to which it refers has long since passed away. . . . It can be read today with as deep enjoyment of its thrilling story and as absorbing interest in its exciting subject, as in the days when all the world went wild over the sorrows of Uncle Tom and wept at the death of the saintlike Eva. (10) Weeping over a novel in the 1890s marked both reader and text as lacking sophistication. America of this period was eager to forget the passions once stirred by Uncle Tom’s Cabin, along with the divisiveness of an underground railroad and the outrage of whips, shackles, and auction blocks. Eliding the narrative of Uncle Tom’s Cabin from the Stowe display was not difficult: The display was no hands-on exhibit, not a library to be used; it was a memorial to Harriet Beecher Stowe and her books. But the reprints of Uncle Tom’s Cabin that proliferated in the course of the 1890s presented a more difficult challenge. Editors and commentators were eager to celebrate the novel but fearful of reopening a Pandora’s box of painful memories by drawing attention to brutalized or martyred slaves, families separated, women raped, and children bought and sold. How could Stowe’s narrative be rewritten in editions presumably published to be read? The story could not be elided on the printed page. But introductions and other prefatory material could attempt to reshape it; aided by the “pictorial turn” in literary culture, illustrations could upstage it.11 A close look at one late nineteenth-century edition will suffice to exemplify this dynamic.

Paratextual Recasting: The Appleton Edition In the Appleton edition of 1898, paratextual materials frame Uncle Tom’s Cabin as a reassuring cultural narrative for white readers of the period. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who wrote the introduction to this edition, as mentioned earlier, was one of the few commentators to suggest that Stowe’s novel had begun some still unfinished business: “The book will always keep before 266

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us the sorrows of a greatly injured race,” Higginson wrote, “and will always create sympathy for the brave effort that is being made by that race to raise itself. It must still be many years, from this point of view, before the mission of ‘Uncle Tom’ is ended” (xiv). Despite this closing caveat, however, Higginson’s “Critical and Biographical Introduction” presented Stowe’s novel in a characteristic way: as a work that had served a great cause in American society. Higginson’s main emphasis was fully in line with the practice of reading the novel as evidence of social progress and a ground of cultural self-congratulation: “The time is past, fortunately, when ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ need be read in any sectional spirit or as anything but a thrilling delineation of a mighty wrong, whose responsibility was shared by a whole nation and for which the whole nation paid the bitter penalty” (xiii–xiv). The Appleton edition, like others of the period, celebrates Uncle Tom’s Cabin as one of “the world’s great books” (the series title), primarily because it was an agent of social change. Illustrations and their captions provide a scholarly and historical aura for the novel and play a major role in this framing. The Appleton edition foregrounds a selection of illustrations entitled “Famous and Unique Manuscript and Book Illustrations: A series of fac-similes, showing the development of manuscript and book illustrating during four thousand years” (title page). This definition of the visual accompaniments to the novel offered a diachronic perspective that placed it in an evolving literary and pictorial tradition. The first visual image, “Anne of Brittany, and Her Patron Saints,” was a “miniature from a book of ‘Hours,’ painted toward the end of the fifteenth century.” It showed Saint Anne with her hands pressed together in prayer over what appears to be an open book (fig. 2). Two of the three patron saints in the background seem to be contemplating the volume as well. On the face of it, this illustration is an odd choice for an accompaniment to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Yet insofar as the image of Saint Anne foregrounds both piety and literacy, it links Stowe’s novel and its reading to the holy book and holy purposes generally. It thus engages some of the text’s central themes and reproduces antebellum marketing strategies, which, as noted, often stressed the book’s religious goals and the author’s divine inspiration. Yet Stowe’s evangelical fervor, like her political and didactic aims, made the novel seem dated to many readers of the 1890s. “The theological system under which [Stowe] was trained” required almost as much explanation to new readers as the peculiar institution itself.12 The image of Saint Anne and the Bible draws attention to the religious function of literacy, but it places the scene of reading at a considerable remove from U.S. culture. It distances the act of reading still further from the theme of black literacy, a significant issue within Stowe’s text and one that early illustrators of the novel singled out for attention (Hochman, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”). Illustrators of the 1850s regularly depicted Tom with his Bible, George Shelby teaching Tom to write, Eva and Tom writing a letter to Chloe, Eva teaching Mammy to read, and George Harris with his bookshelves in Canada. By Sentiment without Tears

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Figure 2. “Anne of Brittany, and Her Patron Saints. Miniature from a book of ‘Hours,’ painted toward the end of the fifteenth century.” Frontispiece from the Appleton edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (General Research Division. The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations) contrast, the Appleton edition represents reading and writing as the prerogative of saints, authors, and editors—not African Americans. The image of Saint Anne is aligned not with Stowe’s thematics of reading and the American social context, but rather with “four thousand years” of manuscript and book illustrating. This perspective emphasizes both literary tradition and technology. Through its focus on the history of book illustration, the Appleton edition (like the Stowe display at the World’s Fair and other paratextual materials of the 1890s) presents Stowe’s novel as a historical artifact in a continuing tale of Western, especially American, achievement. The second visual accompaniment to the Appleton edition is an image of Eliza stopping at Uncle Tom’s cabin before fleeing the Shelby plantation. This illustration was designed by Hammatt Billings, the abolitionist illustrator of the first edition; like the other illustrations in that edition, the image of Eliza singles out a significant moment of Stowe’s plot, one that suggests slaves are capable of action, moral responsibility, and human relations. As reproduced in 1898, however, this image subordinates a dramatic moment of the tale to an emphasis on the novel’s contribution to the development of a literary mode. Here the initial caption (“Eliza Tells Uncle Tom He Is Sold”) is only the pre268

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lude to a further explanation: “Photogravure for a drawing in the first illustrated edition of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ showing the style of book illustration in 1852.” The most popular early American illustrator of Uncle Tom’s Cabin thus becomes (like Stowe) the focus of a retrospective narrative. Historical, aesthetic, and technological developments legitimize renewed attention to the novel. By providing a backward glance at early editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the caption for the image of Eliza suggests that the art of book illustration has steadily improved, not only since the fifteenth century but over the preceding fifty years. This, too, was a common emphasis in editions of the period. As stated in the introduction to the “Art and Memorial” edition of 1897, “When ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ was originally published, the modern method of illustration was unknown, and only crude and old-fashioned woodcuts were available. . . . It is to [the] developed tastes [of the new generation] that the publishers have catered” (11). Reprints of the novel in the 1890s were regularly justified not only by the story of moral and political success in American society but also by an emphasis on improvement in the taste of the reading public and the technology of printing and book design. The Appleton edition is governed by a concept of the past largely designed to foreground achievements of the present. Such images as “The Levee at Baton Rouge” and “The Planter’s Home” do not evoke specific characters or events in Stowe’s narrative. Rather, they frame the “Old South” as a geographical space and a historical era that deserve the attention of contemporary readers rightly curious about the national past. Three additional illustrations—two portraits of Harriet Beecher Stowe and a picture of “The House in Brunswick Maine Where ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ Was Written”—create a memorial perspective on the author and the book. Stowe’s narrative itself is elided. If we look only at the visual accompaniments and their captions, we encounter neither racial conflict nor sentiment. Attention is directed away from events and characters. Emotional responses, like racial or political divisions, are deflected. Four images in the Appleton edition are labeled engravings based on photographs. The reference to photography in the captions (“Photogravure from a photograph”) asserts the reality of the represented subject or object. Toward the end of the century, photography was increasingly identified with objectivity as well as technological expertise. Roland Barthes notes that photographs are often “taken as the pure and simple denotation of reality,” as if reading photographs requires no interpretive code (28).13 Academic scholars of the last half century have developed a heightened awareness of photographs as texts that frame and interpret their materials. But when photographic practices were in an early stage of development, the excitement of the new art derived partly from its claim to scientific neutrality, a way of transcending the merely personal vision. The inclusion of photographs in editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin lent the authority of technology, science, and reality to the novel Henry James had called Stowe’s “wonderful leaping fish.” Taken together, the illustrations in the Appleton edition present the novel not as a gripping tale, a text inspired by Sentiment without Tears

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God, or a narrative with relevance to contemporary social issues, but rather as a book that provides a reliably documented historical perspective on a famous author, on an influential literary work, on the antebellum South, and on the technology of book illustration.

Serving and Resisting Nostalgia at the Turn of the Century As Jim Crow laws proliferated, editions of the 1890s often showcased images that offered white readers reassuring messages about African Americans, such as black field workers with hoes and baskets of cotton, or “Ophelia Shows Topsy How to Make a Bed” (fig. 3).

Figure 3. “Ophelia Shows Topsy How to Make a Bed.” Full-page illustration from the Art Memorial edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. (Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University)

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This moment of Stowe’s novel, never illustrated in the 1850s, promises that with proper training a black American girl will make a “fine little maid” (Boylan 94). The image foregrounds docility, subordination, and service, as if these were the qualities enduringly appropriate to African Americans in the United States. Many illustrations in editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin during the 1890s implied that black people could never acquire the skills that seemed the birthright of white U.S. citizens. New paratextual materials for the novel suggested that the natural and proper role of African Americans was obedience and loyalty to white authority. Children’s editions particularly emphasize Uncle Tom’s inordinate willingness to die for his master (Boylan 10, 23, 62, 65, 100); Topsy’s comic function dramatically overshadows every other aspect of her story. Thus editions of the period offered a reassuring message to white readers who might be troubled by racial anxieties. But by promoting white complacency and prescribing service and entertainment as the inevitable roles for people of color, new editions also heightened the book’s racist potential. That potential would come to the fore when influential black voices were increasingly raised against Stowe in the course of the twentieth century. It is beyond the scope of this essay to explore the way specific groups of nineteenth-century readers (women, children, black readers, working-class men) responded to the protocol of reading for Uncle Tom’s Cabin inscribed in paratextual materials. Undoubtedly, the responses of late nineteenthcentury readers were as varied as those of antebellum readers—and often at odds with pronouncements by literary professionals. In James Weldon Johnson’s fictionalized Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, Johnson (born 1871) reads Stowe’s novel as a child “with feverish intensity”; Johnson’s narrator asserts Stowe’s book “opened my eyes as to who and what I was and what my country considered me” (28–29). According to Marianne Noble, many late nineteenth-century readers read against the grain in a very different way: Freud and Krafft-Ebing reported that its scenes of whipping “stimulated masochistic erotic desires” in their patients (126). Some modes of reading against the grain remain idiosyncratic, of course; others gradually become part of a new consensus. By the end of the twentieth century, few proclaimed Uncle Tom’s Cabin a book that had helped to solve the nation’s problems. During the last fifty years, African American and feminist scholars have helped frame new editions.14 Stowe’s representation of race and her use of sentiment have become objects of analysis rather than complications to be glossed over. Some editions still present the novel as an important historical agent, but optimism about social progress has faded, and uncertainty has deepened—not only about the relation of literature to society but also about what counts as literary value. New editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, like editions of the 1890s, will continue to tell us much about the society for which they have been prepared. It is all a question of how we read.

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Acknowledgment Research for this essay was conducted with the generous help of a National Endowment for the Humanities Fellowship for University Teachers and an Israel Science Foundation grant.

Notes 1. When readers of the Literary News sent in their nominations for “the Ten Best Novels” early in the 1880s, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of only two American novels on the list, the other one being The Scarlet Letter (Penn 45; see also Rhodes 284n2). Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared on numerous lists of “recommended reading.” Winship confirms that it had “steady popular appeal” in the 1880s and 1890s (326). 2. Jay Martin notes that “following the decline of instruction in Latin and Greek, Dickens, Cooper, Scott and their peers came to be known as ‘classics’” (19). See also Hart 183. Uncle Tom’s Cabin became “a classic wherever the English Language is spoken” (UTC, Art 10). See Beadle 286; Wendell 354. 3. “Wonderful” and “marvelous” were shorthand for “fiction” at a time when the genre remained culturally suspect. Like the editor of the Eaton and Mains edition, McCray refers to Stowe’s novel as a “wonderful story” while acknowledging its precariousness as a “work of art” (98). 4. “No tenement baby should be without its ‘Mother Goose,’ and, a little later, its ‘Little Women,’ ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin,’ ‘Robinson Crusoe,’ and all the other precious childhood favorites,” Dorothy Richardson wrote in 1905 (qtd. in Brodhead 106). Of course, Uncle Tom’s Cabin was no “precious childhood favorite” in the South. Gossett cites a Louisiana writer who claimed in 1888 that Stowe’s “hideous, black, dragonlike book . . . hovered on the horizon of every Southern child” (345). Theodore Dreiser, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Agnes Reppelier, James Weldon Johnson, and James Baldwin, among others, recall reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin as children. 5. Late nineteenth-century advice literature regularly recommends purposiveness in reading. As Charles Richardson puts it, “Every book that we take up without a purpose . . . is an opportunity lost of taking up a book with a purpose” (35). On anxieties about nineteenth-century reading and idleness see Kerber 233–63; Davidson; Sicherman, “Reading.” 6. Portions of this section first appeared in my “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” 7. In his preface to The Virginian, Wister uses Uncle Tom’s Cabin to exemplify a “historical” novel “which presents faithfully a day and generation” (ix). “Recommended” reading lists often categorized Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “historical” fiction. But many commentators emphasized the book’s role in shaping (not merely representing) historical events. 8. Cited in Fields 181; see Gossett 344. This citation has had a long life. See Sandburg 385; Hedrick vii; the back cover of the Oxford World’s Classic edition (UTC 1998). 9. Commentators defined realism as a sophisticated “high” taste, but historical romances remained popular. On the snob appeal of realism see Glazener; Barrish 16–47. On the appeal of popular romances in the same period, see Hart; Hochman, Getting at the Author. 272

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10. For perspectives on the ideology informing the fair, see Rydell; Harris; Demosh. 11. On the “pictorial turn,” see Mitchell 11–13. For Mitchell this turn is a recent phenomenon, but it also seems eminently applicable to the late nineteenth-century explosion of images in books, in magazines, and throughout the press. 12. “Biographical Sketch” (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1896 edition xi). Knight’s celebration of Stowe praises her “unsectarian Christianity” (105). 13. Mitchell notes that it is as if “in cognitive terms . . . the principle connotation or ‘coded’ implication [of photography] is that it is pure denotation, without a code” (285). 14. African Americans include Langston Hughes, Darryl Pinckney, and, most recently, Henry Louis Gates; feminist scholars include Ann Douglas, Elizabeth Ammons, and Jean Fagin Yellin.

References Allen, Grant. “Novels without a Purpose.” Current Literature: A Magazine of Record and Review 20 (July–Dec. 1896): 408. Allen, James Lane. “Mrs. Stowe’s ‘Uncle Tom’ at Home in Kentucky.” Century 34 (Oct. 1887): 852–67. Barrish, Philip. American Literary Realism, Critical Theory and Intellectual Prestige. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Barthes, Roland. Image, Music, Text. Trans. Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977. Beadle, J. H. “Harriet Beecher Stowe.” Literature: An Illustrated Weekly Magazine, 16 Feb. 1889, 285–88. Blight, David. The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2001. Boyeson, Hjalmar Hjorth. “Why We Have No Great Novelists.” Forum 2 (Feb. 1887): 615–17. Boylan, Grace Duffie. The Young Folks’ Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Hurst, 1901. Brodhead, Richard. Cultures of Letters: Scenes of Reading and Writing in NineteenthCentury America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993. Brown, Joshua. Beyond the Lines: Pictorial Reporting, Everyday Life and the Crisis of Gilded Age America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. Burton, Richard. “The Author of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ ” Century, Sept. 1896, 696–703. “Changes Wrought by One Book.” Clipping marked “June 8, 1911.” Beecher Stowe Collection, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University. Folder 379, reel 5. Chartier, Roger. The Order of Books. Trans. Lydia G. Cochrane. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1994. Coontz, Stephanie. The Social Origins of Private Life. New York: Verso, 1988. Davidson, Cathy N. Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. De Forest, J. W. “The Great American Novel.” Nation, 9 Jan. 1868, 27–29. Domosh, Moma. “A ‘Civilized’ Commerce: Gender, ‘Race,’ Empire at the 1893 Chicago Exposition.” Cultural Geographie 9 (2002): 181–201. Sentiment without Tears

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“Editor’s Study.” Harper’s, June–Nov. 1901, 152–54. Eggleston, Edward. A History of the United States and Its People. Household ed. New York: Appleton, 1888. Fields, Annie. Authors and Friends. New York: Harper, 1893. Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny 1827–1914. New York: Harper, 1971. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis, with Hollis Robbins. The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Norton, 2007. Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman: An Autobiography. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990. Ginzburg, Carlo. The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-Century Miller. Trans. John Tedeschi and Anne Tedeschi. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1981. Glazener, Nancy. Reading for Realism: The History of a U.S. Institution. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. Gossett, Thomas F. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and American Culture. Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985. Harris, Neil, William De Wit, James Gilbert, and Robert Rydell. Grand Illusions: Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Chicago: Chicago Historical Society, 1994. Hart, James. The Popular Book: A History of America’s Literary Taste. New York: Oxford University Press, 1950. Hedrick, Joan. Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life. New York: Oxford University Press, 1994. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth. Introduction. Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Appleton, 1898. iii–xiv. Hochman, Barbara. Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. ———. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin at the World’s Columbian Exposition.” Libraries and Culture 41 (2006): 82–108. Howells, William Dean. Criticism and Fiction. New York: Harper, 1891. Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex–Colored Man. New York: Penguin, 1990. Kerber, Linda. Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980. Knight, Kate Brannon. History of the Work of the Connecticut Women at the World’s Columbian Exposition Chicago 1893. Hartford, Conn.: Hartford Press, 1898. Long, Elizabeth. “Textual Interpretation as Collective Action.” The Ethnography of Reading. Ed. Jonathan Boyarin. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993. 180–211. Lowell, James Russell. “The Five Indispensable Authors (Homer, Dante, Cervantes, Goethe, Shakspere).” Century 47 (Dec. 1893): 223–25. Martin, Jay. Harvests of Change. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice, 1967. McCray, Florine Thayer. The Life-Work of the Author of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1889. McPherson, James M. The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975.

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Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. Moers, Ellen. Harriet Beecher Stowe and American Literature. Hartford: Stowe-Day, 1978. Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000. Norris, Frank. “The Novel with a ‘Purpose.’ ” The Literary Criticism of Frank Norris. Ed. Donald Pizer. New York: Russell and Russell, 1976. 90–93. Ohmann, Richard. Selling Culture: Magazines, Markets and Class at the Turn of the Century. New York: Verso, 1996. Parfait, Claire. The Publishing History of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” 1852–2002. Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2007. Penn, Arthur [Brander Matthews]. The Home Library. New York: Appleton, 1883. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Culture. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Rhodes, James Ford. History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850. Vol. 1. New York: Harper, 1896. Richardson, Charles F. The Choice of Books. New York: American Book Exchange, 1881. Rydell, Robert. All the World’s a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions 1876–1916. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984. Sandburg, Carl. Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years. One-volume ed. New York: Harcourt, 1939. Schouler, James. History of the United States of America under the Constitution. Vol. 5. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1891. Sicherman, Barbara. “Reading and Middle-Class Identity in Victorian America: Cultural Consumption, Conspicuous and Otherwise.” Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature. Ed. Barbara Ryan and Amy Thomas. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2002. 137–60. ———. “Reading Little Women: The Many Lives of a Book.” U.S. History as Women’s History. Ed. Linda Kerber, Alice Kessler-Harris, and Kathryn Kish Sklar. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. 245–66. Silber, Nina. The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993. Stowe, Charles Edward. Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe Compiled from Her Letters and Journals. London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle, and Rivington, 1889. Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891. ———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1896. ———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. New York: Eaton and Mains, 1897. ———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Art and Memorial Edition to Which Is Added How Henry Ward Beecher Sold Slaves at Plymouth Church; Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe; The Story of the Book and a Key to the Characters by Prof. Charles Morris. Chicago: Thompson and Thomas, 1897. ———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Introduction by Thomas Wentworth Higginson. New York: Appleton, 1898. ———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Introduction by Langston Hughes. New York: Dodd Mead, 1952.

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———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Introduction by Ann Douglass. New York: Penguin, 1981. ———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York: Norton, 1994. ———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Introduction by Darryl Pinckney. New York: Signet, 1998. ———. Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ed. Jean Fagin Yellin. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Trachtenberg, Alan. Reading American Photographs: Images as History. New York: Hill and Wang, 1989. Warner, Charles Dudley. “Uncle Tom’s Cabin Half a Century Later.” Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York: Norton, 1994. 483–88. Wendell, Barrett. A Literary History of America. New York: Scribner’s, 1900. Wharton, Edith. “Copy: A Dialogue.” Crucial Instances. New York: AMS, 1969. 99–119. Wilson, Henry. History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America. Vol. 2. New York: Negro University Press, 1969. Winship, Michael. “‘The Greatest Book of Its Kind’: A Publishing History of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’” Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 109 (1999): 309–32. Wister, Owen. The Virginian. New York: Washington Square, 1956.

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IV Audiences, Fans, and Viewers in Media and Cultural Studies

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Kiss Me Deadly Cold War Threats from Spillane to Aldrich, New York to Los Angeles, and the Mafia to the H-Bomb JANET STAIGER

Media studies have been engaged in academic analysis of audiences for at least ninety years. As early as 1914, the Reverend J. J. Phelan used surveys to study movie preferences of children, and in 1915 William Healy published a book on the relationship between watching films and juvenile delinquency, basing his arguments on case studies (Jowett et al. 26). Since then, the mass audiences of film, and then radio and television, have produced a profitable field for reception research on both everyday and fan spectatorship. Scarcely a subject or method has not been explored in at least an introductory way (Staiger, Media). A rich literature exists on fans, cult movies, stars, readers of various subjectivities, and violence, horror, and sexually explicit materials. One of the slogans for media studies has been to think of the media consumer as a producer. In reaction against midcentury theories of audiences that believed people to be passive, either taking in textual information in a sort of blank-slate way or being overpowered by product fetishism, the

consumer-as-producer thesis can exist in a liberal form (consumers have free choice to select media that is useful and gratifying to them) or a more critical form (consumers can resist preferred readings of capitalist products, tactically re-forming them through perverse interpretations and even new productions such as fan rewritings). The degree to which the consumer escapes dominant ideologies is debated, for within late Foucauldian theorization of power, it is obvious that discourses and regimes of knowledge likely produce subjectivities well meshed into the dominant. That said, media reception studies still explore slippages and resistant empowerments.1 Recently, I have been exploring the application of the findings of media reception studies back to what is often seen as the other side of the producertext-consumer equation. Given what media reception studies hypothesizes about the (albeit limited) agency of the consumer, what implications does the model of consumer subjectivity have for more traditional authorship studies? After all, authors are themselves audiences—readers and fans of the medium in which they produce.2 This is certainly apparent positively in intertextuality and negatively in, as Harold Bloom would put it, the anxiety of influence. It is likely most easily observable in instances of adaptations, serials, and remakes, something ubiquitous in the lives of film authors. Robert Stam has also argued this point in his essay “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” He urges moving away from the standard question of whether or not a film adaptation is faithful to its source (the fidelity metaphor obviously reproduces myths of a pure origin as well as images of loyalty or betrayal) to considering an adaptation as a reading (critical or otherwise) of the prior text. “Adaptations, then, can take an activist stance toward their source novels, inserting them into a much broader intertextual dialogism” (64); these dialogisms are transformations involving “selection, amplification, concretization, actualization, critique, extrapolation, analogization, popularization, and reculturation” (68). The case of the film Kiss Me Deadly (released in 1955) is certainly one in which the authors take an activist stance toward the source, inserting their adaptation into a broader intertextual dialogism.3 This interpretation occurs within a cold war politics when these authors who held nondominant views also necessarily could not speak out directly. In this essay, I analyze the articulated reception by director Robert Aldrich and screenwriter A. I. Bezzerides of Mickey Spillane’s hard-boiled detective, Mike Hammer, and Spillane’s source novel within the cold war context. In my concluding remarks, I make a few observations about method and reception studies.

The Contexts for the Reception of Spillane’s Kiss Me Deadly At the time of the opportunity to adapt Kiss Me, Deadly for the screen, the cold war was well underway. After World War II, even liberals supported 280

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cold war ideologies, although their solutions to global tensions differed from conservatives’. In 1949, the Soviets had exploded an atomic fission device; in 1952, the United States produced a “super” fusion (H-) bomb, followed up rapidly by the Soviets doing the same in 1953. The Truman administration reorganized wartime military-information units into the Central Intelligence Agency as an international spying system to keep tabs on communists. Communists had secured the political administration of China; the war in divided Korea was going on. Although the extent of this was known only later, supporting civil rights for blacks could put people on the watch list of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, since J. Edgar Hoover associated the movement with subversion of the United States, reasoning that it made the country look bad in the global war of national image. Other internal enemies included organized crime, already labeled “the Mafia,” and the Democratic congressman and presidential contender Estes Kefauver held televised hearings in 1950–51 to expose these dangers. Even before the war, conservatives in Congress had used the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) to investigate films seen to be deviating from national policy. After the war, HUAC held new hearings in 1947, seeking films and their filmmakers who might tacitly or overtly have supported the Soviet Union or communism. The committee called nineteen “unfriendly” witnesses and asked them if they were members of the Communist Party. The witnesses were confrontational, claimed freedom of association rights, and refused to answer. Congress cited ten for contempt of Congress, and nine screenwriters and one director received prison terms and/or fines. The studio heads set up informal systems of blacklisting, asking for loyalty to the United States. In 1951, Joseph McCarthy, seeking communists, gays, and any other people who might be considered security risks to the country, renewed these hearings, fed by current events and the Alger Hiss and Rosenberg trials. In 1952, the HUAC called ninety people from the film industry and asked them not only about their own affiliations and beliefs but also who else they knew to be communists or communist sympathizers. At this point, a real blacklist developed, although the studios and TV networks denied its existence publicly. Within this context, Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer novels expressed intense right-wing views. The first novel in the series, I, the Jury, in 1947, set the sources for the formula that John Cawelti has brilliantly described as the “enforcer” version of the hard-boiled detective (67). I shall return to Cawelti’s descriptions of these novels, but their success is legendary. Spillane’s first six books averaged 2.5 to 3 million copies in sales by 1956. By 1965, of the ten best-selling books in America, Spillane had written seven, and he had written only seven books (Halberstam 60). Hammer’s villains alternate between gangsters and “commies” in the series. One Lonely Night (1951) sold seven million copies and provided its readers a scene in which Velda, Hammer’s loyal secretary and fiancée, is strung up naked and whipped by communist spies to secure information. Cawelti aptly says that what Spillane offered his readers Kiss Me Deadly

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was “quasi-pornography” (184) in which sexual stripteases culminate in violence as substitute orgasms. Spillane offered more than that, however, as Cawelti indicates. He offered melodrama. The enforcer formula features a skilled professional, often in a vengeance plot, operating independently and sometimes at odds from the official systems of law enforcement (67). As a transitional figure between Dashiell Hammett’s and Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled detectives and the later full-fledged enforcer, Hammer uses violence more than skill, may kill villains but always in self-defense, and operates within a plot dynamic in which he is “bringing about true justice where the law is helpless” (68). Unlike the Hammett and Chandler detective, Hammer is also intensely emotionally involved and also more physically confrontational. These characteristics in turn produce more violence directed at him. The plot usually develops from the death of a friend of the detective, accentuated by further threats to friends, often Velda (147). Thus, the classical investigation transforms into a crusade (152). Hard-boiled detective stories are often narrated in the first person (or at least focalized through the perspective of the detective). Hammett’s and Chandler’s protagonists are much more detached than Spillane’s, and their novels yield tones of “irony and complexity” (187). Spillane’s “I” narration evinces none of that; his is done up in “sentiment and a ‘primitive sense of justice’ ” (189). Cawelti finally connects the texts with “the fervor and passion of the popular evangelical religious tradition” (190). The precise articulations of Robert Aldrich’s politics are not clear, but his alliances are. In the early 1940s, as a cousin in the Rockefeller family, Aldrich secured a position at RKO as a production clerk and moved up (Arnold and Miller 1–11). By 1944, he began freelancing as a first assistant director, working with left-wing directors such as Jean Renoir, Lewis Milestone, Joseph Losey, and Charlie Chaplin. In 1947, he edited Body and Soul and worked on Force of Evil (1948), both films the HUAC targeted as professing un-American sentiments. Aldrich followed television work and a first directing job at MGM with World for Ransom (1954), an independent production about an “adventurer involved with [a] plan to kidnap [an] H-bomb scientist” (Jarvie 96). Given these credentials, why would Aldrich and A. I. Bezzerides want to take on an adaptation of Spillane’s 1952 Kiss Me, Deadly?4 Aldrich has been very consistent in his explanation; he wanted to stand Hammer on his head, equating him to McCarthy and making alternative political and moral points.5 Aldrich read Hammer “as a ‘cynical and fascistic private eye’ ” and had “utter contempt and loathing” for him. Doing an adaptation was a way to represent McCarthyism and “the witch-hunting America of the 1950s” with their “antidemocratic spirit.” Aldrich specifically indicated that he wanted to author a political statement that “the ends did not justify the means” and “justice is not be found in a self-anointed, one-man vigilante” (qtd. in Arnold and Miller 37). Aldrich claims, “Bezzerides and I thought we were making a real important statement. We were very apprehensive because it was such an uncomfortable time and it could bring down a lot of heat on us” (qtd. in Aldrich, Interview 282

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40).6 Just as fans often parody political life through popular culture, Aldrich and Bezzerides set out to mock through the fictional Hammer real-life rightwing, hard-boiled investigators of commies, specifically McCarthy.

Kiss Me Deadly as Reception of Joseph McCarthy How can individuals articulate their reception of dominant ideology, especially in a climate of some repression?7 It is not the case that all venues and means of expression are withdrawn in such situations. Tactics of resistance still exist. John A. Noakes argues convincingly that civil rights proponents in the early 1950s transcoded dangerous race integration arguments into westerns where Native Americans stand in for blacks; this transcoding permitted covert social commentary.8 Aldrich and Bezzerides were equally sneaky. I shall focus on three tactics of plotting and narration they use.9 The first tactic is to alter Hammer’s motivation.10 As Robert Lang notes, in the novel Hammer’s motivations are “personal vengeance for the wrecking of his car” and for being “beaten up by men he soon finds out to be Mafia agents” (36). These two triggers are also joined to the brutal slaying of a young woman whom Hammer has rescued in the first scene. All of these overdetermine the “enforcer” motif of the original. These motivations are articulated often through Hammer’s first-person narration; for instance, when he first learns about the Mafia connection, he says: I could feel it starting way down at my toes, a cold, burning flush that crept up my body and left in its wake a tingling sensation of rage and fear that was pure emotion and nothing else. . . . I was dreaming of a slimy foreign secret army that held a parade of terror under the Mafia label and laughed at us with our laws and regulations and how fast their damned smug expressions would change when they saw the fresh corpses of their own kind day after day. (35–36) Hammer’s motivations in the film are not vengeance and moral righteousness but greed and egotism. Since the filmmakers deny Hammer a voice-over narration (otherwise conventional for film noirs in this period), access to character depends on character statements, comments by other characters, and acting.11 The first words of goal-orientation from Hammer are that something big must be at stake and that he wants something out of it. In addition, the few significant changes from the novel almost entirely involve other characters casting Hammer’s personality in a negative light. In the opening scene, the young woman Hammer initially rescues mocks him by noting that he cares a lot about his “pretty little car”; she also says, “You’re one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself.”12 Then, right after Hammer is released from the hospital after nearly being killed by the Kiss Me Deadly

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villains, Interstate Crime Commission investigators question him and belittle him as a “bedroom dick” who uses his secretary as “woo-bait.” (In contrast, Spillane’s Hammer is not a divorce PI.) Third, as soon as he arrives home, his friend Pat, a cop, warns him off the case, saying, “You’re in over your head,” a claim the film then proceeds to prove. These initial denigrations of Hammer are reinforced later when Velda goes after him, asking him if his search for the “the great whatsit” is worth the deaths of his friends and the use of her as sexual attraction to secure information from suspects.13 In films, acting is also access to character. Edwin Arnold and Eugene Miller argue that Ralph Meeker, the actor playing Hammer, contributes to this negative characterization with his acting style: “Meeker’s slight chubbiness, his softness around the face and belly, play against our romantic image of the private investigator: [Aldrich’s] Hammer is a sleazy second-rater” (39). A second tactic these readers/authors use to articulate reception to dominant ideology is to raise the political stakes. Although the original plot premise in the novel is that the New York Mafia are after a cache of narcotics imported before World War II with current street value of $4 million, Aldrich and Bezzerides change that. Aldrich recalls, “It seemed to us that the only way to inject any political significance—and that’s already a heavy word—any uniqueness, was to say what if the secret were the atomic weapon? Once we made that decision everything fell into place” (Aldrich, Interview 40).14 Not only do Aldrich and Bezzerides raise the political stakes by making stolen fissionable material the object of everyone’s search but also they create an apocalyptical counterfactual argument. After Hammer and the spy ring find the box, one of the villains opens it. She does not just receive radiation burns, but since the materials are exposed, a chain reaction produces an explosion. Although Hammer, along with Velda, escapes the house as the conflagration develops, Aldrich has said that “Mike was left alive long enough to see what havoc he had caused, though certainly he and Velda were both seriously contaminated” (qtd. in Arnold and Miller 42n). Shifting the setting of the film to Los Angeles (primarily to reduce production costs) permits a symbolic resonance. The filmmakers create another Pacific nuclear explosion but make it an at-home version.15 Moreover, this shift makes a moral and political point that enforcers going alone can produce nuclear catastrophe. The third tactic for articulating reception to dominant ideology is to retain the violence.16 If one of the points Aldrich wishes to express is that the ends of someone like McCarthy do not justify the means, the meanness of the means must be represented so that public apprehension is created. Prior to the release of the film, Aldrich publicly justified the violence in Kiss Me Deadly by pointing out that violence has a long and wide history in literature, is logically motivated by the plot, is edited so that most of it is in the viewer’s mind, and is authentic to the source: “We think we have kept faith with the 60,000,000 Mickey Spillane readers” (Aldrich, “You Can’t” n.p.).17 Indeed, much of the violence in the movie duplicates scenes in the novel or offers their equivalents, including the torture death of the woman Hammer initially rescues; the death of a 284

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garage mechanic when goons remove a jack from a car and the auto crushes him; and Hammer’s own brutality toward those he questions by, for example, slamming a morgue attendant’s hand in a drawer, breaking a witness’s rare opera records, and the customary assorted punchings and beatings of thugs.

Conclusion: A Note about Methods for Studying Audiences One of the questions I want to ask in conclusion is whether audiences of the film interpreted the film as Aldrich hoped to articulate it. After all, in some sense, some of the changes and retentions might be said to reinforce and justify McCarthy’s concerns. Having spies secure fissionable material could arguably be said to rationalize paranoia about U.S. security. And while Hammer is unacceptably violent, so is the enemy he combats. According to Aldrich, “Spillane . . . never understood that this was the greatest Spillane put-down in a long time. He just thought that it was a marvelous picture” (qtd. in Arnold and Miller 40). While not many reviews of the film exist, both Variety and Newsweek did interpret Aldrich’s Kiss Me Deadly as a critique of Spillane, but they missed the political commentary about McCarthy (“Brog”; “Fright”). Only in France, apparently, did the critics understand; Aldrich says, “Nobody but nobody in the United States picked up on [the political statement] at all. When the picture got to Europe, the French in particular picked up on it immediately” (Aldrich, Interview 40). This sort of variable interpretation is classic in reception analysis of audiences and interpretation.18 However, beyond the lack of his own audiences seeing all that reader/author Aldrich was up to, another concluding point needs to be made, one about method. I would imagine that many readers of this essay have been vaguely frustrated with my rather simple-minded critical analysis of Kiss Me Deadly from the point of view of the author’s “intent.” After all, haven’t we been rid of that sort of approach for at least the last forty years? The answer is, not totally, and not for audience studies. One of the criticisms of Janice Radway’s analysis of the reading strategies of the women of Smithton was her psychoanalytical interpretation of their statements. Other work on fans and everyday uses of media often tries to convey appropriate ethnographic cautions about the importance of letting informants express themselves. For instance, Mark Duffett has recently severely criticized Erika Doss for reading the activities of fans of Elvis Presley as acting in ways equivalent to religious behavior when the fans deny this is a valid analogy. Are we, when we turn to authors of adaptations, equally willing to let their stated intentions speak for themselves? Or is there merit to applying analytical tools to their (and fans’ and audiences’) self-reports of their agency? While I have somewhat implicitly argued for letting authors and fans speak for themselves here, I am unsure that I am willing to give up critically analyzing intentional discourse by audiences or authors as audiences. Kiss Me Deadly

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What, then, is new in reception studies? One development is the way the application to authoring of some lessons of studying fans and audiences is beginning to dissolve some of the artificial dichotomies of producer/consumer. However, we still need to consider the respective power of some readers/authors in relation to others. Not everyone in this dynamic is equally able to access media production, distribution, and exhibition. A second innovation is a confrontation with the respect we are tending to pay to fans’ explicit statements about their practices and interpretations. Frankly, we need to ask whether we are operating with a double standard: Readers are given respect, but critics are speaking for producers. This contradiction needs attention. Notes 1. An excellent explanation and model of this is in Kesby 2045–46. 2. See Staiger, “Authorship Approaches”; Staiger, “Authorship Studies”; Staiger, “Analyzing Self-Fashioning.” Theodore Gracyk, in his excellent study of this dual role in music, writes, “Attributions of influence are important, I have suggested, because rock musicians are themselves fans who study and imitate recordings” (36). 3. I cannot develop this here, but the film also provides incidentally an important dialogue with film noir, since it critiques the hard-boiled detective, a foundation for film noir. See Flinn; Robinson. 4. The novel title includes a comma; the film title does not. Flinn (115) claims Bezzerides was blacklisted. I have been unable to confirm this. As far as I can determine, Bezzerides was able to work openly with Aldrich during the 1950s. Flinn’s assertion is, however, possible. Alain Silver (19) also writes that Aldrich used a blacklisted writer for World for Ransom. 5. Bezzerides wrote the script with contributions from Aldrich; however, all interviews indicate a shared vision of the project, and Aldrich and Bezzerides worked together on other films during the decade (Arnold and Miller 38). 6. Also see Silver 17; Silver and Ursini 347. 7. Their articulation is also constrained by economics (they wanted to make profits) and aesthetic norms (they operated within the classical Hollywood narrative and style). However, all responses of audiences and fans function within generic and social bounds. 8. Transcoding works for all ideological positions; see Polan 45–87. For instance, Polan argues that during World War II, cleaning house is equated with war efficiency in the discourse of the period. 9. Other analysts of this film have noted the alterations I am about to discuss, and I will indicate this as I proceed. Lang provides the most extensive comparison of novel and film using a Lacanian framework to argue that Kiss Me Deadly is about “cold war fears (or a fear of feminine sexuality or homosexuality, or whatever) displaced into a hermeneutic involving a box of nuclear material” (39). However, Lang concludes that both the novel and film produce a Mike Hammer who displays “fascistic behavior.” Lang does not use any statements of authorial intention from Aldrich. I will return to this matter in my conclusion when I raise questions of method. 286

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10. Overall, the film is quite similar to the novel in plot events. Although some scenes are rearranged in order, most of the mechanics of the plot are duplicated. Only a couple of changes, which I will discuss, are significant. In addition, Spillane and Aldrich/ Bezzerides have a lot in common aesthetically. Spillane describes sounds rather more than some writers, and the movie is notable for its sound design. Spillane has great character and symbolic “business” with Hammer’s Luckies cigarettes; the filmmakers do the same with Hammer’s smoking. Finally, Spillane likes to create metaphors and uses pathetic fallacy (thunder strikes as Spillane figures out the whole scheme). The image of the Medusa in the film, about which so many film scholars remark, appears in the novel as an analogy for the Mafia. 11. This omission is fairly ironic, because Kiss Me Deadly is usually seen as the climax of film noir. On the lack of voice-over, see Flinn 120. 12. Noted in Arnold and Miller 39. 13. Although Aldrich has been accused of creating a misogynistic cinema, at least in Kiss Me Deadly he is much improved over his source material. The script gives women an articulation of the sexual politics; moreover, the novel has women much more blatantly offering themselves sexually to Hammer. Still, an argument can be made that much is left or added that produces sexist imagery, such as the diatribe against Gabriela as Medusa, Lot’s wife, etc. See Jarvie 111. Flinn also notes that while the film is about cold war politics, “it would be a gross disservice to the film to approach it merely as a response to cold war fifties politics” (111). 14. Aldrich misremembers the novel’s treasure being a jewel heist in this 1978 interview. In another interview, Aldrich credits this idea to Bezzerides (Arnold and Miller 42n). 15. Robinson (47) neatly points out that Aldrich can also exploit Los Angeles’s car culture, although I think the Pacific connection is more crucial. 16. Lang (36) states he thinks the film has less violence than the novel. It is hard to calculate such a difference or the effect of prose versus visual representations. 17. Aldrich’s purpose was in part to avoid intense regulation, but the Catholic Church gave the film a condemned rating. A Catholic magazine also responded to Aldrich’s argument (“Sex”). 18. Of course the film, as something of a climax to the 1940s hard-boiled detective genre within the tensions of the cold war, has itself had many later receptions in film. See the movies Chinatown, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Repo Man as a start.

References Aldrich, Robert. Interview by Chris Petit and Richard Combs. Robert Aldrich. Ed. Richard Combs. London: British Film Institute, 1978. 37–48. ———. “You Can’t Hang up the Meat Hook.” New York Herald Tribune, 20 Feb. 1955. Arnold, Edwin T., and Eugene L. Miller. The Films and Career of Robert Aldrich. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1986. “Brog.” “Kiss Me Deadly.” Variety, 19 Apr. 1955. Cawelti, John C. Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976. Kiss Me Deadly

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Doss, Erika. Elvis Culture: Fans, Faith and Image. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1999. Duffett, Mark. “False Faith or False Comparison? A Critique of the Religious Interpretation of Elvis Fan Culture.” Popular Music and Society 26 (2003): 513–22. Flinn, Carol. “Sound, Woman and the Bomb: Dismembering the ‘Great Whatsit’ in Kiss Me Deadly.” Wide Angle 8.3–4 (1986): 115–27. “Fright—By Spillane.” Newsweek, 25 Apr. 1955, 106. Gracyk, Theodore. I Wanna Be Me: Rock Music and the Politics of Identity. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001. Halberstam, David. The Fifties. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1993. Jarvie, Ian. “Hysteria and Authoritarianism in the Films of Robert Aldrich.” Film Culture 22 (1961): 95–111. Jowett, Garth S., Ian C. Jarvie, and Kathryn H. Fuller. Children and the Movies: Media Influence and the Payne Fund Controversy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Kesby, Mike. “Retheorizing Empowerment-through-Participation as a Performance in Space: Beyond Tyranny to Transformation.” Signs 30 (2005): 2037–65. Lang, Robert. “Looking for the ‘Great Whatzit’: Kiss Me, Deadly and Film Noir.” Cinema Journal 27 (1988): 32–44. Noakes, John A. “Racializing Subversion: The FBI and the Depiction of Race in Early Cold War Movies.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 26 (2003): 728–49. Polan, Dana. Power and Paranoia: History, Narrative and the American Cinema, 1940– 1950. New York: Columbia University Press, 1986. Robinson, George. “Three by Aldrich.” Velvet Light Trap 11 (1974): 46–49. “Sex and Violence ‘Justified.’ ” America: The National Catholic Weekly Review, 5 Mar. 1955, 583–84. Silver, Alain. “Mr. Film Noir Stays at the Table.” Film Comment 8.1 (1972): 14–21. Silver, Alain, and James Ursini. Whatever Happened to Robert Aldrich? His Life and His Films. New York: Limelight, 1995. Spillane, Mickey. Kiss Me, Deadly. New York: Dutton-Signet Classic, 1952. Staiger, Janet. “Analyzing Self-Fashioning in Authoring and Reception.” Paper presented at Ingmar Bergman Symposium 2005, Stockholm, 28 May–1 June 2005. ———. “Authorship Approaches.” Authorship and Film. Ed. David A. Gerstner and Janet Staiger. New York: Routledge, 2002. 27–57. ———. “Authorship Studies and Gus Van Sant.” Film Criticism 29.1 (2004): 1–22. ———. Media Reception Studies. New York: New York University Press, 2005. Stam, Robert. “Beyond Fidelity: The Dialogics of Adaptation.” Film Adaptation. Ed. James Naremore. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2000. 54–76.

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Textual Poaching or Gamekeeping? A Comparative Study of Two Six Feet Under Internet Fan Forums RHIANNON BURY

With the publication of Textual Poachers in 1992, Henry Jenkins put fandom on the academic radar. He vigorously challenged prevailing notions of media fans, held by an assortment of academics, high-culture aficionados, critics, and William Shatner, as passive dupes of mass culture sorely in need of lives.1 Jenkins provided an empowering accounting of fan practices under the rubric of textual poaching, borrowed from the Marxist theorist Michel de Certeau. According to de Certeau, “poaching . . . on the property of others” (xii) is what characterizes the multiple practices of everyday life. These “tactics of consumption” are “ingenious ways in which the weak make use of the strong” (xiv). Jenkins makes a similar point about fans being in a position of “cultural marginality and social weakness. Fans must beg with the networks to keep their favorite shows on the air, must lobby producers to provide desired plot developments or to protect the integrity of favorite characters” (26–27).

While recognizing the legitimacy of fandom, it is also necessary, as Jenkins would no doubt concur, to critically examine poaching as a purely oppositional practice. Matt Hills makes such a move in the context of consumerism: “Fans are no longer ignored or viewed as ‘eccentric irritants’ ” by producers, but rather as “loyal consumers to be created, where possible, or otherwise to be courted through scheduling practices. . . . The supposedly ‘resistive’ figure of the fan . . . has become increasingly enmeshed within market rationalizations and routines of scheduling and channel-branding” (39). In short, fandom has become a niche market (37). He provides the example of the British satellite specialty channel Skye One, which showed American cult/science fiction favorites such as The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer before they were picked up by BBC. The spread of Internet and DVD technologies has deepened this entanglement. Ten years ago, the majority of online discussion about television series took place on forums created and maintained by fans on Usenet or Internet Relay Chat (IRC).2 Today, all American networks provide discussion boards for their active series alongside virtual stores selling associated merchandise. For example, the homepage for Six Feet Under, produced by the American cable network Home Box Office (HBO), has a series of links under the title banner, including “Community” and “Shop Six Feet Under.” Clicking on the latter takes one to a page of popular merchandise, ranging from hats to DVD sets, as well as, not surprisingly, links to other HBO series merchandise. I would argue that these network-based fan forums have replaced the Usenet groups as the first point of entry into Internet media fandom. Of the thousands of messages I analyzed for this research project, many were from fans who had registered the day after the broadcast of a new episode and prefaced their comments to the “thread” with statements such as “I’ve never posted to a message board before.” Moreover, participants regularly referred to watching episodes multiple times using HBO’s “on demand” feature and anticipated purchasing the DVD set of the most recent season once it was released. Hills is therefore right to ask if textual poachers might not be better thought of as textual gamekeepers (36). At its broadest, this essay is a discussion of textual gamekeeping, but the focus is not on practices of consumption but rather practices of interpretation. To place reading in de Certeau’s framework, the “property” is the text with access strictly monitored by its “trustees”—scholars and educators. Jenkins points out that fundamental to the teaching of literature in schools is the premise that no personal marks be left on the sanctioned text. Even when popular cultural texts do make it into the curriculum, teachers usually present them the same way they present literary texts, in order to shore up their cultural worth. While Jenkins says that “one does not have to abolish all reverence for authorial meaning,” he positions personal response, speculation, and the production of unauthorized meanings as alternative reading strategies, ones that fans deploy as a form of resistance to elitist schooling practices (26). My previous ethnographic research with female fans of The X-Files shows, however, that while such strategies were deployed to varying degrees 290

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to gain pleasure from the text, mobilizing school-based discourses of literary criticism and “respectful” reading were just as prevalent. In other words, while the “Keep off the Grass” signs were ignored, the textual turf remained relatively untrammeled. My results are not entirely surprising, given that my participants were university-educated members of a private listserv who had turned their backs on public fan forums, in part because they were tired of the inability of many participants to engage in “rational” (their term) discussion or to express themselves clearly and effectively. The project I discuss in the pages that follow was set up to examine the reading practices of a diverse range of fans on two of the largest and most popular public online fan forums for Six Feet Under (SFU). I chose this series because over its five-season run, it received almost universal acclaim and therefore can be considered a “quality” popular text that covets the critical gaze. For example, the television critic for the Canadian national newspaper the Globe and Mail began his review of the series finale as follows: “In the annals of American television, SFU will always stand apart. Certainly it will stand beside The Sopranos as an example of HBO’s enormous impact on American TV drama at the turn of the twentyfirst century” (Doyle). He went on to describe the final episode as “immensely smart and elegiac. It is a fitting conclusion to what has been a magnificent fifth season for the drama. The final three episodes stand with anything produced in Hollywood in the past few years as a statement about the contemporary American quest for happiness, stability and optimism.” Similarly, one fan forum participant commented on the appropriateness of the series in the college English curriculum: Wouldn’t “studying” SFU in a literature-based college English class be interesting? All of the foreshadowing, symbolism, quirky directional moves . . . etc. It certainly would be better than rehashing Moby Dick like so many English 1B classes do. View an episode, talk about the symbolism, write a few papers, and finally write a big one at the end of the class summing up recurring themes and such? Given the accessibility and popularity of network-run fan forums, HBO’s discussion board, with its multiple topic areas, which cover the show in general as well as specific episodes, was the place to find not only a range of fans with differing levels of linguistic and cultural capital (Bourdieu, “Economics”) but also a concentration of “nonelite” fans—that is, those who are either unable or unwilling to draw on the cultural and linguistic resources that mark out membership in the university-educated middle classes. The only site of comparable size and structure is Television without Pity (TWOP), a forum that is not aligned with any network and purports to celebrate all things “tubey” for the “tv junkie.” Yet this website has built its reputation in online fandom on its highly detailed “recaplets” on all current American series, which are adroitly sprinkled with clever witticisms and a range of arch, caustic, and sarcastic remarks—in short, texts produced by and for “elite” fans. My comparative Textual Poaching or Gamekeeping?

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study confirms the distinction between “elite” and “nonelite” fans in terms of displays of linguistic capital: In general, the posters on TWOP were able to express themselves more accurately and effectively than those on HBO. However, both groups were strongly invested in mining the text collectively for the “right” (i.e., authorial) meaning even while engaging in fannish speculation. As John Frow points out, there is no reason to assume that “a set of dominated classes has developed quite separate and autonomous practices of reading from those employed by a dominant class” (32–33).

The Author Is Dead; Long Live the Author In his provocatively titled essay “The Death of the Author,” Roland Barthes links the modernist obsession with the figure of the author to a capitalist ideology based on the individual (254). Acknowledging the continuing influence of New Criticism in the mid-1970s, he is nonetheless optimistic that the text will soon no longer be read as a line of words releasing a single “theological” meaning (the message of the Author-God) but a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings, none of them original, blend and clash. . . . We are now beginning to let ourselves be fooled no longer by the arrogant antiphrastical recriminations of good society in favor of the very thing it sets aside, ignores, smothers, or destroys. (256) From the vantage point of the present, it is clear that Barthes misjudged the tenacity of capitalism in general and the reproduction of bourgeois aesthetics and tastes via mass education, which were largely uninterrupted by the linguistic turn within the academy. “School instruction,” Pierre Bourdieu says, “always fulfills a function of legitimization, if only by giving its blessing to works which it sets up as worthy of being admired, and thus helps to define the hierarchy of cultural wealth valid in a particular society at a particular time” (“Artistic Taste” 208). Thus, the aesthetic and literary tastes of the dominant classes are passed off as natural or universal, as are their preferred methods of acquiring mastery of these cultural codes. Although New Criticism may have fallen out of favor in today’s English departments, Northrop Frye’s dictum that “the fundamental act of criticism is a disinterested response to a work of literature in which all one’s beliefs, engagements, commitments, prejudices, stampedings of pity and terror, are ordered to be quiet” is still central to the teaching of literature and other “admirable” works in schools (qtd. in Rabinowitz 261). In addition to distance, which supposedly allows for an objective response, a mastery of close reading to gain access to the sanctioned text’s authorial meaning is needed, along with competencies in argumentation

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and exposition to effectively communicate one’s “discoveries” in essay form. Indeed, the teacher plays a critical role as cultural gamekeeper/gatekeeper through grading and assessment. Those who fail to maintain the appropriate distance and who react on an emotional level—women to their romances, lower-class men to their comics, African Americans to their nonlinear oral storytelling traditions—are subjected to disapproval, ridicule, and/or scorn, as implied in the Frye quotation, for their lack of taste and poor competencies. Bourgeois aesthetics, as Bourdieu calls it, is pervaded by what Foucault refers to as the will to truth: “True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it” (219). Obscured as a result are the ways these practices are gendered, raced, and classed. Despite the promise of mass education that everyone can gain mastery of the cultural code, only those who already possess sufficient amounts of cultural and linguistic capital, whose home discourse matches those of the school (Gee), are for the most part the ones who will have success. Bourdieu stresses the need to remember that culture is not what one is but what one has, or, rather what one has become; to remember the social conditions which render possible aesthetic experience and the existence of those beings—art lovers or “people of taste”—for whom it is possible; to remember that the work of art is given only to those who have received the means to acquire the means to appropriate it and who could not seek to possess it if they did not already possess it. (“Artistic Taste” 211) But what of the fan, who, in Jenkins’s words, chooses to “sit too close” (60)? Is that fan’s decision to respond emotionally an act of rebellion against practices learned in school? To answer this question, the heterogeneity of actual school practices and the alternative discourses that circulate within educational institutions must first be acknowledged. Since the 1970s, at least in North America, schools have not only sanctioned but enabled pupils to leave tracks on textual property, drawing on the approach to textual interpretation known as reader response. In my own high school experience of that period, teachers encouraged students to write alternative endings to classic novels (e.g., Lord of the Flies), and creative writing classes were offered as alternative credits to English literature classes. Yet, by grade 12 honors English, traditional approaches prevailed, no doubt in preparation for university English classes not taught by followers of Barthes. My point in recounting this anecdote is not to dispute the role of schooling in cultural reproduction but to make the case that responding to a favorite show on an emotional level or speculating about character motives or actions needs to be also considered a learned skill that has been taught alongside the highly valued close reading for authorial

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meaning. Indeed it is the transposability of in-school learning that informs and enables fan interpretative practices: Although it deals almost exclusively with literary works, in-school learning tends to create, on the one hand, a transposable inclination to admire works approved by the school and a duty to admire and to love certain works, or rather, certain classes of works which gradually seem to become linked to a certain educational and social status; and, on the other hand, an equally generalized and transposable aptitude for categorizing by authors, by genres, by schools, and by periods, for the handling of educational categories of literary analysis and for the mastery of the code which governs the use of the different codes, and to store away the typical knowledge which, even though extrinsic and anecdotal, makes possible at least an elementary form of apprehension, however inadequate it might be. (Bourdieu, “Artistic Taste” 208–9) Classroom practices are thus directly implicated in the formation of normative practices of society at large. Peter Rabinowitz describes reading as “the joining of a particular social interpretative community” (259). “Authorial reading,” he argues, “is not only a way of reading but, perhaps equally important, a way of talking about how you read—that is, the result of a community agreement that allows discussion of a certain sort to take place by treating meanings in a particular way” (259, my emphasis). In the next section, I present data samples that closely illustrate the “agreements” of the HBO and TWOP Six Feet Under fan communities.

Is Maggie Pregnant? Fannish Speculation On (the) Line To identify the sets of reading practices mobilized on the two forums, I analyzed the messages posted exclusively to the topic area set up for the series finale, “Everyone’s Waiting,” broadcast originally on HBO in the United States and on The Movie Network (TMN) in Canada on 21 August 2005. I examined the first 100 pages on the HBO board, consisting of 1,486 messages posted within 48 hours of the broadcast. By the time the boards were archived and locked by HBO in February 2006, this topic area comprised 8,958 messages. In August 2006, TWOP’s software calculated a total of 117 pages of 1,746 posts; but regular posting had slowed considerably by message 1400 on 31 August 2005, the point at which I stopped collecting data. Discussion on both boards developed almost identically, beginning with accolades and expressions of gratitude to Alan Ball, the series creator and producer, the writers, and the cast for the five seasons. The following is an example:

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Kudos and praise to Alan Ball and his peers. The cast, crew, writers, directors, producers, caterers, grips, drivers, everyone did a fabulous piece of work for five years and especially for the finale. The way the show was tied together from beginning to end, alpha to omega, if you will, just floored me. The pilot, Season One, was the beginning, but began with the ending of a life (Nathaniel), and the finale, Season Five, was the ending, but began with the beginning of a life (Willa). The oldest to the youngest, the yin and yang, it resonated perfectly for me. To all my fellow posters, you rock! Don’t be strangers, since we’ll all get the DVDs someday and can still comment on episodes, characters, music, etc., just like we do now. Six Feet Under—rest in peace eternal. The reference to the DVDs should be understood in terms not only of consumption but also of cultural capital—the possession of a classic work that stands up to the scrutiny of multiple readings and commentary over time. While the post is an emotional response, it also draws on a discourse of criticism, with references to the overarching series narrative being perfectly “bookended.” Beyond praise (there were but a handful of dissenting posts), posters commented on the parts of the episode they particularly liked and/or thought were particularly well written or well acted. Interwoven with these posts were questions and observations about the meaning of particular scenes. I have divided the interpretive strategies used on both boards into four broad categories, ranging from least to most fannish, as follows. Strategy 1 is close reading based on the primary text. Fans make sense of the scene under discussion in light of the narrative and logic of the series as well as its status as a “quality” text. Strategy 2 is close reading based on secondary texts, including interviews with Alan Ball or the “obituaries” for the major characters written by HBO staff and posted on the Six Feet Under website the day after the airing of the finale. Strategy 3 is extratextual, involving the use of either a shared cultural stock of knowledge of the “real” and/or lived personal experience. This is not to say that the “real” and the televisual are mutually exclusive. In critical discourses of contemporary television drama, the closer art is seen to imitate “real life,” the better the art. Hence, the critics have meted out high praise to Six Feet Under for its “realistic” portrayal of aspects of American life, as indicated in the earlier quotation from the newspaper critic. Moreover, a number of posters on both forums combined strategies 1 and 3 in their messages. Strategy 4 is also extratextual, but little or no support is offered for the interpretation (“Just my opinion”), or the response is based purely on emotion, in line with The X-Files’ Fox Mulder’s “I want to believe” philosophy about extraterrestrial life. The data I will present is excerpted from a discussion thread concerning the possibility that one of the reoccurring minor characters, Maggie, is pregnant

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after a one-night stand with Nate Fisher, one of the central characters.3 This thread is particularly fannish in that it involves speculation based on a single scene of little more than one minute in which Maggie is seen in the waiting room of a doctor’s office talking to Ruth (the mother of Nate, who is now deceased) on her cell phone. Indeed, even raising the question seems more appropriate to discussion of a soap opera than a critically acclaimed drama. Yet the “Maggie” thread generated approximately ninety posts made by fiftyfive HBO posters spanning the data collection period; on TWOP, fifty-five posts were made by forty-five posters over the data collection period. While the elite/nonelite binary seems to hold, in that more speculation took place on HBO than TWOP, the discussion on the latter is nonetheless extensive enough to trouble the binary. Moreover, as the following data samples indicate, most posters are firmly committed to rooting out authorial meaning.4

HBO Strategies HBO 1: Also I noticed maggie at the dr office and it didn’t seem like she was working I bet she was having an abortion. HBO 2: I thought about the pregnancy thing with Maggie as well . . . left us to wonder I guess HBO 3: Maggie was a Rep for a Pharmaceutical Company—which may be why she was in the waiting room. . . . HBO 1: yes but a rep wouldn’t be called in like a patient. reps always hang out with the receptionist untill the dr can see them HBO 4: True—a nurse/medical assitant told Maggie that “the doctor will see you know”—indicating she’s a patient—not there for a business interest. There’s no closure with Maggie!! HBO 5: The reason I say maggie isnt preggers is the 2 old people def werent there for a pregnancy and she would have gone to a maternity doctor so thats that, not preggers HBO 6: I think someone else said it earlier—it seems that Maggie never had Nate’s baby, or there would have been more grandchildren listed in Ruth’s obituary. I don’t really think it means anything except it’s real life—I get calls when I am in the post office, doctor’s office, grocery shopping. I am personally not reading too much into it. In this opening round of discussion, HBO 1 speculated wildly about the reason for Maggie’s presence in a doctor’s office.5 HBO 2 suggested that the ambiguity was Alan Ball’s intention (he wrote the episode), giving the audience license to speculate. Like HBO 2 (“I guess”), HBO 3 hedged rather than took a definitive position (“which may be why”). Nonetheless, HBO 3 de296

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ployed strategy 1 by pointing out Maggie’s occupation in the series narrative. HBO 1 did not back away from her position, drawing on strategy 3 to support it, and HBO 4 followed up with a close reading to acknowledge HBO 1’s conclusion as a possibility, though like HBO 2, HBO 4 gestured to the intentional polysemy of the text. HBO 5 and HBO 6, however, disagreed with the conclusions of the others, both doing close readings of the primary and secondary texts, respectively, to support their position. HBO 6 also challenged the idea that the scene was intended to invite speculation, implying that such speculation is unwarranted given the reliance of the series on verisimilitude. The disagreement heated up with HBO 1 responding directly to HBO 5: “your kidding right. Im pregnant right now and there are always old people in the office to see the dr too. Old women still have to have their stuff checked out too. thats funny its ok your probably a man LOL [laugh out loud].” While HBO 1 continued to support her position, again mobilizing strategy 3, HBO 7 confirmed Maggie’s profession and read the text closely to point out the absence of expectant mothers in the waiting room. HBO 12 did the same and drew on personal experience to bolster this position: “At my physician’s office the pharm. reps are required to make an appointment and sit in the waiting room like any other patient. The waiting room is always full of these reps and they have to be called in just like a patient. Maggie was not pregnant, she was there for her job.” HBO 8 and HBO 10 joined the thread to debate the likelihood of Maggie being pregnant in light of both “real life” and the series narrative: HBO 8: I think it would have been extremely unrealistic for Maggie to become pregnant from one session of unprotected sex. There are many women who try month to month to become pregnant and it can take years. Nate would’ve had super sperm IMO [in my opinion]. . . . HBO 10: It’s not unrealistic at all. Many people become pregnant after one sexual adventure. Even Ruth became pregnant her first time out. In response to HBO 12, HBO 10 clarified her position on Maggie’s pregnancy, this time extrapolating from both primary and secondary texts: Oh, don’t get me wrong. . . . I don’t think Maggie was pregnant. As mad as she was I doubt Maggie would just never see her dad [Ruth’s second husband] again and not let Ruth know she had another grandchild, especially after their brief but lovely phone conversation about Nate. With the exception of HBO 11, who did not attempt to substantiate his or her opinion (“i think maggie’s knocked up with nate’s kid”), the next set of posters who joined the thread relied primarily on strategy 1, the majority focusing on the details of the scene as would be fitting for a classroom debate: Textual Poaching or Gamekeeping?

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HBO 15: When Maggie was on the phone she put the flat of her hand to her back as if it was sore or needed support. This is something that pregnant woman do all the time. HBO 10: When they have a belly. Maggie didn’t. HBO 16: I sincerely think they would have told us if she was pregnant. She was at work with her briefcase/bag supplies what have you. She reps drugs for a living. That is why she was at a Doctor’s office. If she had a baby it would be in Ruth’s obituary as well. HBO 18: Perhaps Maggie inherited a bit of George’s loonyness and she was seeking out a doctor’s help for that? he was a bit unhinged if you ask me. Most pharmaceutical reps that I’ve seen usually have a bigger bag than what she was carrying. Can’t fit all those samples in a purse. HBO 19: Maggie would have been 4 months along by then. She had her large sample case with her and was wearing a very short jacket which did not reveal a tummy. Over the next two days, the debate continued, and a few posters joined the thread to say that they had been persuaded by others to change their original positions: HBO 22: After reading everyone’s responses to Maggie’s “could be pregnant theory” I have to say you guys might have a point that she was just doing her job but come on now it would have been a great twist on things. I guess for me I’m just trying to keep making up story lines to keep this show alive in my mind & heart. Again, awesome episode can’t [wait] to watch it again tonight. HBO 51: I know Maggie’s possible pregnancy is a big question mark in the postings today, so I’ll add my two cents. Upon first viewing of the finale last night I was quite convinced that her being in a doctor’s office was a Ball-esque hint that she was indeed pregnant with Nate’s child. But being reminded in the postings today that she is by trade a pharmaceutical rep, a second viewing revealed a small suitcase on wheels in front of her during the wide shot. So, while there is a case to be made on both sides (and I love how up for interpretation everything is in this show!), I’ve landed in the “not pregnant” camp. The first poster is clearly caught between two opposing discourses: bourgeois aesthetics and fannish attachment. In light of the discussion, HBO 51 did a second close reading and noticed a new detail. Nevertheless, HBO 51 did not dismiss the views of the others, who continued to argue that Maggie is pregnant but rather pointed to the polysemy of the primary text and the pleasures it affords. In the end, the arguments of the “not pregnant camp” seem to have carried the most traction, for no one from this camp switched allegiance. That 298

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said, not everyone who was convinced Maggie was pregnant found the counterarguments persuasive. HBO 27 responded, “Wow, you guys just don’t want to accept that maybe Nate knocked Maggie up when he cheated on Brenda with her! Pretty closed minded for fans of such a weird show, lol! Face it, it could’ve totally happened & it would be a great twist!!!” This poster was then taken to task by another with stronger investments in bourgeois aesthetics: HBO 8: Close minded? No, I just think it would have been a sell out on Alan Ball’s part to add yet another child of Nate’s to the picture. This isn’t Days of Our Lives and we’ve already seen how many children have been spawned from Nate’s seed in previous epis. Is there some Quaker rule that prevents her from using birth control? Why is it so unbelievable that she was there for her job? If Maggie was going to be pregnant, it would’ve been revealed just like everything else, IMO. I think the “twist” that Tina was talking about was the affair that lead to Nate’s demise in “Singing for Our Lives” Episode 59. Just because I believe she isn’t pregnant doesn’t make me close-minded and it wouldn’t be a great twist IMO—it would be totally predictable and boring. In contrasting Six Feet Under with a daytime soap opera, HBO 8 framed the series as a quality text that does not offer formulaic plot developments at odds with the series narrative; HBO 8 also made reference to the final montage that closes both the episode and the series. The montage “fast-forwards” through all the major characters’ lives to the moments of their deaths, and HBO 8 offered it as proof of the author’s intention to reveal, not confuse or conceal. The debate appeared to have run its course, with HBO 36 saying, “It appears that the general consensus was that she was at a business appointment.” The debate reopened, though, when new posters joined the thread without having read the previous posts on the subject, perhaps owing to the massive quantity of messages posted to the series finale thread. As the final sample demonstrates, some posters invested in bourgeois aesthetics lost patience with those who dropped in with unsupported opinions. When HBO 53 wrote, “I don’t think Maggie’s pregnant, just to get my opinion out there,” HBO 16 replied, “No, but possibly I am and Jake in the red sweatshirt may be the father.” This putdown, which references a minor character who viciously beats David Fisher in an earlier episode and whom David keeps seeing in his mind as a result of the trauma, is particularly interesting, given that HBO 16 held the same view as HBO 53. Unlike the latter, HBO 16 had substantiated her position with a close reading of the text. Appealing to reason rather than shame, HBO 25 returned to the thread and finally ended the debate with a numbered list summarizing the “evidence”: HBO 25: Not trying to beat a dead horse here, but I just watched “Everyone’s Waiting” for my second time and I have concluded there is no way Maggie was written to be pregnant or even ambiguous. Textual Poaching or Gamekeeping?

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1. We know she works as a pharmaceutical rep. 2. She was putting a sample pkg. of pills in her bag when her cell rang. 3. She was dressed as a drug rep. would be dressed, waiting for her chance to see the dr. as all reps must do. 4. She had a rolling business bag with her in addition to her carry bag. You don’t take a rolling bag to your dr. s appt! 5. Ball wrote no dialogue or symptoms that would indicate she was pregnant, yet he showed the viewer how each characters life progressed and how each would die. I think there are some people (for whatever reason) want Maggie to be pregnant?! And are overlooking the obvious.

TWOP Strategies The first exchange on the TWOP speculative thread is almost a mirror image of that on HBO: TWOP 1: I’m also pretty damn sure that Maggie wasn’t at the doctor for a check-up. There’s a loose Fisher out there somewhere. TWOP 2: Oh yeah. TWOP 3: Maggie was at Doctors working. She would have been showing by then at least 12 weeks. TWOP 4: She was a Pharm/drug rep right? They have set appointment times for a lot of their meetings with doctors. TWOP 5: I like how it was left purposely ambiguous—it would have been too obvious to have her pregnant. But [it] is fun to wonder. Also liked how she rewrote history when speaking to Ruth—if I recall correctly, she was not particularly happy in the afterglow of their lovemaking. I’m not sure if she was being kind to Ruth, or trying to comfort herself. TWOP 6: . . . When Ruth calls Maggie it’s at least 4 months after Nate’s death (after they go to see Willa/Maya at Bren’s) and probably a bit later than that—and Maggie looked pretty thin to me. She’s a drug rep, was dressed in a suit. . . . I don’t think she was pregnant—it looked very much like business to me. TWOP 7: I agree, most likely she was there because as a pharmaceutical rep, she has appointments in doctors’ offices constantly, every working day. TWOP 8: Maggie: I don’t think she was preggers. It looked like she had a little case with her, the kind that she might use to schlepp around her samples. 300

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TWOP 2: Good point. Although she was sitting with other patients and didn’t the receptionist say “the doctor will be with you now” or something like that? I’m not sure if that’s what would be said to a drug rep. Perhaps. I have to watch the show over again. I love that they left this ambiguous. The first two posters embraced the possibility of Maggie being pregnant and did not concern themselves with the accuracy of their interpretation vis-à-vis authorial meaning. Yet TWOP 2 immediately acknowledged the points that TWOP 6, TWOP 7, and TWOP 8 made about the character’s job and appearance and, after adding another observation about the scene, moved to take up TWOP 5’s position. TWOP 5, like HBO 2, HBO 4, and, to an extent, HBO 51, delighted in what TWOP 5 saw as intentional ambiguity, understood as an indicator of “quality” television (“it would have been too obvious to have her pregnant”). Interestingly, when TWOP 6 replied to further develop her argument later in the thread, she added the following fannish response: So in my version of the end of SFU, the ferret [Maggie] did not have Nate’s child.6 But she did find love and have another child with a nice Quaker man in Peoria, or wherever. (i’m keeping the hope alive, forgiving all, and giving out happy endings all around in the Photogenic version of the non-wrapped up threads) The majority of TWOP posters, like those participating in the HBO forum, relied on strategy 1 and to a lesser extent strategy 3, although personal experience was drawn on even less often on TWOP. Strategy 2 was rarely used, most likely because the TWOP posters had yet to visit the HBO site to read the “official” obituaries. Strategy 4 on TWOP was the least common, as it was on HBO, and was mobilized, with one exception, by those who concluded that Maggie was pregnant: TWOP 12’s statement “I have monster sized Plasma tv and Ferret looked totally preggers to me on it” is an example. The difference between the TWOP posts that argued against the pregnancy narrative or ambiguity and the other TWOP posts and HBO posts in general was a greater attention to detail, indicating a strong investment in bourgeois aesthetics and a transposed mastery of the “quality” televisual code. The following is an exchange on Maggie’s posture: TWOP 35: At one point Maggie has her hand on hip like she’s a pregnant woman finding leverage. TWOP 37: She struck that pose a number of times before the issue of pregnancy reared its ugly head. TWOP 40: Thank you, 37. One place we see Maggie in this particular pose is when Brenda walks in on Nate and Maggie having a quiet conversation at the funeral home, just before the Quaker “silent Textual Poaching or Gamekeeping?

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worship.” She has one hand on Nate’s arm and the other pressed to her hip. Count me in the group that thinks she’s not pregnant. She’d be some 4 months along and would certainly be showing something. On the HBO forum, the discussion of Maggie’s posture, quoted in the previous section, never became more detailed than the first post’s in that exchange (HBO 15: “When Maggie was on the phone she put the flat of her hand to her back as if it was sore or needed support. This is something that pregnant woman do all the time”). The last poster has an especially good memory for minute details, for the scene this poster described is from episode 59, “Singing for Our Lives,” originally broadcast five weeks prior to the finale ( HBO 8: “I think the ‘twist’ that Tina was talking about was the affair that led to Nate’s demise in ‘Singing for Our Lives’ Episode 59”). Others stepped back from the particulars of the scene and commented on authorial intention in light of the series narrative: TWOP 9: I thought the doctor scene was straightforward. We all know what Maggie’s job was. All told, Maggie was a pretty flat character who had a lot projected on her (both by the characters—Nate I’m talking to you—and the viewers). Her purpose in this scene was to (a) confirm what Brenda had told Ruth [about the affair] (which Ruth doubly suspected was true after her conversation with George) and (b) give Ruth some peace over Nate’s last moments. I think this is what allowed Ruth to finally warm up to Brenda and understand what she had been through with Nate’s death. The scene on the stairs where Ruth told her, “He loved you the best he could” (or to that effect) was her peace offering. That is where they were finally family. Aside from the “shout out” to Nate, this poster decoupled authorial meaning from fannish desires. TWOP 31 did the same in the following post but went a step further, chastising those who fail to respect the limits imposed by bourgeois aesthetics: TWOP 31: On Maggie’s potential pregnancy: Anything’s possible, but there are so little facts supporting it, I think it is safe to say that the writers did not intend for the viewers to dwell on this possibility. There is just too much room for speculation there. We don’t know if she is on birth control, has had her tubes tied, etc. Even if she is pregnant, in 4 months it is entirely possible that she is carrying some other man’s baby. Or she could have had an abortion. Or a miscarriage. Etc. Etc. Etc. At some point, you have to make a distinction between “interpreting” the script and “rewriting” the script. The “Maggie” thread on TWOP effectively ended, as did the one on HBO, with one regular poster mocking another’s fannish response: 302

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TWOP 41: Oh well, screw logic. I want to believe that she’s pregnant so I’m going to go with that TWOP 37: I want to believe that Maggie was an alien sent to steal Nate’s life force. So, that’s what I’ll believe.

Lessons Well Learned: Print Competencies in the Digital Age As the foregoing discussion has indicated, fans do not live up to their reputation as uncritical dupes of the culture industry or as rebellious poachers who hijack authorial meaning. Discussion on the HBO and TWOP forums demonstrates that both sets of posters have learned their lessons in bourgeois aesthetics well, the large majority respecting the boundary between thoughtful speculation based on a close reading of the text and wild speculation based on personal whim. Their emotional attachment to the text and, for some, their attachment to other fans in the community make the quest for authorial meaning pleasurable. Indeed, even the pleasures associated with polysemy are wrapped up in authorial intention. At the same time, they feel no need to distance themselves from their emotional attachments in favor of “objective” interpretation and appreciation of the text. Contemporary classroom practices have ensured that fans are comfortable with both close reading and reader response. A second conclusion to be drawn is that some fans have learned their lessons better than others. To use an educational analogy, the TWOP class has a higher concentration of “A” and “B+” students, with higher levels of cultural capital with which to meet and exceed standard competencies, than the HBO class. Still, caution must be exercised in making generalizations about fans’ interpretive practices. This study focused on a “quality” text, which in itself may apply a certain kind of discursive pressure to read “respectfully.” Would this still be the primary strategy with texts of less cultural worth? Nancy Baym makes the case that central to interpreting soap operas is personalization, one aspect of my strategy 3. She also points out that many soap fans are highly critical of the narratives and poke fun at them. I would add that such fans are most likely elite fans, who have the cultural and linguistic resources to compose witty messages about their guilty pleasure. Further study needs to be done on a range of fandoms for a range of television texts, including the popular reality television shows. Let me conclude by gesturing to the larger implications of this study beyond media fandom. Many people, ranging from conservative education critics to hypertext theorists, are convinced that the end of the Age of Print is nigh. Their positions on either side of the “hooray/boo” (Hartley) binary, moreover, produce very different conclusions about children growing up with computers, DVDs, and the Internet. These youths will either lose the critical ability to follow narrative logic or will be freed from the tyranny of it—seen as enforced by print technologies. I would suggest that, like the future of the Textual Poaching or Gamekeeping?

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author, the future of the book in general and “good” books in particular, along with the reading practices that surround them, is secured as long as mass literacy and cultural reproduction remain the foundational focus of classroom instruction.

Notes 1. William Shatner is the Canadian-born actor best known for his role as Captain James T. Kirk on the original Star Trek series. He appeared on Saturday Night Live in a sketch mocking fans of the series (“Trekkies”), which concluded with him telling them to “get a life” (Jenkins 9–10). 2. Usenet was started in the mid-1970s and reached the height of its popularity in the mid- to late 1990s, with over 10,000 newsgroups organized under the following major categories: alt, comp, misc, news, rec, sci, soc, and talk. Most fan-related groups are clustered under rec (e.g., rec.arts.tv.soaps) or alternative (e.g., alt.tv.x-files). 3. For those unfamiliar with Six Feet Under, it concerns members of the Fisher family. The father, Nathaniel Senior, is killed in a car accident in the series premiere and leaves the funeral business that is run out of the family home to his two sons, Nate and David. The other family members are Ruth, Nathaniel’s widow, and Claire, the much younger sister of the two brothers. For more details, visit http://www.hbo.com/sixfeet under. 4. Because I understand computer-mediated communication as a hybrid form of communication (oral-written), I have not inserted the standard expression “[sic]” to indicate a spelling or typographical error when it occurs in the data sample. Any apparent errors should therefore be understood to be in the original text. 5. Because I did not conduct interviews with the posters that asked them to indicate their gender, I have used a gender-specific pronoun only for posters who selfidentified directly or indirectly in the data collected. 6. Nate’s wife, Brenda, referred pejoratively to Maggie as “the ferret” in episode 59, and fans who do not like the Maggie character have appropriated that moniker.

References Barthes, Roland. “The Death of the Author.” Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David H. Richter. 2nd ed. Boston: St. Martin’s, 2000. 253–57. Baym, Nancy K. Tune in, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 2000. Bourdieu, Pierre. “Artistic Taste and Cultural Capital.” Culture and Society: Contemporary Debates. Ed. Jeffrey C. Alexander and Steven Seidman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. 205–15. ———. “The Economics of Linguistic Exchanges.” Social Science Information 16 (1977): 645–68. de Certeau, Michel. The Practices of Everyday Life. Trans. Steven Randall. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. 304

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Doyle, John. “Six Feet Under Bows out Gracefully.” Globe and Mail, 19 Aug. 2005, R29. Foucault, Michel. “Appendix: The Discourse on Language.” The Archaeology of Knowledge. Trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith. New York: Dorset, 1972. 215–37. Frow, John. Marxism and Literary History. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986. Gee, James. Social Linguistics and Literacies: Ideology and Discourses. New York: Falmer, 1990. Hartley, John. “Television and the Power of Dirt.” Tele-ology: Studies in Television. New York: Routledge, 1992. 21–42. Hills, Matt. Fan Cultures. New York: Routledge, 2002. Jenkins, Henry. Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture. New York: Routledge, 1992. Rabinowitz, Peter. “Actual Reader and Authorial Reader.” Falling into Theory: Conflicting Views on Reading Literature. Ed. David H. Richter. 2nd ed. Boston: St. Martin’s, 2000. 257–67.

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Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television Women Watching Oprah in an African American Hair Salon ANDREA PRESS AND CAMILLE JOHNSON-YALE

I arranged with Janelle to show up at 10:30 on a Thursday morning. When I arrived at the scheduled time, the salon was locked. As I waited in the parking lot I noticed a woman in a battered old car right next to me in the parking lot. She was sleeping. Sensing me watching her, she stirred and sat up. “Are you waiting for Janelle?” I inquired. “Yeah, she told me to come at 9:30, so I’m waiting. I know she’ll show up.” She had been napping in her car for an hour waiting for Janelle to open the shop. I realized that now I had no idea when Janelle would show up, so I ran out to the bank, as I had forgotten to bring cash for my subject payment to Janelle. When I returned almost an hour later Janelle was just opening the salon. Her client, who had waited all this time, was still waiting for her appointment

to begin. That was when I realized that this hair salon represented a different type of space than I’d been used to in the all white salons I frequented. —Andrea Press, Fieldnotes

Ethnography in the Hair Salon This essay reports findings from an ethnographic project in which we sought to understand how the public engage media in public settings. The site of the ethnography discussed in this chapter is an African American hair salon located in a midsized town in the midwestern United States. The salon’s owner, Janelle, had been part of a parent project studying people’s engagement of public issues through media, funded by the National Science Foundation. It became apparent through media diaries and interviews conducted for the project that her salon was a place where she often engaged media and at times participated in discussions about public issues featured by those media. Janelle’s salon presented a unique opportunity to observe people interacting with media naturally in the context of their daily lives and routines, an approach to audience studies that has generally been avoided because of its inherent logistical difficulties. Janelle’s salon also offered a chance to better understand how women in particular—historically constructed as primarily occupying a domestic sphere and, therefore, less important to discussions of democratic processes conducted in the public domain—were in fact engaging in discussions of public issues in public places and perhaps doing so through engagement with media not traditionally considered political in nature, namely daytime talk shows. We feel this project makes an important contribution to a tradition of research that has questioned the critical dismissal of women’s media consumption as unimportant to theories of the public sphere. Since the critical proclamations of the Frankfurt School against the “culture industry,” popular media, and particularly those enjoyed primarily by female audiences, such as romance novels and soap operas, have been under attack as anti-intellectual, socially deviant dross. Even more, these media forms have been constructed as insignificant within the rarified process of political discourse. A significant and continually growing body of work challenges these dismissals, and these challenges have been central for feminist communication studies.1 We see this study as contributing to this tradition. What we add are ethnographic vignettes of naturally occurring discussion in the presence of ambient television, which is often heard in the background of the salon.2 Few have used this method to record either the actual reception of television shows or the actual occurrence—or lack thereof—of political discussions, especially in a female setting.3 Most studies that have 308

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used ethnography to investigate the presence or absence of public talk have not involved the presence of media or have focused on male spaces such as bars (e.g., Oldenburg),4 which parallel the original male-dominated coffeehouses discussed by Habermas. Nina Eliasoph notes the absence of political talk in various public spaces in the United States, again using the bar as one of her examples but supplementing it with the more traditionally feminine space of the PTA (26). Our findings contrast directly with hers, in that we do find significant presence of political discussion in a public place, and specifically, the feminized space of the salon. Perhaps the presence of the television, almost always on in the background of the salon, accounts for this difference. Or possibly the nature of the salon group—a “work-family” in the tradition of the 1970s–1980s television sitcom—explains it.5 In any case, the discussions we observed in Janelle’s salon regarding important social issues such as race, class, and parental rights provide evidence of a rich public forum, concerned with more than the “pathology of the individual” that has usually been seen as the only concern of female talk show audiences.6 Further, we assert that this example of political talk in Janelle’s salon helps us to pinpoint an actually occurring form of certain concepts in our literature often recognized as vague—notions such as “domestic space,” the “public,” and the “public sphere.” At this level, our study engages feminist critiques of the public sphere (e.g., Fraser; Young) and certain feminist audience research (e.g., McRobbie’s) that urge that the notion of public spaces must be broadened if we are to capture women’s participation in the public arena. Lynn Spigel’s work is also significant in this regard, as she points to the way television has been socially constructed as a medium of domestic space, used to reinforce a gendered division of labor according to categories of domestic versus nondomestic, which implies that more political importance accrues to activities outside the home (98). This pattern is interesting when talking about Janelle’s salon, because it works the other way around. The salon is a work space made more leisurely, yet also more politically engaged, by television. It is these types of slippages in notions of the public sphere and media—theorized by Spigel, Fraser, and others— that we begin to address here in observation of the actual practices of women as they engage in public life and public talk in the presence of media. Before our discussion of our observations, it will be useful to have an orientation to some of the vast literature regarding women as media audiences, as well as the literature that has addressed the potential role of talk shows— including a favorite program in the salon, Oprah—as legitimate sites for political discourse.

Women and Audience Studies The subject of women as audiences of television and film has been studied in terms of contemporary reception and historical construction, particularly Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television

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through a feminist analytical lens. Spigel has provided a cultural history of the gendered representation of television since World War II by television manufacturers and broadcasters. She argues that television has been culturally relegated to a place of “domestic leisure,” a place often constructed as feminine and nonproductive (73). Others have looked at the way gender in relation to class, age, and race may frame female audiences’ understandings of media texts. Through in-depth interviewing and program analyses, Andrea Press has discussed the way women of different age and class groups relate to representations of women on primetime television. She found that while lower-class female audience members thought television was unrealistic in its portrayals of women with careers and families, they were generally more accepting of television as a whole compared to their middle-class counterparts (138). For Press, this seemingly contradictory reading of television content by female audiences, who were both passive and resistant to its construction of women, brings to the foreground questions of the role of media in maintaining a dominant hegemonic ideology, which inherently undermines a critical analysis (176–77). Media’s hegemonic function was also a primary concern for Jacqueline Bobo in her influential study of black female audiences of the film adaptation of Alice Walker’s The Color Purple, a novel about oppression and liberation of black women in the rural South. Bobo was initially unsettled by the overwhelmingly positive response of black middle-class women to Steven Spielberg’s filmic presentation of the narrative. However, she concluded that their response might be understood as a counterhegemonic reading by a specific “interpretive community.” Bobo explains the process: “Working together the women utilize representations of black women that they deem valuable, in productive and politically useful ways. . . . [They are] members of an audience who have been brought together to talk about their relationship to specific cultural texts” (22). In other words, it is an audience that at once celebrates its collective identity and actively negotiates and reclaims representations of its community in popular media. In both Press’s and Bobo’s accounts of female media audiences, women are given credit for participating in important cultural dialogue with the media they consume. These researchers also concede that women can perform this important cultural work in relation to popular entertainment media, a point that has been elaborated by scholars specifically examining the role of television talk shows in public life. A further study foreshadowed this one in examining the way the political content of prime-time television could structure women’s talk about the moral issue of abortion in semipublic settings, such as a living-room full of friends and acquaintances. Press and Elizabeth Cole organized focus groups of friends, family, and acquaintances who met in living rooms to discuss various television shows they viewed that treated the subject in different ways. Contrary to the scholarly literature, Press and Cole’s study found that women, by their own accounts and examples, did engage in public talk about political and social issues, habitually and often in public settings (125–26). 310

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Press and Cole’s work was done at a time when daytime talk shows were just becoming extremely popular and did not address the implications of these. The talk show television genre, with its sometimes trashy, boisterous, and even chaotic veneer, has since been a subject of interest for both feminist media studies and cultural studies of the “public sphere.” Sonia Livingstone and Peter Lunt have addressed the way British talk shows may function as liminal spaces, in which constructions of the public sphere by dominant culture are challenged and where marginalized voices of the modern era—for example, black working-class women—can be heard and become a “legitimate cultural subject position” (177). Jane Shattuc has taken a similar position by providing a cultural history of the talk show, linking its gradual marginalization in American society to the rise and fall of “identity politics” since the radical political climate of the 1960s. She argues that talk shows rely on several conventions of identity politics, including a focus on the personal as a means for change, which fits uncomfortably with traditional masculinist constructions of a nondomestic, communal public engagement of social issues (90). Of particular interest to scholars looking at the place of talk shows in public life is the ubiquitous Oprah. The show can only be described as a behemoth within its genre, touting a global distribution to 121 countries, including Brazil, Saudi Arabia, India, and Rwanda. With an average nine million U.S. viewers per show and syndication in 215 domestic markets, Oprah has ranked as the number one talk show for nineteen of its twenty seasons since 1986 (“About Oprah” para. 4; Cox 70). Scholarly literature has approached the show with an interest in its construction of a parasocial relationship with its audience (Haag 120), its depiction of issues of race and gender (Peck 89), and its reception in non-U.S. settings (Wilson 89). Eva Illouz has written on the cultural phenomenon of Oprah, arguing that “Oprah Winfrey has become an international and a mighty (western) symbol, because she offers a new cultural form through which to present and process suffering generated by the ‘chaos’ of intimate social relationships, one of the major cultural features of the late modern era” (4–5). As important to researchers as Oprah’s impact on the cultural mediation of suffering and the positioning of the personal through her show is her economic impact as a powerful brand within the world of marketing. The Oprah Winfrey Book Club has been the primary focus of such scholarly work, examining the way Winfrey’s selection of literature for the club has blurred the lines between “high” culture forms and “low” culture consumption practices (Striphas 297; John Young 181). These studies have also looked at the way the club’s reading selection of predominantly African American authors has been interpreted by white female fans of the show. Much as Sut Jhally and Justin Lewis found “enlightened racism” among white fans of The Cosby Show, Kimberley Davis perceived a level of quasi-imperialist “racial sympathies” among some audience members, although she also proposes that these reactions could translate into positive social transformations regarding racism for those who experience them (399). An important point to be garnered from Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television

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Davis’s study is that the reactions of the white female fans indicate a complex intermingling of private political transformation with engagement of social issues in the public sphere. The literature on female audiences and the cultural (and perhaps political) implications of media, specifically television talk shows, suggests an important intersection between media engagement and public engagement by women. While theories of such engagements, as well as after-the-fact reflections on such engagements, have been provided within the literature, there is a need for documentation and reflection on the natural interplay between the public lives and thoughts of women with media as they occur in their daily lives. It is with this thought that we introduce Janelle and her salon, offering up what we believe are meaningful instances of women engaging in public talk, in a public setting, and in the presence of media.

Sister Streaks Salon Sister Streaks is a hair salon in a small midwestern town. It is rented by Janelle, its proprietor, an African American woman of thirty-seven. The salon is small, on a commercial street sandwiched between the downtown area to its west and the campus of a large public university to its east. It is housed in a simple, aluminum-sided, single-story structure, which is part of a makeshift strip mall containing only one other business—a barber shop—which never appears to be open. By contrast, the interior of Janelle’s salon has seen a great deal of foot traffic over the years, and the furnishings and linoleum are the worse for wear. A few fluorescent lights buzz overhead. Some Fridays the shop is crowded with others like Boris, an African American man who “rents a chair,” or Janelle’s daughter Tori, there to provide extra help. On other days it is relatively empty, with one or two women waiting while Janelle does hair for a third. All of the customers we saw her work on in seven months of almost weekly fieldwork in the salon were African American women, though occasionally we saw Boris working with a white client. There are three sections in the small shop. Immediately to the left as one walks in is the “business” section, consisting of a painted plywood counter, a cash register, and a few chairs. This part of the salon sits on a low platform set off from the rest of the salon; people rarely sit in it, except on days when it is very busy. The other half of the salon (the non-work-station area) is partially divided by a wall and a linen cabinet—plastered with photographs of Janelle’s immediate and extended family—that runs halfway through; the work station area on the left, together with the bathroom, is separated from the shampoo stations on the right of these dividers. In front of the wall are three chairs, the waiting area, and to the side are two large chair hair dryers. Above these dryers is a small television, perched on a shelf and easily viewable from everywhere in the salon except the dryers. A metal slotted magazine rack is mounted 312

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on the wall next to the dryers, filled with black hair magazines, popular entertainment rags such as People and Us Weekly, and black interest magazines, including Jet and Essence. In relation to the general social dynamics in the salon, Janelle functions partly like the moderator in a chat room, creating and maintaining the discursive spaces in the room. This role begins with the signs advertising the rules of the salon, posted on every surface: “no kids allowed unless they’re being serviced” (a rule we specifically saw broken many times); “salon rules: please no credit”; “I’m a cosmetologist not a magician-ologist”; “no foul language.” In conversations, Janelle responds rather than leads. She tends to ameliorate when the conversation becomes controversial. Even at times when she disagrees with what is being said, she might quietly express this disagreement, but she avoids making an issue of it. She controls the presence of time as well, since the large clock that oversees the salon is set about fifteen minutes ahead, making it very difficult for anyone else to figure out why each television show is starting late. Finally, her control of the remote control—she keeps it squarely by her work station at all times—allows her to both change the channels and control the volume, functions she exercises regularly throughout the day.7 For example, she notes when Oprah is broadcast each day and changes the channel to her, at the same time increasing the volume when she is especially interested in this show. What follows are accounts of particularly interesting days in the salon, during which viewings of Oprah sparked intense social and political discussion among the clients there. These accounts are drawn from multiple visits of one to three hours to the salon, particularly in the late afternoons when Oprah aired. While much of the conversation in the salon centered on personal issues—talk about family and children, mutual friends, romantic relationships, and so on—a few notable instances occurred in which the women addressed public issues such as Hurricane Katrina, parenthood and parent rights, the Iraq war, and racial prejudice in relation to television programs, particularly Oprah, playing in the salon. We will try to reproduce a little of the flow and then reflect on the kind of space this locale is for political conversation mixed with media reception. As Janelle’s media diary indicated, both take place here, and they take place in tandem. Because pinpointing this kind of process was our goal in the diary project, we thought a more in-depth investigation of this particular location might be fruitful. On the days recounted here, the issues raised were particularly interesting, especially when described within the context of the meanings the television presented in the interstices of the women’s political conversations.

Oprah and Hurricane Katrina The events surrounding Hurricane Katrina were of particular interest for Janelle and her customers, as many in the salon were either born in the Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television

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southern United States or had relatives living in the affected areas. Oprah Winfrey, also a southerner by birth, became directly involved in the aid effort following the disaster and dedicated two shows to telling the stories of hurricane victims in Louisiana and Mississippi, which the women in the salon had followed closely. During a salon visit shortly after the disaster occurred, a conversation about the hurricane arose when Janelle switched on Oprah in anticipation of seeing another report from the disaster site, only to find Oprah had returned to her regular programming schedule from her Chicago studios. While Oprah interviewed a woman about “Once in a Lifetime Dares” on the screen behind them, the women in the salon that day recounted personal stories about time spent in New Orleans, or survival stories they had heard from family and friends who had lived through the hurricane. Alma, a lively African American woman in her sixties who made occasional appearances in the salon, described how a cousin living in New Orleans, stranded in her flooded neighborhood, was rescued while clinging to a floating mattress. Alma then transitioned into a story from her childhood in New Orleans of being stalked by an alligator while catching crabs with her uncle. By her account, her uncle had swooped in and plucked her from a barrel she was floating on just in time before the alligator attacked. She then joked that she knew what was happening to all the abandoned pets being shown on the news coverage of the hurricane: “The alligators are eating ’em!” She bent over slapping her knee laughing, and everyone joined in—much-needed levity during a very intense and sad time. A few weeks later, when the much-covered evacuations of the hurricanedevastated areas in the South were complete, we visited the salon again. Again we witnessed conversations about the hurricane, many involving personal stories from contact with people affected by the disaster. But this time, many other disconcerting issues were intertwined in the conversations of the day, including the war in Iraq, crime, financial security, and family. When we arrived at the salon in the early afternoon, Judge Hatchett was on the television, and no one appeared to be paying attention. Hatchett, a black female judge with a knack for cutting through the nonsense of the civil cases presented to her, discussed a case in which a woman was being sued by a former boyfriend for what he claimed were unpaid loans, and what she claimed were gifts. The salon customers were uninterested, the television functioning only as background noise. While most occasionally glanced at it, their stares were empty, and they did not seem to be hearing the dialogue or following the stories. A woman named Mattie, whom we had not seen previously, was in the salon on this day, waiting to have her long, straight hair done. She was pregnant, due in two weeks with her third child. She told the story of her husband, who was training in Texas or California for deployment to Iraq in November. He had been in Korea for two years, but of course that situation was very different, since there was no active fighting while he was there. 314

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The conversation turned to the dangers of duty in Iraq and what the men must face there. Mattie and Janelle were detailing the problems. “The problem is the women and children. They come up to you and act all friendly. Then the next day, they bring bombs. It’s their beliefs, their religion, and everything else.” Janelle had seen this on a television special about the situation in Iraq. Mattie returned, “Donnie don’t want nothing to do with the people. He stays away.” She went on to talk about her husband’s best friend, currently in Iraq. They had not heard from him; he was in communications out there, and they were worried. The conversation turned to another of Donnie’s friends, who had been kicked out of the service for being too fat. Janelle said she would just eat and eat if that were a possibility. Then they took up the topic of contractors, men working independently in Iraq. The man Mattie knew was a laundry worker, who, she said, “makes $10,000 a month, that’s tax-free money. The supervisor makes $12,000.” Her friend told her it’s not very dangerous if you only do what you’re supposed to be doing, which is to do your job, stay where you’re working, and not go sightseeing or trying to meet the people. Without saying it, we all knew that she was referring to the videos that had recently surfaced of kidnapped independent contractors in Iraq being executed by their captors. There was an uncomfortable pause, accompanied by a sense that these were the kinds of things Mattie wanted to believe—maybe had to believe—given that her husband would be in Iraq soon. Janelle was supportive and told her it sounded like a good opportunity. On the television, the sitcom Mad about You, starring Helen Hunt, had just begun. No one noticed that it was time for Oprah and that the set was not tuned to that show. The talk continued. At 4:10, Janelle realized that it was past Oprah time. “Is anyone watching this?” she asked innocently. “I want to see what Oprah is up to.” She changed the channel, and the talk turned to Oprah. “I saw her hair extensions showing through last time she was on,” Janelle joked. “She needs to come to Sister Streaks.” Something in her voice suggested that she believed such a visit might be possible, and that interpretation was confirmed when we learned later that Janelle had written to Oprah offering to redo the extensions. Oprah’s first guest was Charlize Theron, a blond actress with skin that glows white, the color of Marilyn Monroe’s. She had made a film, North Country, wherein she “dirties” up her look to play a working-class woman who takes on the establishment. (In her previous movie, Monster, Charlize—in an Academy Award–winning performance—had played a serial killer from a poor, abused background who was executed, a character based on a real story, as was her newest one.) The women were attentive to Charlize. She attracted them. They wanted to see what she had to say, what Oprah said to her. Yet the pull of the more immediate conversation in the salon took over, and they couldn’t maintain their attentiveness. Janelle bustled around the salon, putting one woman under a dryer and taking another to the shampoo area. Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television

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Charlize’s mother came on, and Janelle, washing hair, was barely able to view the small television over her shoulder. “Is that her mom?” “Yeah.” “I like her mom.” Janelle was impressed. Oprah was talking to the mom, who seemed to be sitting in the audience that day. Charlize raved about how her mom had taught her to think for herself and helps her make decisions by reading through the scripts Charlize sends her. It was widely reported in the tabloids that Charlize’s mom had killed her father while living in South Africa in what was ultimately judged to be self-defense: Her father apparently abused both Charlize and her mother. This subject did not come up with Janelle or the others in the salon, or in the interview with Oprah. The earnestness of Oprah’s conversation about the closeness of the mother and daughter, however, seemed to suggest this subtext. Janelle then ignored the television, talking with the younger woman in the chair about the kids going to school and the work of getting kids off in the mornings. They debated the usefulness of school uniforms (“We had them in Texas. They’re better,” Mattie claimed). Janelle asked Camille to explain the story that followed Charlize Theron’s slot on Oprah; Janelle had lost track in the conversation about schools, yet her attention was drawn to the woman who had begun speaking. Camille caught her up: It was the story of an air traffic controller who had blown the whistle on the men she worked with who were playing chicken and other dangerous games with the airplanes they controlled. The men and their bosses harassed her until she almost quit. Janelle was interested; something about the story grabbed her. On this day in the salon, the television attracted much more interest than usual. Janelle focused on Oprah, but often she did not; often she ignored the television talk in the swing of events that constituted her work in the salon. But then the conversation shifted, and her attention with it. Mattie began to speak about her impending birth. Patrice, another woman in the salon, brought up an article in Essence magazine of a few months earlier, which Janelle had read also. It named the small town of Killeen, Texas, home of an American military base, as the best town in the United States for meeting single black men. The women all laughed (Janelle, like Patrice, is single). This reference propelled them all into a group discussion of their friends who had been affected by the recent hurricanes. Mattie knew Killeen well, because it was the place where she and her husband had last lived together. She said the town had everything you need and that you did not really need to leave the base. Mattie and her husband noticed right away that the town seemed relatively crime free. However, a friend had said that since Hurricane Katrina things had changed quite a bit. Many people had come there from New Orleans, and crime had gone up. She heard about a family who took in a couple from New Orleans and became crime victims—one family member was raped and another murdered. It was unclear whether this story was something she 316

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heard from a friend or in the news. As 5 p.m. approached, the salon began to fill to capacity, with the after-work clients popping their heads in the door to ask Janelle if she could fit them in. The more people in the salon, the more difficult it became to follow any one conversation—some talked softly on cell phones, others read magazines, and Janelle used the hair dryer, adding to the overall din in the salon.

Racism, Oprah, and Political Talk While not a common subject in the salon, racism was explicitly discussed in a few notable instances. On one particular day, a young African American college student sitting in Janelle’s chair raised the subject. It was rare for Janelle to be working on a college girl, and the conversation reflected some of the tensions between their points of view. The subject of visiting Chicago came up, and the girl, Lisa, mentioned that she found the city to be an extremely racist environment throughout. Janelle’s face registered her almost total disagreement with this statement, unusual in our observations in the salon. “Do you really think so?” she replied, in a mild voice, and then dropped the topic. But it was extremely clear to Press (who was in the salon that day) that Janelle did not agree at all with Lisa’s statement and that she had made a conscious decision not to pursue the details of her disagreement, or to register it more forcibly. While the Chicago discussion did not immediately deal with media, other public talk about racism occurred in which media were central. On one occasion, the women in the salon discussed a recent incident in Paris in which Oprah claimed to have been discriminated against by the high-end handbag boutique Hermès. As Oprah explained, she and a small entourage went to the boutique to buy a last-minute gift for a friend. The store was closing, although there were several people inside for a private event. When Oprah asked to quickly buy one item, she was turned away by the manager, an act Oprah interpreted as racially motivated. Janelle and a few of her patrons were in wholehearted agreement with Oprah’s reading of the situation. Janelle felt the story had much broader implications than the specific incident itself: “Oprah has a great deal of influence worldwide, [and] countries like France should be concerned with their image. They should want to make a good impression for tourists” (Janelle, personal communication). Eventually, the United States CEO of Hermès appeared on Oprah’s show, offering a personal apology for the events. Janelle’s description of the incident seemed to communicate her sympathy and identification with Oprah and her entourage. This response is at first confusing, given that Oprah is clearly in a social and economic class well out of Janelle and her clients’ reach. However, Bobo found a similar prioritizing of racial, gendered, and class identities among the women she interviewed Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television

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about The Color Purple, with race overriding class as a group identification for her black female participants. Similarly, Janelle and her patrons engaged in a certain selectivity as a black female “interpretive community.” It mattered less that Oprah was wealthy and more that she was an African American woman. It seemed that racial, national, and gendered identities trumped class identity. A final incident in which Janelle openly engaged public issues and the media in her salon, particularly in regard to race, involved a discussion of the Million More March of October 2005. The march occurred on the tenth anniversary of the Million Man March on Washington, D.C., which had been organized by Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam to highlight the needs and responsibilities of African American men. The commemorative march, also staged in Washington, had a more open agenda; men, women, and children representing diverse religious, political, and cultural perspectives were invited to attend and engage in discussions of the cultural and economic development of African Americans, as well as more controversial topics such as reparations and the “prison industrial complex.”8 On an early fall afternoon, Press happened to ask Janelle if she had any plans to travel soon. In her diaries, she occasionally mentioned driving to Chicago or St. Louis to visit family. She also went to hairdresser conventions from time to time. She had a picture of such a trip to Las Vegas pinned to her linen closet along with a huge collage of various pictures of family and friends. She said that in fact she was planning a trip to Washington, D.C., with her eleven-year-old son to go to the Million More March (she called it the Million Man March, though she was obviously referring to the Million More March). I asked if any other children were going, and she said she might take one of her daughters and maybe let each child bring a friend. The details of the trip were a bit vague beyond this; she did not mention where she had heard about the event or why she was motivated to go, only that a bus trip would be involved. Interestingly, Oprah had not discussed the Million More March on her program but had instead focused on a similar female-centric event—the Million Mom March, an event held in Washington, D.C., in 2000 involving moms lobbying for more restrictive gun control laws. A couple of months later, the Million More March came up again in conversation in the salon. Janelle and a client had been engaged in a conversation about father–child relationships in divorced families. Janelle mentioned that she had been to a comedy concert featuring Ricky Smiley and that he had “got serious” about fathers who need to provide child support and fight for access to their kids. In the background, Judge Hatchett discussed DNA results with a couple disputing the true identity of their child’s father. The women, however, did not seem aware of the show. After a few minutes, Janelle switched the television over to Oprah, who was interviewing the black supermodel Tyson Beckford. Janelle grumbled, “He’s arrogant as hell.” Another woman added that she preferred a particular black soap opera star, to which Janelle replied, “Oh yeah, he was at the Million Man March.” Press asked Janelle how her trip 318

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to the march had gone, a little surprised that she had not mentioned it at this point. She listed a few more celebrities she had seen while there, although her primary assessment involved the fact that there were not many good-looking men there. Instead, she thought the men she saw in the D.C. area bars were too “business-y” and “nerdy.” “Sounds alright to me!” one woman responded, making everyone laugh. The conversation then shifted to talk about dating and being a single mom, never returning that afternoon to discussion of the march. Looking back on Janelle’s involvement and conversations regarding the Million More March, it would be easy to dismiss her actions as apolitical. However, other evidence suggests that Janelle and her clients’ talk about men could also be interpreted as having a very public and political nature. Implicit in the life of the salon is the fact that Janelle and many of her clients are single mothers. The conversations the women engaged in about men often involved social and legal issues—talk about how a friend was able to use the legal system to get child support from a “deadbeat dad” or how another woman was coping with the public trial of an ex-boyfriend who had molested her young daughter. These conversations mirrored the subject and tenor of the talk shows and “judge” shows constantly on in the background of the salon. But more important, Janelle’s seemingly personal interest in the Million More March—to meet attractive men—could be read as part of the political agenda of the event and of single parenthood in African American culture. The march intentionally highlighted the gender politics of African American culture and promised a new future in which black men would be more empowered and engaged in their public and private lives. For Janelle, this emphasis and promise were obviously important messages she wanted her children, and particularly her son, to experience firsthand, but the march also represented a cultural and political agenda of hope for single black women like herself. In the three instances of public talk described here, Janelle’s explicit position on racism and racial awareness demonstrated a willingness to engage difficult public issues not fully expressed in her diaries or interviews. Such issues were never mentioned, not even in passing, in the interviews in which she specifically discussed media preferences and perceived media biases. Again, her diary entries provided only the most tenuous insights on critical issues such as racism, which were more directly addressed in the salon. For instance, in one diary entry she complained that it seemed like African American athletes were being singled out on the issue of steroid use: “I see they are testing a lot of the athletes for steroids. The only problem is, they all seem to be African-Americans that are being questioned. I agree wrong is wrong and people should be disciplined for these types of actions, but I’m sure there are others that are doing the same thing” (Janelle, media diary, Nov. 2004 entry). While she appears to take a clear position on the issue of drug testing, racial discrimination is merely implied and not named. These issues were important to Janelle—important enough to travel several hundred miles to attend a highly publicized, highly politicized event such as the Million More March. Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television

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But it was in the salon, in the presence of media and in the presence of her mostly like-minded clients, that these thoughts and engagements were more fully expressed.

Conclusions We have documented here examples of the flow of political conversation in public and in the presence of television. Anna McCarthy offers an intensive history of the presence of ambient television in a variety of settings in American life. Here we supplement that analysis with an in-depth discussion of day-to-day life with ambient television in a hair salon in a small midwestern town. In the process, we challenge McCarthy’s definition of “ambient.” Although the television in this salon is both public and in the background, in McCarthy’s sense of ambient, the television is also, to an extent, Janelle’s private set, something she puts on, changes channels on, and occasionally watches with great interest in between the more demanding moments of her work day. In this way, the television seems to passively reflect Janelle’s worldview to anyone who enters the salon. The people and issues she deems important, particularly Oprah Winfrey and the stories featured on her show, are literally put on a pedestal in the salon via the little television mounted above everyone’s head. Much like the women in Bobo’s study, Janelle celebrates the media texts that resonate with the interpretive community of black women that visit her salon. Also like the women in Bobo’s study, Janelle and her clients must sometimes overlook the inherent contradictions Oprah presents as a cultural icon for working-class African American women like themselves. The stories collected in Janelle’s salon also seem to indicate that the interactions and interplay of media and public and personal talk in the salon were intricate and unpredictable. It was difficult to know how subjects such as Hurricane Katrina, which appealed to the women on several personal and cultural levels, would be engaged by them. Even the absence of the subject in the media, as in the incident in the salon when Oprah had returned to regular programming, was enough to spur renewed conversation on the hurricane situation. And as time wore on after the disaster, other public issues, especially those specifically affecting many African Americans, such as the Iraq War, became intrinsically linked in their conversations. But even more compelling is the delicate interaction between personal experience and public consciousness for Janelle and her salon clients. Each offered her personal connections to the hurricane tragedy, while readily recognizing the way these experiences connected to larger social issues such as crime, disaster preparedness, war, employment, family safety, and finally, racism. In this way, our findings would appear to align with what Livingstone and Lunt, as well as Davis, have theorized as the potential role of talk shows in public discourse: that they have the ability to activate public consciousness and productive debate for otherwise 320

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marginalized members of society, even if through personal experience and “identity politics.” In this small study, which is drawn from a much larger, multimethod study involving interviews, media diaries, and participant observation in several midwestern communities, we find that television in the African American women’s hair salon becomes an integral part of women’s ongoing discussions with one another, discussions that often engage social, political, and at times moral themes, which are themselves quite often central to the media narratives featured on the television in the salon and in other media to which the women refer. This study is one small attempt to capture the texture of our mediated, media-saturated lives, a texture that poses issues that often elude the current mix of methods we have available to inform our analyses. We feel that our main contribution here is a method of listening, participating, and understanding that differs from the methods with which we began (in-depth interviews and media diaries) and that consequently offers a different perspective on the role media play in these women’s lives and thought processes. We hope to integrate all these methods to construct a fuller picture of media as an influential participant in our political and social conversations.

Notes 1. See the journal Feminist Media Studies for examples of this feminist audience research. See also Radway; Press; Press and Cole; Spigel; Brown. Nancy Fraser and others have criticized the patriarchal dimensions of Habermas’s theory of the public sphere. This is a tradition within which we also locate our work. 2. See McCarthy for an intelligent discussion of the role, occurrence, and meaning of ambient television. 3. The anthropologist Yolanda Majors has conducted extensive ethnographic work in African American hair salons. But while her work is concerned with the cultural, she has primarily focused on linguistics and the construction of a collaborative knowledge community in salons and not on media use. 4. Ray Oldenburg includes “beauty parlors” in the extended title of his book on “third places,” The Great Good Place. However, Oldenburg does not discuss beauty parlors specifically in his book, arguing generally that women lack public gathering places and are limited in their access to such places by domestic obligations of family and marriage (230). 5. Ella Taylor describes the television “work-family” of the popular situation comedy shows of the 1970s and the 1980s, including The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Murphy Brown, and others, and how this changed the notion of domestic space on television (126). We argue that Janelle’s salon is somewhere between the traditionally domestic space of the family and the semipublic space of the workplace. 6. For examples of negative framing of talk shows and their audiences, see Abt and Seesholtz. Political Talk and the Flow of Ambient Television

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7. Janelle’s use of the remote control follows the tradition of the fathers reported in David Morley’s now classic Family Television. 8. For more information on the history and agendas of the Million More March, see http://www.millionmoremarch.com.

References “About Oprah.” Oprah.com. 18 Nov. 2005. http://www2.oprah.com/about/press/ releases/200511press_releases_20051118.html. Abt, Vicki, and Mel Seesholtz. “The Shameless World of Phil, Sally, and Oprah: Television Talk Shows and the Deconstructing of Society.” Journal of Popular Culture 28.1 (1994): 171–91. Bobo, Jacqueline. Black Women as Cultural Readers. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Brown, Mary Ellen. Soap Opera and Women’s Talk: The Pleasure of Resistance. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage, 1994. Butler, Judith, and Joan W. Scott. Feminists Theorize the Political. New York: Routledge, 1992. Cox, Gordon. “Oprah Heats Branding Iron.” Variety, 3 Oct. 2005, 70, 74. Davis, Kimberly Chabot. “Oprah’s Book Club and the Politics of Cross-racial Empathy.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 7 (2004): 399–419. Dibbell, Julian. My Tiny Life. New York: Holt, 1998. Eliasoph, Nina. Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Fraser, Nancy. “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender.” New German Critique 35 (1985): 97–131. Haag, Laurie. “Oprah Winfrey: The Construction of Intimacy in the Talk Show Setting.” Journal of Popular Culture 26.4 (1993): 115–22. Illouz, Eva. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. Janelle. Media diary. ———. Personal communication, 22 July 2005. Jhally, Sut, and Justin Lewis. Enlightened Racism: The Cosby Show, Audiences, and the Myth of the American Dream. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1992. Jones, Felecia. “The Black Audience and the BET Channel.” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 34 (1990): 477–86. Kaplan, E. Ann. “Feminist Criticism and Television.” Channels of Discourse. Ed. Robert C. Allen. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987. 211–53. Landes, Joan B. Feminism, the Public and the Private. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Livingstone, Sonia. “The Changing Nature of Audiences: From the Mass Audience to the Interactive Media User.” A Companion to Media Studies. Ed. Angharad Valdivia. Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. 337–59. Livingstone, Sonia, and Peter Lunt. Talk on Television: Audience Participation and Public Debate. London: Routledge, 1992. 322

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Majors, Yolanda. “ ‘I wasn’t scared of them, they were scared of me’: Constructions of Self/Other in a Midwestern Hair Salon.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 35 (2004): 167–88. ———. “Passing Mirrors: Subjectivity in a Midwestern Hair Salon.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 32 (2001): 116–30. ———. “Shoptalk: Teaching and Learning in an African American Hair Salon.” Mind, Culture, and Activity 10 (2003): 289–310. McCarthy, Anna. Ambient Television: Visual Culture and Public Space. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. McRobbie, Angela. Feminism and Youth Culture. New York: Routledge, 2000. Meehan, Johanna, ed. Feminists Read Habermas: Gendering the Subject of Discourse. New York: Routledge, 1995. Morley, David. Family Television: Cultural Power and Domestic Leisure. London: Comedia, 1986. Oldenburg, Ray. The Great Good Place: Cafes, Coffee Shops, Community Centers, Beauty Parlors, General Stores, Bars, Hangouts, and How They Get You through the Day. New York: Paragon, 1991. Peck, Janice. “Talk about Racism: Framing a Popular Discourse of Race on Oprah Winfrey.” Cultural Critique 26 (1994): 89–126. Press, Andrea. Fieldnotes on Janelle’s Hair Salon. ———. Women Watching Television: Gender, Class, and Generation in the American Television Experience. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Press, Andrea, and Elizabeth Cole. Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Radway, Janice. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984. Shattuc, Jane. The Talking Cure: TV Talk Shows and Women. New York: Routledge, 1997. Spigel, Lynn. Make Room for TV: Television and the Family Ideal in Postwar America. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992. Striphas, Ted. “A Dialectic with the Everyday: Communication and Cultural Politics on ‘Oprah Winfrey’s Book Club.’ ” Critical Studies in Media Communication 20 (2003): 295–316. Taylor, Ella. Prime-Time Families: Television Culture in Postwar America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Williams, Raymond. Television: Technology and Cultural Form. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1974. Wilson, Tony. “On Playfully Becoming the ‘Other’: Watching Oprah Winfrey on Malaysian Television.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 4 (2001): 89–110. Young, Iris Marion. Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Young, John. “Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and Postmodern Popular Audiences.” African American Review 35 (2001): 181–205.

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V Retrospective Prospects

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What’s the Matter with Reception Study? Some Thoughts on the Disciplinary Origins, Conceptual Constraints, and Persistent Viability of a Paradigm JANICE RADWAY

In posing the question contained in my title, my aim is not to suggest that reception study is somehow ailing. In fact, since the early 1980s, it has become an accepted part of literary studies, communication studies, cultural studies, and the still-developing field called “history of the book.” Judging by the success of titles such as Purnima Mankekar’s Screening Culture, Viewing Politics (1999), Elizabeth Bird’s Audience in Everyday Life (2003), Elizabeth Long’s Book Clubs (2003), and Lila Abu-Lughod’s Dramas of Nationhood (2005), different forms of reception study have established a substantial foothold within anthropology and sociology as well. Given the widespread adoption of reception study as a scholarly method, as well as the range of careful critiques of some of its founding assumptions, one would think that it would not be necessary to reflect further on the concept of reception or to raise the question of whether the research paradigm built on it will remain a useful one for the foreseeable future.1

I want to raise the latter question, however, by reflecting on the rise of reception study and on some of the historical conditions of possibility for its formulation. I think it important to understand those conditions because they operated as enabling conditions for the paradigm as well as constitutive constraints. Those conditions functioned as warrants for the constitution of proper research “objects,” for the specification of methods appropriate to their investigation, and for the definition of interpretive protocols fostering understanding of what emerged into view as a result. At the same time, they produced certain occlusions and assumptions about what qualified as the insignificant or unremarkable. I have been musing over the origins and the consequences of the organizing concepts of reception study in light of the vast outpouring of work on recent adjustments and alterations in global capitalist relations and their impact on cultural activity.2 More to the point perhaps, I have been thinking about them as consequences of problems I have been encountering in trying to conceptualize a new research project. I have been pushed to reconsider the value of the reception paradigm as I have struggled to design a study of the changing subjectivities and cultural practices of girls in the 1990s. In the interest of attempting to understand why reception study seems somehow inadequate to the particularities of this project, I have been trying to think systematically about the constitutive concepts and methodological assumptions that ground the paradigm and, as such, dictate how and what it can and cannot take into account. As one might expect, it is not easy to place reception study historically. How does one decide which scholars or books should be included within the paradigm? How should we understand the relationship between reception studies, audience studies, and studies of reading? How is reception study as an elaborated research field related to its enabling academic disciplines? When did the paradigm of reception study become visible as such, that is, as an identifiable intellectual or scholarly movement? Were there previously active individuals or earlier published texts that contributed to the rise of reception studies though they themselves were not understood at the time to have founded a movement? Questions like these are challenging, and they are even harder to address in an essay of this length. It is possible to sketch out only a partial history here. Nonetheless, it is my hope that by drawing attention to the moment of reception study’s institutional efflorescence and consolidation at a particular site—that is, within the academic discipline of literary studies—we might begin to understand better both how and why the enabling conditions of the study of reception also operated as constraints that ordered disorderly human processes in particular ways, precluded the asking of certain kinds of questions, and obscured other phenomena or trends from consideration. Before taking up this question, though, I want to underscore the fact that I will deal with only one strain of reception study here, that is, with reception as it appeared in the context of literary studies, as an engagement with readers and reading. Reception study also developed into a vigorous tradition 328

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within the social science discipline of communication studies, in which the concept of the audience tends to organize its pursuit.3 Although the study of reading and audience studies emerged at different moments and thus were subject to different histories within the context of two distinct disciplines, I think an extended comparison would demonstrate that despite temporal and disciplinary differences, certain conceptual similarities and methodological regularities characterized the reception paradigm whether it focused on readers and reading or on the concept of the audience.4 Those regularities, it seems to me, constitute the infrastructure of the paradigm, and as such, they both enable it and have worked to prescribe what it cannot take into account. Of course, as enabling structures, all disciplines and conceptual paradigms produce blind spots. What I would like to suggest is that it is far riskier now than it was when reception study first emerged to tolerate the conceptual occlusions that accompany the concept of reception and the methodological practices that ironically both derived from it and attempted to escape its limitations.5 I want to argue here that present conditions suggest that, though we must not forget what reception studies has enabled us to conceptualize and therefore to investigate, it may well be time to rethink how we approach the positioning of cultural materials such as books, films, televisions shows, recorded music, and digital texts in the contexts of everyday life. If we are to avoid the familiar pitfall of reception studies—that is, the tendency to romanticize reception, as an instance, however complicated or qualified, of independent creativity or political resistance—we need to formulate social interactions with cultural materials as something other than the natural complement to a temporally antecedent moment of creation and production of a particular text, object, or product.6 And we need to do this, it seems to me, while remembering that a significant portion of the world’s cultural production is being further consolidated, concentrated, and centralized in a few small corporations. The problem is how best to understand the relationship among that kind of corporate centralization and production, the diverse kinds of social activity it enables—whether directly or indirectly—and other forms of cultural practice that are neither incorporated nor wholly independent of such production. These are some of the present conditions, it seems to me, for which reception study, as we have heretofore known it, is unfortunately inadequate.7 Although James Machor and Philip Goldstein include work in cultural studies and communication studies under the rubric of reception study in their edited collection of that name, I think it worth remembering that the term “reception study” seems to have entered the academic vocabulary as a loose translation of the German term “rezeptionasthetik,” a formulation of Hans Robert Jauss, Wolfgang Iser, and others at the University of Konstanz who were working within the field of literary studies and specifically within the subfield of literary theory.8 First published in German in the very early 1970s, their works on reading and reception were translated into English slowly and only as the 1970s and 1980s wore on.9 Presented primarily as interventions in literary theory and therefore in the disciplines of English, comparative What’s the Matter with Reception Study?

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literature, and romance languages and literature, where literary studies had been principally institutionalized in the United States, these lectures, articles, and books constituted themselves as revisions of literary formalism: that is, of theories and practices that posited meaning as a function of textual devices. In opposition, Iser and Jauss sought to treat literary meaning as the result of a temporal process of interpretation—that is, as the result of an intersection between text and reader that takes place in and over time. In spite of their attempt to acknowledge the role of the reader in the construction of literary meaning, it has been argued that, for the most part, the early work of the Konstanz theorists did not entirely escape the formalism or objectivist models of interpretation they sought to displace.10 Although Jauss in particular would later write thoughtfully about the complexities of the historical processes of reception, some of his and Iser’s first formulations tended to construe the reader as a function of the text itself, implied or called for by the rhetorical and narrative devices within the text.11 The implied or ideal reader was itself another constructed textual device, a rhetorically devised textual position that the reader tended to adopt and the trained critic was enjoined to elucidate. When Stanley Fish developed his own reader-response approach to Milton and the works of Renaissance poets in Surprised by Sin and Self-Consuming Artifacts, he was criticized for failing to escape the very formalism he indicted so vigorously, in part because he attributed regularities in interpretation to the particulars of the text, despite his emphasis on the independence of the individual reader. Even when Fish sought to address these criticisms in his later, highly influential book Is There a Text in This Class? by situating readers themselves within interpretive communities, the only interpretive communities he could imagine were different schools of literary critics such as Freudians, Marxists, or feminists.12 As many have pointed out since, despite overt attention to individual readers and social communities, Fish’s work constituted, in effect, an elaborate and ingenious defense of the critic’s role as an informed, authorized reader. Although reader theory would subsequently be taken in a more socially and historically grounded direction, in its earliest formulation it remained an intervention within the academic discipline of literary studies, as part of a technical and professional debate about the ontological status of the text itself, which remained the proper object and foundational support of the discipline. Jane Tompkins argued as much in “The Reader in History: The Changing Shape of Literary Response,” which concludes her anthology Reader-Response Criticism. This essay, which is still too little known, explores the relationship between modern literary criticism and the discipline’s professionalization of reading.13 Arguing that formalist theories of literary autonomy emerged in response to the growing dominance of scientific discourse and its grounding in objectivist theories of language as a transparent medium for the description of the world, Tompkins suggests that this move to declare the ontological distinctness of the literary text enabled the consolidation of a discipline based on the practice of expert textual interpretation. As she put it, 330

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The New Critical effort to generate a definition of literature as “an object of knowledge sui generis which has a special ontological status,” not only meets the positivist objections to literary study but establishes the whole enterprise on a new footing. Once the literary work has been defined as an object of knowledge, as meaning not doing, interpretation becomes the supreme critical act. The kind of interpretation that the formalist definition of literature requires, moreover, cannot be performed by the man on the street. Since the literary work is formally and semantically unique, . . . it requires interpreters specially schooled in the intricacies of the poetic medium. (222) Real, radical change in the discipline, Tompkins concluded, would come about only when and if the very practice of expert interpretation could be displaced. What I am interested in here are the ways the literal discipline of literary studies ordered reception study when it appeared as a disruptive impulse, as an effort to challenge the discipline’s actual day-to-day business. That ordering or disciplining, it seems to me, ensured that, however much reading researchers subsequently attempted to focus attention on how historically and socially situated readers interacted with the texts they read, that activity would always be conceived as categorically distinct from and temporally secondary to the practice of textual creation or production. As a consequence, the act of reading would generally be approached (however actively the reader herself was conceived) in a way that tied reading to the fundamental categories of the discipline, that is, to discrete genres and subgenres, to particular books and individual titles, to authors and the act of writing.14 Though a practice or activity in its own right, reading would be construed as coterminous with the act of textual interpretation, as a process of meaning-making. As a consequence, the authority of the literary critic was preserved. Rather than a priestly exegete of sacred books, the critic was reconceived as a trained commentator on the meaning of a text/reader interaction. As you might begin to suspect, I see these habits as constraints that pose conceptual problems and might, in the years to come, prevent us from understanding the wayward and diffuse yet redundant and cumulative effects of engagements with books, texts, stories, images, films, music, video games, and much more. In seeking to understand both the advantages and the limitations of reception study, I think it necessary to ask why reader theorists began to register skepticism about the postulated autonomy of the nearly authoritarian text as it had been construed within the New Critical discourse that dominated literature departments in the 1950s, in the 1960s, and well into the 1970s. More generally, why did the literary text become a subject worthy of debate at all in the mid-1970s and after? Indeed, reader theorists were not the only people seeking to explain, to question, or to justify the nature, operation, effects, or status of the literary text during this period. Many, in fact, turned away from applied criticism during what has been called the moment of “theory” as they What’s the Matter with Reception Study?

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debated among themselves less over what particular texts meant and more over what it meant to read and to write about literature at all. However significant the nature of their differences—and they were substantial—structuralists, semioticians, deconstructionists, poststructuralists, feminists, Marxists, and race-conscious critics all sought to raise questions about how best to understand the nature of the relationship among the author, the literary text, its constitutive devices, the reader, and the larger social formation within which all interacted. Again, one has to wonder why? And why, especially, did the reader suddenly wheel into view after decades of banishment by New Critics, who charged any criticism exhibiting interest in the effects of a literary text with “the affective fallacy”? Again, these are not easy questions to answer. A fully satisfying explanation would have to look at the complex conditions of possibility for each of these different critical discourses.15 In this context, more general observations will have to suffice. It has often been noted that the moment of theory was a post-1968 phenomenon inspired in part by new democratically oriented social movements seeking to question traditional economic, political, and cultural arrangements. Challenges to the authority of the literary text as well as to the privilege accorded authors and authorship can be seen, I think, as a mediated effect of this more general political orientation, as the enactment of different forms of political skepticism in a particular institutional context. In the United States, the upheaval associated with the 1960s was bound up with the ferment generated by civil rights discourse and activism, much of it centered on the efforts of African Americans seeking redress and restitution for the violence done by slavery. In addition, women, gays, Native Americans, Asian Americans, and Latinos and Latinas also sought to understand and contest how they had been inscribed and circumscribed within the dominant social and political formation. Burgeoning anticolonial movements, international and domestic opposition to U.S. involvement in Vietnam, and the political assassinations of the 1960s further eroded confidence in traditional authorities, thereby contributing to a growing awareness of difference and diversity within the larger social formation. As political contestation and disagreement increased, more intellectual attention was devoted to understanding the operations and uses of rhetoric and ideology, as well as to the generation of alternative narratives and knowledges that disputed the ways language and stories had been used previously to support the ordering and control of stigmatized populations. Intense interest developed, as a result, in the very nature of meaning-making as a social process and in the character of storytelling as a political act, interests that helped to produce what has been called “the linguistic turn” within humanistic scholarship more generally. Within literary studies and the discipline of English, this metacritical attention to the semiotic process united with political interests in contesting authority to focus attention not only on the character of the literary text and on the way its meaning was determined but also on the status of the author and the literary canon itself, that body of works authorized by the 332

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discipline as “the best that had been thought and said.” Differential readings and interpretations were acknowledged as theoretical possibilities and then increasingly explored in practical criticism that wondered what it meant to read as a feminist, as an African American, as a Native American, or even as a working-class reader. Much of this work was done by a changed professoriate and student body, both of which had been altered substantially over the course of the 1950s and 1960s by the dramatic expansion of the American university system and by the influx of more women, more people of working-class background, and more African Americans and other minorities.16 When situated in this historical context, reader theory can be understood as a metacritical, philosophically oriented complement to these discourses, which sought to challenge the autonomy of the literary text and the privileged position of the author. In effect, reader theory raised significant questions about the proper object of knowledge of the discipline and about its foundational supports. Actual reception studies varied in their orientation, but I think it fair to say that many of them, including my own Reading the Romance, claimed to be displacing textual criticism as the essence of disciplinary practice in favor of the elucidation and analysis of the readings of texts and genres made by so-called real readers. This project, more often than not, was generated by a politically inspired commitment to the investigation of the powerful ideological role played by popular literature within the lives of particular groups of readers. At the heart of this new form of scholarly practice in literary studies was an interest in the effects of texts on the readers who read them and, more often than not, a desire to understand how such effects might be undone. Political commitments to the kinds of people who regularly read popular texts tended to underwrite the practice of reception study. The subsequent “culture wars” declared, publicized, and prosecuted by conservative groups such as the National Association of Scholars and their avatars, Dinesh D’Souza, William Bennett, and Lynn Cheney, as well as their more virulent heirs, Karl Rove, Chris Matthews, and Bill O’Reilly, are the most concrete evidence of the fact that reception study, along with all of the post-1968 theoretical approaches to texts, reading, and the canon, were perceived to be part of a radical challenge to business as usual within both the literary discipline and the university at large. To be sure, there is significant truth in the assertion that reception study and other related critical discourses sought to rethink the nature of literary study. Together, these critical discourses contributed to the rise of cultural studies in the American context, to the study of the literatures produced by women, racial, ethnic, and sexual minorities, and to the creation of quite different literary curricula and significant changes in such pedagogical tools as anthologies, companions, and histories.17 Both courses and the teaching tools that supported them selectively dropped traditional touchstones for the inclusion of works by writers who had previously been ignored or dismissed as lacking in quality. Increasingly, the boundary between the popular and the literary was highlighted and then rethought as the contingent construction What’s the Matter with Reception Study?

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of socially specific cultural authorities. It was subjected, furthermore, to reexamination from a number of different perspectives as a device that itself operated to recommend particular texts, authors, and ideological frameworks to readers, thereby helping to produce subjects of a certain sort, whether national, white, heterosexual, or something else. The discipline itself, in effect, was reflexively examined as a form of political practice. Even though literary discourses such as feminist literary criticism, African American literary criticism, queer theory, and postcolonial criticism did not necessarily take up the task of investigating how socially specific readers understood texts, they did implicitly hover around the question of textual effects and, in seeking to uncover or to expose meaning-effects they deemed deleterious, they significantly altered both the content of the discipline—that is, the objects it worked on—and the nature of the claims made about those objects. Whereas literary studies had previously claimed largely to be making and justifying aesthetic judgments, in the 1980s and 1990s, the discipline moved more and more to the making of historical, social, or political claims about the functions of literature.18 One might argue that reception studies often made such claims particularly explicit by seeking to displace the critic’s reading of a text with assertions about, and analysis of, the ways actual readers made sense of texts. Reading the Romance, for instance, gives an account of how a group of romance readers actually selected, read, and evaluated particular romances. Not content simply to repeat or even to ventriloquize such readings, however, the book provides a feminist reading or interpretation of those readings and, as many observers have pointed out since, at least implicitly claims to speak on behalf of the interests of romance readers.19 The point I am trying to make here is that despite its claims to be challenging business as usual in the discipline, Reading the Romance and other reception studies like it did not entirely manage to displace the practice of textual exegesis, nor did they alter in the end the role or authority of the critic. Interpretation was still the name of the game. Rather than offering a reading of the literary text, such studies offered readings of the readings of texts by textualizing what readers said about texts and by providing second-order interpretations of those readings. In thus textualizing the cultural world, reader study expanded the field of objects confronting the critic, thereby enlarging the range or purview of her interpretive authority. Now no longer simply an authorized reader of literary texts, the professionally trained literary critic was warranted to read all manner of popular cultural forms as well as the interpretive practices of all those who engaged with them. At this moment, literary studies mutated into cultural studies, but a cultural studies still ordered by the privilege accorded texts and textuality. I should note here that I am not saying that all of cultural studies was constituted as coterminous with literary studies. In fact, a good deal of cultural studies discourse, especially that deriving from the early work done at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in England, actively sought to displace texts and textuality from the starting point of the 334

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enterprise. Work such as Paul Willis’s Learning to Labor; the book Policing the Crisis, written collectively by a group associated with Stuart Hall; and Paul Gilroy’s There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack began not with questions about cultural genres or their production, reception, meaning, and effects (still a mistaken assumption about the general content of cultural studies) but rather with social communities, their histories, and their internal and external political relations. Although each of these books engaged with what might be called cultural activities (schooling and forms of education, newspapers and news reporting, the global circulation of African American music), their forms of inquiry, it seems to me, were ordered by the disciplinary assumptions of the social sciences and, as such, treated cultural production, circulation, and use as social practices contiguous to, intertwined with, and therefore not necessarily privileged over and above other forms of social practice. As such, “culture” could not be studied in isolation or through categories generated within the ideological realm of the aesthetic but had to be approached as a contingent aspect of a larger, more complex social process and formation. Now if this discussion sounds something like the beginning of a brief for a more sociologically and anthropologically informed kind of cultural studies, let me acknowledge that it is. But before attempting the difficult task of trying to argue the adequacies of one discipline against another or explaining why a rigorously social approach to cultural activity will be necessary to take the measure of the historic changes that confront us, I would like to return to the reception studies paradigm and, through some very brief critical comments about my own Reading the Romance, show how that paradigm limited what I could conceptualize, research, and therefore know about the activities of some women.20 It is now clear that Reading the Romance was the product of a particular historical moment. Conceived just after the publication and discussion of the first flush of feminist literary criticism, the book is animated by a desire to take a women’s popular genre and its readers seriously. But that project was actually generated by an even more fundamental desire: the desire to ask in the late 1970s and early 1980s whether a backlash had set in against the second wave of the feminist movement. The question the book ultimately poses is a question about the subjectivity of so-called ordinary women, about whether and how much they had been affected by the discourses of feminism. In effect, Reading the Romance is animated by political and social questions about the nature of gender formation, and it ultimately raises questions about, and argues on behalf of, possibilities for utopian social change. Small wonder, then, that a book almost entirely innocent of an engagement with the contemporaneous discourse of cultural studies was subsequently taken up as an instance of it.21 It might not be surprising to learn as well that, when I was first reviewed for tenure at the University of Pennsylvania, the manuscript was assigned to the social science review panel on the tenure committee rather than to the humanities group dealing routinely with the appointments of people in the English department and in American What’s the Matter with Reception Study?

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Civilization, where I was hired. The social scientists on the panel, however, found Reading the Romance lacking, as did the additional reviewers they consulted, in part because its sample of romance readers was too small and not “scientifically” constructed and because its assessment of its women subjects was less than objective. Of course the reviewers and committee members were not wrong to pronounce the book “not social science.” Indeed, the very title of the book gives the game away. Although my study focused on a social practice—that is, on the activity of reading—the fact that it began first with a genre and retroactively constituted its subjects as precisely romance readers demonstrates that it had been unwittingly brought under the concepts, practices, and procedures of the discipline of literary studies, despite my best efforts to think about women’s popular cultural activities in a social and more openly political way. In spite of its desire to raise questions about the social impact of the women’s movement and its aftermath, Reading the Romance manages only to do so through the mediation of genre study. Genre, of course, is an aesthetic, literary category, a mode of organizing the results of the social activities of writing and reading according to the appearance of certain textual features and the affects they purportedly produce in those who encounter them.22 Those who take up the genre are conventionally construed after the fact and, I might add, as a function of the notion of genre itself, as subjects of a certain sort, that is, as romance readers. But romance readers are also women, sometimes men, nurses, wives, secretaries, department store clerks, feminists, television viewers, magazine readers, baseball fans, hobbyists of all sorts, church-goers, single women, readers of autobiography and popular history, daughters, mothers, and sisters. They are many other things as well. So-called romance readers are, in short, complex and contradictory social subjects buffeted by all manner of cultural discourses, historical traditions, and social trends. To isolate only one aspect of their way of being in the world, then, and to draw conclusions from it as to the impact of a controversial political movement on them seems unduly hopeful or, if you prefer, blinded to a certain extent by the assumptions of literary disciplinarity that are taken for granted. Genre is not the only taken-for-granted category structuring the thinking and methods of Reading the Romance. The book also orders the diffuse field of human social practice by falling back on the categories of reader, writer, text, author, and book. Indeed, all of the foregoing, it seems to me, are a function of the very idea of the book, itself a reification of a highly complex, thoroughly social process of ongoing, collaborative, cultural communication. What I mean here is that the modern notion of “the book” as a discrete entity is an effect of particular printing, binding, and circulation technologies, as well as of an entire juridical regime that coagulates social process and communication into intellectual property, that is to say, a commodity that can be sold to generate both financial and cultural capital. Because the union of those technologies and that property regime enables us to treat the book as a remarkable, even significant instance of what in other contexts might be understood as an 336

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ephemeral incident in a cacophonous, chaotic, ongoing social conversation, we can pose the question of what any book “says” or “means” and what it “does” to those who “read” it. The writer of that book is thereby retroactively converted into an “author” of ideas with the power to affect a reader.23 The reader is understood always to come after the fact of that creation; the reader can only be understood to be either under the sway of the book or resistant to its pleasures and incitements. Within this configuration, it is difficult to construe reading itself as a generative activity, as a process that might itself enable the performative production of a subjectivity through the act of reading, which might then migrate to other regions of daily social life.24 Because Reading the Romance takes the entire constellation of books, text, genre, authors, and readers for granted as it tries to make sense of the dispersed, unwieldy, overdetermined process by which women were constituted and reconstituted as subjects in the 1970s and 1980s, the book reigns in and manages a messy, fitful, often contradictory social process by homing in on the question of how particular stories written by particular authors and sold by publishers as books of a certain type affected the constitution of women precisely as genre readers or fans. Although Reading the Romance tries to move beyond textual interpretation alone by using ethnographic methods to determine how romance reading figures in the context of ongoing daily lives, even when it manages to conceive the act of romance reading as one practice among many, the initial decision to begin with genre—and with a genre that is specifically about gender relations—tends to produce the readers at the center of the study not only as “romance readers” but also for the most part as individuals who are saturated by their gender. What this effect means is that, to a certain extent, the book answers the question it poses at the outset precisely because it cannot take seriously readers’ identities as classed, raced, or ethnically diverse subjects, nor can it very effectively study how the individuals who are its focus negotiate the contradictions among the many social and cultural activities that engage them.25 Even more important, perhaps, it cannot know how repetitive romance reading and the pleasure it incites—indulged in over time amid television viewing, church attendance, changing family relations and events, evolving work lives, and a lot more—might interact with such factors to produce a changing subject who is therefore unsecured and open to further change.26 I want to make it clear that I am not saying that the study of the literary or the aesthetic is never useful. Rather, what I want to suggest is that if one is interested in the historical constitution of human sociality and subjectivity precisely so as to assess the prospects for how both might be changed in the future (and even to suggest that this might be one’s goal is to admit the desire for, if not the possibility of operating within, a quite different regime of knowledge production from the scientific and objectivist paradigm that called the modern disciplines into being), then the particular reifications that obtain within the discipline of literary study, even in the form of its querulous cousin, reader and reception analysis, may occlude too much of what What’s the Matter with Reception Study?

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one needs to take into account. In a sense, you might say, what I am trying to think about here are the contemporary costs of reification, both economic and intellectual, within the literary sphere itself and in the discipline of literary studies at a time when the production, circulation, sale, and use of cultural commodities (including what is called information or intellectual property) is figuring ever more centrally in the range of human activity. In our present context, it seems critical to me to ask what the reification of languaging into “literature,” whether popular or avant-garde, or broadly into “culture,” as such, manages or occludes.27 Of course, this is not the place to open up an extended inquiry into the complex concept of reification. I would like to quote Marx briefly, however, if only because his famous definition of the commodity form calls attention to two aspects of the coagulation process at the heart of reification that I believe ought to concern us. In Capital, book 1, Marx writes: A commodity is therefore a mysterious thing, simply because in it the social character of men’s labour appears to them as an objective character stamped upon the product of that labour; because the relation of the producers to the sum total of their own labour is presented to them as a social relation existing not between themselves, but between the products of labour. This is the reason the products of labour become commodities, social things whose qualities are at the same time perceptible and imperceptible by the senses. . . . It is only a definite social relation between men that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things. (77) Capitalism alienates human beings from the products of their sensuous material labor by appropriating those products for exchange and sale, a move that suppresses the social situation within which they were made and that gives them their exchange-value. That suppression thereby presents the commodity as given, as apparently “natural,” as a thing without a history. More generally, reification condenses and precipitates out from complex social processes, which are always both relational and fluid, only one aspect of what is produced in and through those changing social relations. When the commodity makes its appearance as the putatively objective distillation of this process, both the sociality and the fluidity of the process itself have been erased. Instead of experimental languaging, we have texts and books. Instead of engagement and play with the words proffered by another, we have readers and reading. The ultimate question I want to pose here is what would we learn were we to try to restore greater sociality and fluidity to literary and cultural relations in place of the comfortable autonomism of authors and readers? What could we know if we more rigorously bracketed the familiar reifications of book, text, author, and reader and attempted to investigate the thoroughly social and wholly open-ended cultural labor of making meaning of contemporary 338

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daily existence? Writers, after all, are always already readers, and in materializing their creations they work with phrases, narrative conventions, character types, plot devices, genres, and other literary forms they have encountered in the materials they have previously read. Those devices, when imported into their own creations, come trailing complex semantic histories only some of which they control. Those histories give their creations a layered social depth that can never be fully plumbed. And most readers, of course, as every librarian, English teacher, and literature professor knows, willfully engage texts from their own ground, wandering about within them sometimes aimlessly, sometimes hell-bent on a purpose. They raid them, remake them, perform them in contemporary and ethnocentric dress, as Michel de Certeau has reminded us. In effect, they write them anew, even if only in mobilizing a single image, phrase, figure, or vignette in future speech, conversation, or written form. Is there a way to understand the vitality and ongoingness, the forward trajectory and unsecured nature of the social process without capturing it and fixing it as a tiny, delicate insect caught in amber? What is hindered from emerging into view by retaining the theoretical distinction between writer and reader? I am attempting to envision here something like the cultural network of capillary action by which a society talks to itself about its conditions of existence, thereby transforming itself in the process. Is there a way to understand that process without fixing it, stopping it, pronouncing on its meaning as a finality? Is there a way to identify and to understand the multiple tendencies and trajectories of change and to foster not only greater capacity to embrace change but also the ability to seize greater control of its direction? Are readers only always already subordinated writers incapable, finally, of writing their own experience because, inevitably, they come after the privileged process of production and that which it apparently produces, the text itself? I will close with some very brief remarks about how my engagement with girls has pressed these questions and this project upon me, prompting me to wonder whether the methods of reading study or the fundamentals of the reception paradigm are adequate to what I think I am straining to detect and to make known. My interest in “girls” as subjects of a certain sort was incited by my daughter’s engagement with the gendered literary and material culture of the 1980s and 1990s. What, I wondered, was I doing to her when I allowed myself to be beaten into submission by her relentless desire for Polly Pockets, pink and purple beasts branded “My Little Ponies,” Berenstain Bears stories, Barbies, Barbies, and more Barbies, the Babysitters Club, Seventeen, MTV, 90210, Dawson’s Creek, and eventually Road Rules? What did she make of her experiences with these objects and stories, and how did her cultural life relate to her diary-writing or the innumerable collages she created in her bedroom after school or the drawings and designs she inscribed on her many backpacks? What about her intense relations with her girlfriends? How were they affected by such already-consumed products and stories? How was it possible to page endlessly through pages and pages of back issues of Glamour What’s the Matter with Reception Study?

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and Seventeen and yet identify so strongly with the university men’s basketball team as to want to play girls’ basketball for a Quaker school that only recently had given up on its principled opposition to competitive sports? Although I could imagine taking up these questions in a study of girls’ cultural consumption, a study that might be structured like Reading the Romance, I worried that all I would be able to say was that, like romance readers, girls were sutured into traditional gender arrangements by the cultural materials marketed to them and yet they still managed to carve out some small space of playful resistance and self-nurture despite that interpellation. Not exactly news—as my daughters and her friends would say. The inadequacies of this orientation were brought home to me while visiting some close friends whose daughter and mine had once gone to preschool together and saw each other each summer. Noticing a basket filled with xeroxed, oddly composed, handassembled newsletters of a certain sort, I learned from my friend’s daughter that these “zines” were made by girls, sometimes alone, sometimes together with others, that they were circulated through the mail and often at punk music concerts, and that once girls encountered them they often proceeded to produce their own. I was struck when I read through this one zine collection about how confused and confusing they were, about how much they were miscellanies and hodgepodges of often contradictory and quite different images, stories, narratives, and discursive fragments culled from magazines, television, school, and conversations with friends. I was struck additionally by how much these zine writers, who were also clearly readers, viewers, and listeners of all manner of cultural materials, disputed, engaged, and altered feminist vocabularies and discourses as they haltingly explored in bits, vignettes, and juxtaposed images different subject positions, some of them gendered, some of them not. To make sense of this activity, it seemed to me, one would have to think about girls’ cultural production, about the fact that they were as much producers as consumers.28 Then, I began to wonder whether this kind of production was a special case, the activity of self-consciously alternative girls, or whether it actually had something to do with other girls’ collages, room decoration, endless note passing, and even the friendship networks created, perfected, and destroyed endlessly both at and after school. Why not think about friendship networks, which many have noted are intense aspects of girls’ lives, as specifically cultural creations? Of what value is the categorical distinction of the aesthetic and the cultural anyway if one wants to know what is happening to the subjectivities of girls? How would one construct a study, I wondered, what research design could one devise that would capture the simultaneity, indeed, the permeability and continuity of girls’ aesthetic and cultural consumption and production and all their other activities?29 As if these questions were not difficult enough, when I began to look more closely at a broader range of zines, I noticed how fractured they were as forms, how quickly their creators slid from subject position to subject position as they presented themselves sometimes as girls but other times as friends, 340

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aspiring filmmakers, political activists, vegetarians, and even, in one instance, as dorks. The very category “girl,” it seemed, was not secured in these zines; it was open to investigation, contestation, and even refusal. What, I wondered, would I fail to see if I began with the category of “girls,” asking only what they consumed and produced as girls? Perhaps, like the book, the author, the reader, and the text, the girl, too, is a reification, a convenient, if not motivated coagulation of the social process, a securing of subjectivities in flux precisely to ensure that before they become anything else some children become girls.30 How might one design a study that did not take this process for granted from the start? Would it be possible to trace—for one’s own interlocutors and readers interested in the subject of so-called girls—the lacunae, the experiments, the possibilities explored through cultural activities not simply as youthful paths closed off, as the playful experience and indecision of youth destined to be transformed into the normalcy of mature, gendered adulthood, but rather as genuinely open, exploratory forays not yet fully disciplined by cultural convention? In highlighting such experiments, in pointing to their lack of closure, could one encourage this kind of creative (I am tempted to call it queer) response to life? Could one encourage and foster change?31 If the piling up of questions here is beginning to sound like a form of paralysis, I can only acknowledge that it is. I am stymied by the difficulty of tracing social interaction, collaboration, and intersubjective production below the radar, as it were, and over time. Even if, in assenting to the rational argument that discourse and investigation always have to operate with posited categories and therefore with strategically fixed objects, I could simply decide that what I want to know is what contemporary girls are making of the cultural materials they are being given now, how could I trace the full range of what they take up, as well as the transformations they perform as they remake that material into basic stuff of their own creations and productions? How could I even investigate the relationship between their reading, their viewing, their listening, and their playing, not to mention the nature of the relationship among all these and other aspects of their daily lives? Assuming that the effects of such activities are sometimes never fully played out, how could I track this process of subject-construction over time? Clearly, such a project could not be carried out by one person. But the fact that it could not, it seems to me, suggests that I have confronted head-on another limit of the discipline: its carving up of the world in such a way that it can be studied by one person, writing one book, in the course of five or ten years. If we refused the restrictions and rewards that render this model of labor self-evidently sensible, if we worked collaboratively and at multiple sites and engaged with our subjects over time, what could we know that our present assumptions and methods of investigation render unknowable? I do not know, but at least at this point I am driven by the glimmer of a different way of pursuing the social just past the horizon of my habituated practice.32 A few final remarks are necessary to expand on the claim I made at the outset that it might now be far riskier to tolerate the conceptual occlusions What’s the Matter with Reception Study?

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that accompany the reception paradigm and the methodological practices that follow from it than it was when reception analysis first appeared. Quite simply, I am thinking of the fact that so much of the cultural material distributed and consumed around the world is now channeled through four or five international media conglomerates. This development has generated a vast body of commentary worrying about the cultural imperialism this economic structure promotes and about the way the dominance of primarily U.S. media products is crowding out indigenous, alternative, even avant-garde creation. The ultimate worry, of course, is that this kind of cultural domination is producing ever more pervasive ideological domination, leading to the production of desiring, fluid, and mobile subjects doubly functional for capital as consuming subjects. When one takes into account the additional claim that more and more of the world’s production is cultural, and therefore, ideological in nature, it is difficult not to be worried by the implications of a global culture industry that voraciously and almost immediately incorporates any instance of social creativity into its corporately designed, commercial mix, with which it then blankets the world. If one can only conceptualize the use of such cultural materials in individualized form as an act of always-belated reception, even when that reception is understood to be restive, resistant, or even oppositional in nature, it becomes difficult to restore to it its status as open-ended, unsecured social process. If one is to avoid the temptations of apocalyptic thinking in which it is simply announced that all human productive activity is tending toward incorporation and compromise or toward being transformed into an ultimately pacified reception, what are needed are ways of identifying, understanding, and talking about the social practices of cultural use that refuse reification and the teleology of an assumed closure. New paradigms need to be forged that neither obscure nor foreclose the alternate possibilities that are almost always being explored just beneath the surface of even the most formulaic restatement of dominant cultural formations. That way of knowing is what I have been straining after here, and the stakes, I think, are immense. To restore to social processes their open-endedness, to conceive the subject as always a subject-in-process is to seek to preserve a future that has not been truncated but remains open to the possibilities of change. In a sense, I am straining after some way of conceptualizing social process and its messy vagaries in a more fluid, less discrete, less body-bound way. I do not mean to deny the existence of the phenomenal, material body. However, it occurs to me that our easy way of discriminating writer from reader is dependent on a prior ontology that assumes the integrity of the physical body and the independent differentiation of the autonomous self, a view that leads to notions of the social as a collection of discrete individuals and to an understanding of communication as transport between and among such individuals—of media, messages, and meaning. I think the mechanisms behind what we label “social and political change” or even “subject formation” are still quite opaque to us, in part because our familiar disciplinary regimes have hindered 342

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us from exploring intersubjective processes of commingling such as reading, processes I sometimes label “interpersonation.” Reading, it seems to me, is an interpersonated performance, a performance that involves the sometimes vocal, sometimes silent, sometimes communal, sometimes private mobilization of the words of another. And those words, of course, are themselves the product of a performance that draws on prior performances, acts of languaging that are part of an ongoing, fluid, social process. The question is, can we imagine ways of seeing, investigating, and knowing that generative confusion that do not depend on fixing it, cleaning it up, on assigning agency only to some and not to others? Where do such questions leave me with respect to a project on girls reading and writing, on girls and emergent forms of subjectivity? At this point, I remain unsure. In fact, I have written several endings to this essay in a restive effort to specify the precise goals of such a project and the temporarily postulated “objects” of analysis that would go with them. Short of initiating a longterm and collaborative inquiry into the place of cultural production and use in the everyday life of girls around the globe, what more modest projects can be undertaken? Is there a way to construct a study that would seek to understand why the figure of “girls” became a topic of widespread discussion within many arenas of the changing global situation in the 1980s and 1990s and, at the same time, assess what possibilities and trajectories this opened up for those subjects denominated as “girls”? These two decades, after all, witnessed the appearance of Madonna and “the material girl,” wannabes, Riot Grrrl, zines, the Spice Girls, academic girl studies, and a widespread popular discourse about girls-at-risk and their various psychological and bodily difficulties. Does it make sense to place zines created by “girls” at the center of this project? Can zines be studied in a way that does not reify them as an objectively existing “genre”? Can they be studied so as to avoid neat differentiation of writer from reader, reader from text, text from reading, and subject from subject? These are some of the questions I am grappling with now as I think through how this project would extend the findings of a number of recent interventions in girl studies that have taken up similar questions (e.g., Driscoll; Harris; Kearney, “Producing” and Girls). I cannot quite see my way to laying out the terms and procedures of that project yet, but I do feel that I am straining to conceptualize a study of what might be called the social practice of “zine-ing” in a way that would seek to understand how that practice operates as a particular open window on a beckoning but still always unsecured future. Further exploration of how this might be done will have to await another essay.

Notes 1. There is a substantial literature of assessment and critique of various strains of reception studies, including reader-response theory and criticism and audience studies. For two early assessments of reader theory and its impact on literary criticism, see What’s the Matter with Reception Study?

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Mailloux; Tompkins ix–xxvi and 201–32. See also Holub, Reception Theory and Crossing Borders. For an extensive bibliography of work in reception studies, see Machor and Goldstein 345–88. See note 3 for the related but disciplinarily distinct literature on audience studies within the field of communication studies. 2. For a basic sense of how the discourse has developed, the interested reader might review the full run of the journal Public Culture. After its influential initial issue in 1988, Public Culture quickly began to publish some of the most important work on the relationship between economic globalization and a worldwide media system that nevertheless retained local and regional specificities. For two especially helpful early attempts to take the measure of these conditions, see Harvey; Jameson, Postmodernism. For a more recent effort to assess the social and cultural consequences of even more intensive global integration, see Hardt and Negri, Empire and Multitude. See also Marcus’s “Imagining the Whole: Ethnography’s Contemporary Efforts to Situate Itself ” (Ethnography 33–56), in which he both provides an excellent summary of recent work on changes in the world economic system and assesses the nature of the implications of this changed situation for the discipline of anthropology and the practice of ethnography. 3. For an introduction to the field, see Cruz and Lewis; Brooker and Jermyn; Hagen and Wasko. For extended assessments and critiques of audience studies within communication studies, see Ang, Desperately and “Culture”; Moores. See also the essays in Alasuutari, Rethinking, especially those by Alasuutari; Gray; Schroder. 4. I will argue here that although reader and reception study focused attention in a new way on the reader and the reader’s interpretive activity, this strain of criticism and research continued to be ordered by the foundational concepts of literary study, that is, by the notion of the author and the idea of the literary text itself, with all the elaborative concepts used to understand its particularities, including, especially, genre. By contrast, audience research within the field of communication or media studies tended to be less interested in questions of authorship and textual meaning than in what has been called textual or media “effects.” Despite these differences, however, both reader studies and audience research have tended to link reception to particular, isolatable texts and have ontologically defined the process of reception as a conceptually and temporally distinct act, different from and coming only after a prior act of textual production. Throughout this essay, I hope to make it clear why I think these definitional and methodological assumptions are a problem, especially if what one is interested in is the social and cultural constitution of historical subjects. Although that is my own goal, it needs to be acknowledged that it is also a historically contingent and debatable project, one that is just as heavily influenced by specific disciplinary assumptions. 5. In conducting this inquiry into the disciplinary enablements and constraints of reader-based reception study, I am not seeking to specify some universally correct or “right” method that will enable us to avoid the effects of such constraints in the future. Rather, in bringing to the fore the way invisible theoretical assumptions are embedded in disciplinary givens that have constructed our objects and our methods of studying them, my hope is to give an account of the particular model of human behavior and communication that has underwritten our investigations of what people do with literary and media texts. I think it important to do so in an age of massive economic, technological, social, and cultural upheaval because these processes have been 344

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creating quite different social and cultural configurations, networks, relationships, practices, processes, and, significantly, subject formations from those we have known heretofore. The question, it seems to me, is how to foster cognizance of those differences around the edges and at the limit of our previous assumptions to find the best way to understand how and where they exert their impact. 6. There has been a great deal of criticism of reception studies that focus on media use as a form of political resistance. For an early statement of this position, see Morris. 7. For an important early critique of reception studies and its blindness to the complexity of the transnational media system, see Ang, “Culture.” 8. For a comprehensive overview of reader-oriented theories and the place of the Konstanz school in establishing their significance, see the essays in Selden. See also Holub, Reception Theory and Crossing Borders; Freund. 9. It is common to connect the inauguration of rezeptionasthetik with Hans Jauss’s 1967 Konstanz lecture, “Literaturgeschicte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft,” first translated in the United States as “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory,” and published in New Literary History in 1970. 10. On this, see Holub, Crossing Borders 322–34. See also Fish, Is There a Text 21–67. 11. Holub has argued persuasively that this move resulted because Jauss was actually attempting to posit a whole new way of thinking literature historically—that is, not as an epiphenomenal effect of other, more primary historical forces (whether economic, social, or cultural) but rather as a primary historical force in itself that, in reality, constituted readers in certain ways by teaching them how to read a given text itself. I am entirely sympathetic to this view and see it as an early effort to examine literary production and reception together as a practice of subject-formation. 12. For a good summary of some of the criticisms of Fish’s work, see Rabinowitz, “Other Reader-Oriented Theories,” in Selden 376–81. 13. Tompkins argues at the outset of her essay that virtually all forms of modern literary criticism, including reader-response criticism, are preoccupied with the problem of textual meaning and, as such, are fundamentally different from criticism of the classical period. “All modern criticism,” she writes, “whether response-oriented, psychological, structuralist, mythopoeic, thematic, or formalist—takes meaning to be the object of critical investigation, for unlike the ancients we equate language not with action but with signification. This explains why the modern critic, despite his interest in audience reaction, does not really mean the same thing by it that Plato, Aristotle, Horace, and Longinus do” (203). 14. On the history of the discipline of literary studies, see Graff; Ohmann, Politics; Readings; Warner. Although their accounts differ, they all seek to track the connection between developing notions of the ontological specificity of literary language and the autonomy of the literary text and the institutional need to establish the legitimacy of a professional caste of trained literary specialists critical of the emergent and then quickly dominant discourse of science. On the central role of the concept of the “author” in establishing modern literary discourse with its privileging of the autonomous text and the act of expert interpretation, see Barthes 147. 15. The literature assessing the moment of theory is vast and still increasing. For a good place to begin, see Selden; Leitch, Norton. Both have extensive What’s the Matter with Reception Study?

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bibliographies. For three influential works seeking to historicize the rise to prominence of literary theory, see Culler; Eagleton; Leitch, American Literary Criticism. 16. For an account of the relationship among larger economic and political conditions, the changing social character of both university students and professors, and the changing nature of the discipline of English, see Ohmann, “English and the Cold War” and “Some Changes Across Thirty Five Years” in Politics 2–27, 42–47, respectively). 17. In this regard, it is instructive to compare the first edition of The Heath Anthology of American Literature (1990) with the 1979 edition of The Norton Anthology. 18. For a shrewd analysis and critique of the “hermeneutics of suspicion” dominating critical work of the last twenty to twenty-five years and of the “paranoid” interpretive practices they have produced, see Sedgwick 1–40. 19. For commentary on Reading the Romance, see Berlant; Allor 223–24; Bird, “Travels” 251–52. 20. I do not intend my discussion here as a repudiation of Reading the Romance. I have been gratified over the years by the many who have written and spoken to me about the book, adapted its methods and arguments for their own use, and quarreled seriously with its premises. Although I do think the book is more complex than some of the critiques of it suggest, like all academic offerings, it is a product of its historical moment and of my own constitution as an intellectual and disciplinary subject of a certain sort. My ability to see now how this training limited my perspective and practice is a product not only of the critiques of my own work and of reception and audience studies more generally but also of the burgeoning trend toward interdisciplinarity in the academy and of the metacritical consciousness it has fostered. 21. On the nature of my own training and my lack of familiarity with cultural studies at the time of the writing of Reading the Romance, see the introduction to the second edition, written originally for the Verso edition published and distributed in England. 22. Fredric Jameson has, throughout his career, sought to rethink genre as something more than an inert aesthetic form and as, instead, a social and political form, as a contract between readers and the larger social and cultural formation. See especially “Reification” and Political Unconscious. 23. On this point, see Barthes; Foucault. 24. This is not the place to review the large literature on subjectivity. My understanding of subjectivity as performatively constituted has been especially influenced by the work of Judith Butler, particularly in Gender Trouble and The Psychic Life of Power. For a useful introduction to the recent work on subjectivity that places Butler’s work in historical context, see Mansfield. 25. This was the force of Berlant’s critique of the book. 26. I did raise this question in a number of articles published after the appearance of Reading the Romance. See especially Radway, “Reading” and “Romance.” 27. I have adopted the very useful concept of “languaging” from Walter Mignolo, who himself attributes it to the Chilean neurophysiologists Umberto Maaturana and Francisco Varela. See Mignolo, “Local Histories,” especially 16–17 and 19–22, and Darker Side. 28. Even as I began to give voice to these thoughts in a preliminary essay on zines, I discovered the work of Mary Celeste Kearney, who published an important article on girls as cultural producers in 1998. See “Producing.” 346

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29. Here, I am returning to a set of questions I posed in an earlier essay, “Reception Study: Ethnography and the Problems of Dispersed Audiences and Nomadic Subjects,” in which I explored the rationale for abandoning the study of isolated forms of reception for an attempt to understand how media use is woven into and through the fabric of everyday life. In the late 1980s and early 1990s I was not, of course, the only ethnographer or media researcher to feel the necessity of this move. For a full discussion of the various rationales for this methodological transformation, see Bird, especially 185–91. See also Alasuutari; Moores. For a rigorous and theoretically adventurous attempt to reconceive and reformulate ethnographic work in a world transformed by the economic and cultural processes of globalization, see especially Marcus, “Ethnography.” Marcus’s work has been inspiring and useful to me as I have struggled to conceptualize my project on “girls.” 30. In his discussion of the way “modernist” ethnography has been transformed by recent critiques of identity formation, Marcus has posed a series of questions that are useful, I think, for producing the radically skeptical, anti-identitarian frame of mind necessary to scholarship that seeks to explore processes of gender formation and performance in the context of an everyday life thoroughly permeated by global economic and cultural processes. To get at identity as it is constituted across multiple sites, one must ask the following questions, Marcus believes: “Which identities coalesce and under what circumstances? Which become defining or dominant and for how long? How does the play of unintended consequences affect the outcome in the coalescence of a salient identity in this space of the multiple construction and dispersed control of a person’s or group’s identities? And what is the nature of the politics by which identity at and across any site is controlled, perhaps most importantly at the site where identity in a literal sense is the embodiment of a particular human actor or group?” (“Requirements” 63). It seems to me that gender identity is one of those forms that coalesce very early on and, indeed, become dominant precisely because an overlapping and redundant set of social practices is organized around the reproduction of the sex/gender system. This is not to say, however, that gender formation is always successful or fixed once and for all. In fact, it seems to me that the question of “the girl” has emerged at multiple sites and through the practices of multiple groups, including performers, intellectual elites, cultural producers, and young people themselves, precisely because economic arrangements have been putting pressure on the traditional sex/gender system for some time. 31. I am following here the conventional sense within cultural studies scholarship that intellectual work is itself an intervention in discourse and, as such, anything but objective in its aims. For a rich discussion of this issue, see Bennett, who argues generally that “Marxism [which provides the conceptual framework for British cultural studies at least] should be conceived as a set of discursive interventions that seeks to interrupt, to uncouple, and to disrupt the subject identities and forms of political alliance constructed by dominant ideological discourses in order to forge new ones” (72). 32. In fact, I remarked on the need for collaborative research in my article on reception studies and nomadic subjects (see note 29). As Elizabeth Bird has observed, such projects are beginning to emerge, though most media and cultural studies scholars continue to work alone. This isolation is true of literary scholars as well and even of What’s the Matter with Reception Study?

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most anthropologists, in part because funding opportunities for collaborative research in the humanities and interpretive social sciences continue to be limited. Individualized research also continues as the dominant form, however, because training regimes have not been adjusted (see Marcus, Ethnography) and because hiring and tenure protocols continue to focus on the achievements of individual researchers. Collaborative research is organizationally and intellectually complex and expensive at the same time. We will see more of it only when imaginative networks for its pursuit can be created and effectively underwritten by financial support and the legitimation provided by university tenure committees.

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de Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984. Driscoll, Catherine. Girls: Feminine Adolescence in Popular Culture and Cultural Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2002. Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983. Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980. ———. Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972. ———. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in “Paradise Lost.” Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971. Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews. Ed. Donald F. Bouchard. Trans. Donald F. Bouchard and Sherry Simon. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1992. 113–38. Freund, Elizabeth. The Return of the Reader: Reader-Response Criticism. London: Methuen, 1987. Gilroy, Paul. “There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. London: Hutchinson, 1987. Graff, Gerald. Professing Literature: An Institutional History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987. Gray, Ann. “Audience and Reception Research in Retrospect: The Trouble with Audiences.” Rethinking the Media Audience: The New Agenda. Ed. Pertti Alasuutari. London: Sage, 1999. 22–37. Hagen, Ingunn, and Janet Wasko, eds. Consuming Audiences: Production and Reception in Media Research. Creskill, N.J.: Hampton, 2000. Hall, Stuart. “The Whites of Their Eyes.” Silver Linings: Some Strategies for the Eighties. Ed. George Bridges and Rosalind Brunt. London: Wishart, 1981. 28–52. Hall, Stuart, Chas Critcher, and Tony Jefferson. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. London: Macmillan, 1978. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000. ———. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin, 2004. Harris, Anita. Future Girl: Young Women in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Routledge, 2004. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change. London: Blackwell, 1990. Holub, Robert C. Crossing Borders: Reception Theory, Poststructuralism, Deconstruction. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. ———. Reception Theory: A Critical Introduction. London: Methuen, 1984. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981. ———. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1991. ———. “Reification and Utopia.” Social Text 1 (1979): 130–48.

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Jauss, Hans. “Literaturgeschicte als Provokation der Literaturwissenschaft.” Translated by Elizabeth Benzinger as “Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory.” New Literary History 2 (1970): 7–37. Kearney, Mary Celeste. Girls Make Media. New York: Routledge, 2006. ———. “Producing Girls: Rethinking the Study of Female Youth Culture.” Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth-Century American Girls’ Cultures. Ed. Sherrie A. Inness. New York: New York University Press, 1998. 285–310. Leitch, Vincent. American Literary Criticism from the 1930s to the 1980s. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988. ———, ed. The Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001. Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Machor, James L., and Philip Goldstein, eds. Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies. New York: Routledge, 2001. Mailloux, Steven. “Reader Response Criticism?” Genre 10 (1977): 413–31. Mankekar, Purnima. Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial Egypt. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999. Mansfield, Nick. Subjectivity: Theories of the Self from Freud to Harraway. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Marcus, George. Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. ———. “Ethnography in/of the World System: The Emergence of Multi-sited Ethnography.” Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. 79–104. ———. “Requirements for Ethnographies of Late-Twentieth-Century Modernity Worldwide.” Ethnography through Thick and Thin. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. 57–78. Marx, Karl. Capital. Vol. 1. A Critique of Political Economy. Ed. Frederick Engels. Trans. Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling. New York: International, 1967. Mignolo, Walter. The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995. ———. “Local Histories and Global Designs: An Interview with Walter Mignolo.” Discourse 22 (2000): 7–33. Moores, Shaun. Interpreting Audiences: The Ethnography of Media Consumption. London: Sage, 1993. Morris, Meaghan. “Banality in Cultural Studies.” Logics of Television: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Ed. Patricia Mellencamp. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. 14–43. Ohmann, Richard. English in America: A Radical View of the Profession. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976. ———. The Politics of Knowledge: The Commercialization of the University, the Professions, and Print Culture. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2003. Radway, Janice. “Reading Is Not Eating: Mass-Produced Literature and the Theoretical, Methodological, and Political Consequences of a Metaphor.” Book Research Quarterly 2 (1986): 7–29. 350

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———. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy and Popular Literature. 2nd ed. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. ———. “Reception Study: Ethnography and the Problems of Dispersed Audiences and Nomadic Subjects.” Cultural Studies 2 (1998): 359–76. ———. “Romance and the Work of Fantasy: Struggling with Female Subjectivity and Sexuality at Century’s End.” Viewing, Reading, Listening: Audiences and Cultural Reception. Ed. Jon Cruz and Justin Lewis. Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994. 213–31. Readings, Bill. The University in Ruins. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. Schroder, Kim Christian. “The Best of Both Worlds? Media Audience Research between Rival Paradigms.” Rethinking the Media Audience: The New Agenda. Ed. Pertti Alasuutari. London: Sage, 1991. 38–68. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1997. Selden, Raman, ed. From Formalism to Poststructuralism. Vol. 8 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. London: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Tompkins, Jane P., ed. Reader-Response Criticism: From Formalism to Post-Structuralism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980. Warner, Michael. “Professionalization and the Rewards of Literature.” Criticism 27 (1985): 1–28. Willis, Paul. Learning to Labor: How Working-Class Kids Get Working-Class Lives. Farnborough, England: Saxon House, 1977.

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The Reception Deception TOBY MILLER

Eve Tushnet was editor-in-chief of The Yale Free Press in 1999. Reflecting on her leaving year’s reception of Gilda, Charles Vidor’s 1946 film noir, she wrote, “Gilda tries to get her dignity back through sex, Johnny through power—the same trophies many of us seek at Yale, the former on couches and the latter in classrooms.” Tushnet, who went on to be a conservative Catholic-conversa blogger, understood the importance of a materially situated uptake of texts. So should we. I take her illuminating remark on ruling-class methods and mores, titillation and training, as a touchstone to criticize what I am calling the “reception deception”—namely, dominant investigations of cultural effects. In its place I propose a hybrid of political economy and ethnography, borrowing, inter alia, from several essays in this volume. Reception has been incarnate in social and textual criticism for a very long time. There was concern about public “stimulation of the passions” by popular romances and plays (the so-called liturgy of the devil) in sixteenthand seventeenth-century western Europe, when typography was thought to be disrupting ecclesiastical authority via a trilogy of crimes: heresy, sedition, and immorality. At the same time, there was hope that this development represented aesthetic and political innovation—new pleasures and new

access. But when books began to proliferate in the mid–eighteenth century, people frequently skimmed through them, generating anxious critiques that a plenitude of publication was producing an absence of erudition—the downside to the Leserevolution that was displacing the systematic study of improving hermeneutic texts with permissive practices of reading for fun (Briggs and Burke 2–3, 18, 49, 64). In their modern form, such preoccupations derive from the emergent social sciences of the nineteenth century, which sought to understand and control “the crowd” in a suddenly urbanized and educated western Europe, which threatened a long-feared “ochlocracy” of “the worthless mob” (Pufendorf 144). Elite theorists from both right and left, notably Vilfredo Pareto, Gaetano Mosca, Gustave Le Bon, and Robert Michels, argued that newly literate publics were vulnerable to manipulation by demagogues. The notion of the suddenly enfranchised being bamboozled by the unscrupulously fluent has recurred throughout the modern period. By the early twentieth century, academic experts had decreed audiences of popular culture passive, thanks to the dread missions of literary criticism (distinguishing the cultivated from others) and social psychology (distinguishing the normal from others) (Butsch 3). Opera, Shakespeare, and romance fiction were all censored for their immodest impact on the young (Heins 23). Since that time, tests of truth and beauty have continued to find popular culture wanting. Concern about successive new technologies and genres has led to an emphasis on audiences: where they come from, how many there were, and what they did as a consequence of being present. As Janet Staiger notes in her essay here, such tendencies developed momentum with the spread of film theatres in the silent era, when ethical critic Vachel Lindsay referred to “the moving picture man as a local social force . . . the mere formula of [whose] activities keeps the public well-tempered” (243), i.e., away from the pub. Because film had the power to stimulate and regulate public life, it was both a threat and a boon to intellectuals and reformers. Much social criticism connected moviegoing to gambling and horse racing, even as the medium was looked to for moral uplift (Greene). Driven by these antinomies, the Payne Fund Studies of the 1930s (May and Shuttleworth; Dale; Blumer; Blumer and Hauser; Forman; Mitchell) inaugurated systematic social science research into reception, observing young people at the cinema and gauging their “galvanic skin response” (Wartella 173). That example has led to seven more decades of obsessive attempts to correlate text with conduct. Audiences are conceived as empirical entities that can be known via research instruments derived from sociology, demography, psychology, education, communication studies, and marketing. These methods are coupled with a secondary concentration on content: What were audiences watching? Hence, texts, too, are conceived as empirical entities that can be known via research instruments derived from the same disciplines and, sometimes, semiotics. As Bob Dylan put it, recalling the 1960s in Greenwich Village, “sociologists were saying that TV had deadly intentions and was destroying the minds and imaginations of the young—that their attention span 354

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was being dragged down” (55). The other dominant site of knowledge was the “psychology professor, a good performer, but originality not his long suit” (67). These gloomy figures still haunt the Village, and many other places as well, plying the trade of normal science as per “the ruthless utilitarian thrust of American sociology” (Hacking 66). The humanities have also participated in this dance, through the civilizing and Americanizing missions of literary criticism and speech communication (Hunter; Miller; Greene and Hicks). As part of liberal education, the project of cultivating ethically self-styling subjects includes in its armature textual analysis and reception studies. Think of the lapsed Schutzstaffel literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss and his aesthetics of reception or the Parti Communiste Français fellow-traveler Jean-Paul Sartre and his philosophy of the mutual intrication of writer and reader (Mattelart and Mattelart 119–20, 123). Janice Radway explains here that literary studies has sought to transcend its subjective discourse of canonical exclusion and inclusion via such devices as formalism and cognitive theory. A second move has been to articulate itself to social movements or cultural policy, through what Stefano Harney calls “state work.” These attempts to bridge the divide between what the physicist-cum-novelist C. P. Snow identified half a century ago as “two cultures”—those who could quote Shakespeare versus those who could quote the laws of thermodynamics (i.e., people repeating the past versus people making the future)—have taken the form of both apolitical kinds of scientism and deeply political styles of intervention. A year after Snow’s provocation (and F. R. Leavis’s banally irritated reception of it) Pope Pius XII issued Miranda Prorsus: Encyclical Letter on Motion Pictures, Radio and Television, stating: Catholic Film critics can have much influence; they ought to set the moral issue of the plots in its proper light, defending those judgments which will act as a safeguard against falling into so-called “relative morality,” or the overthrow of that right order in which the lesser issues yield place to the more important. The correct form of textual analysis could obviously mould good Catholic subjects. A year later, Pius decided that the first telecast had occurred in the thirteenth century, when Clare of Assisi, a teenage runaway who had become the first Franciscan nun, reported seeing images from a midnight mass cast on her bedroom wall. He declared her the patron saint of television. Following these traditions, much cultural criticism derides the popular, finding it responsible for deficits in knowledge, concentration, and responsibility among populations. Aesthetically, it is seen as appealing to base instincts and lowest common denominators. Politically, it is seen as instilling either quietude or hysteria. An opulence of technology is supposedly matched by a barrenness of civilization. Criticisms come from both left and right that a surfeit of signage and a deficit of understanding cheapen public life, as kitsch overruns culture (Martín-Barbero et al. 15–16, 22, 24). For example, The Reception Deception

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communitarians contrast an allegedly active public with a putatively passive audience: We are not happy when we are watching television, even though most of us spend many hours a week doing so, because we feel we are “on hold” rather than really living during that time. We are happiest when we are successfully meeting challenges at work, in our private lives, and in our communities. (Bellah et al. 49) Are we now? In any event, when newspapers point out that more Britons vote in Big Brother than in European elections, this discourse is in full flight (Lewis et al. 2). The critique becomes sharper still in an era of niche cable television stations, which are said to focus viewers “on our own little segment of reality” to the point where “we lose all touch with the larger reality that matters to us” (Andersen 14). Consequently, 1990s television in India saw soap operas depicting transgressive conduct by women: smoking tobacco, speaking out, drinking alcohol, sleeping with men outside marriage, working as professionals, and putting desire above duty (Butcher 171). Old discourse, new object. The popular provides measures of, and stimuli to, social change. It performs a dual representational function, as both index and incarnation. No wonder all this reception induces panic. For popular culture’s indexical and incarnate power enables audiences to participate in the most global (but local), communal (yet individual), and time-consuming practice of making meaning in the history of the world. The concept and the occasion of being an audience are links between society and person. Reading, viewing, listening, and dancing involve solitary interpretation as well as collective conduct, in a state of becoming and ceasing to be that is noted here by Jack Bratich. Production executives invoke the audience to measure success and claim knowledge of what consumers want; regulators do so to organize administration, psychologists to produce proofs, and lobby groups to change content. Hence the link to panics about education, violence, and apathy supposedly engendered by texts and routinely investigated by the state, psychology, Marxism, neoconservatism, the church, liberal feminism, and others. The audience as consumer, student, felon, voter, and idiot engages such groups. Emergent cultural technologies and genres offer forms of mastery and fun that threaten, however peripherally, the established order. Each new development has brought with it concerns about supposedly unprecedented and unholy risks that unwittingly reference earlier panics: penny dreadfuls at the close of the nineteenth century, silent then sound film during the 1920s, radio in the 1930s, comic books during the 1940s and 1950s, pop music and television during the 1950s and 1960s, satanic rock during the 1970s and 1980s, video-cassette recorders in the 1980s, and rap music, electronic games, and the Internet since the 1990s (Kline 57; Mazzarella 228). Whenever such technologies and genres emerge, young people in particular are identified as both pioneers and victims, simultaneously endowed by manufacturers and critics 356

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with immense power and immense vulnerability. This dual positioning was true of 1920s “Radio Boys,” seeking out signals from afar, and 1990s “GirlPower” avatars, seeking out subjectivities from afar: They were held to be the first to know and the last to understand the media—the grand paradox of youth. The satirical paper the Onion cleverly criticized these interdependent phenomena of panic and commodification via a faux 2005 study of the impact on U.S. youth of seeing Janet Jackson’s breast in a Super-Bowl broadcast the year before (“U.S. Children”). The process continues, with Hillary Clinton announcing that electronic games are “stealing the innocence of our children” (qtd. in “Chasing the Dream” 53) and communications, education, and psychology faculty lining up at the trough of research funds made available in response, then hectoring Dylan’s descendants. All this positioning and panic means that the people who “receive” texts characterize them far more than do their technology, law, or content, because most scholarly approaches and moral panics are preoccupied with reception and hence focus on audiences as citizens or consumers. Pierre Bourdieu refers to two rather graceless antinomies: the “paternalistic-pedagogic” versus a “populist spontaneism and demagogic capitulation to popular tastes.” (Tony Bennett here addresses Bourdieu’s own place in this binary.) Néstor García Canclini notes in this context that “we Latin Americans presumably learned to be citizens through our relationship to Europe; our relationship to the United States will, however, reduce us to consumers” (1). UNESCO’s “Screens Without Frontiers” initiative worries about how to support “creativity, not consumerism, in the face of the popular” (Tricot). Such anxieties and pieties continue to color the cultural spectrum, from Mexican priests silencing cell phones at weddings (using technology designed by the Israeli state to prevent signals setting off bombs) to public inquiries convened to investigate links between screen content and social action. Two accounts of reception are dominant in public policy and social activism and have played a major role in academia. In their different ways, each is an effects model, in that they both assume that texts do things to people, with the citizen understood as an audience member at risk of abjuring both interpersonal responsibility and national culture. Together they comprise what I call “the reception deception.” The first account is a domestic effects model (DEM). Dominant in the United States and exported around the world, it is typically applied without consideration of place and is universalist and psychological (see Comstock and Scharrer; Cooper; Surgeon General’s Scientific Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior). The DEM offers analysis and critique of education and civic order. It views popular culture as a force that can either direct or pervert the citizen-consumer. Entering minds hypodermically, the popular both enables and imperils learning as it gleefully engages id, ego, superego, and anything in between. It may even drive the citizen to violence through aggressive and misogynistic sounds, images, and narratives. The DEM is found at a variety of sites, including laboratories, clinics, The Reception Deception

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prisons, schools, newspapers, psy-complex journals, cultural firms’ research and publicity departments, everyday talk, high-culture institutions, programclassification regulations, conference papers, parliamentary debates, and state-of-our-youth or state-of-our-civil-society moral panics. Consider Dorothy G. Singer and Jerome L. Singer’s febrile twenty-first-century call to center media effects within the study of child development: For the first 60 years of the twentieth century, conceptions such as Freud’s . . . theory of a fundamental aggressive drive or instinct predominated. . . . Critical analyses and careful research on social learning . . . and literally scores of psychophysiological and behavioral empirical studies beginning in the 1960s have pointed much more to aggression as a learned response. . . . Can we ignore the impact on children of their exposure through television and films or, more recently, to computer games and arcade video games that involve vast amounts of violent actions? (xv) Must watch out for those “arcade video games.” The DEM is embodied in U.S. theatrics that ensue after mass school shootings, questioning the role of violent images (not hyper-Protestantism, straight white masculinity, a risk society, or access to firearms) in creating violent people. The second means of constituting “dopes” is a global effects model (GEM). Primarily utilized in non-U.S. discourse, the GEM is specific and political rather than universalist and psychological. Whereas the DEM focuses on the cognition and emotion of individual human subjects via observation and experimentation, the GEM looks to the knowledge of custom and patriotic feeling exhibited by collective human subjects, the grout of national culture. In place of psychology, it is concerned with politics. Popular culture does not make you a well- or an ill-educated person, a wild or a self-controlled one. Rather, it makes you a knowledgeable and loyal national subject, or a naïf who is ignorant of local tradition and history. Cultural belonging, not psychic wholeness, is the touchstone of the GEM. Instead of measuring responses electronically or behaviorally, as its domestic counterpart does, the GEM interrogates the geopolitical origin of texts and the themes and styles they embody, with particular attention to the putatively nation-building genres of drama, literature, news, sport, and current affairs. Adherents to the GEM hold that local citizens should control culture, because their loyalty can be counted on in the event of war. In the case of fiction, only locally sensitized authors are said to make narratives that are true to tradition and custom. Paradoxically, the GEM began in the United States. In 1820, the noted British essayist Sydney Smith asked: “In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book? or goes to an American play? or looks at an American picture or statue?” (141). Herman Melville, whose market privations James L. Machor notes here, opposed the U.S. literary establishment’s devotion to all things English, questioning the compatibility of a Eurocentrically cringing 358

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import culture with the need to “carry Republicanism into literature” (Newcomb 94). Not surprisingly, the United States soon became an early modern exponent of anticultural imperialist, pro-nation-building sentiment. That changed when its market position did. Today, the GEM is found in the discourses of cultural imperialism, everyday talk, broadcast and telecommunications policy, unions, international organizations, the media, heritage, cultural diplomacy, anti-Americanism, and postindustrial service-sector planning (see Schiller, Communication; Beltrán and Fox de Cardona; Dorfman and Mattelart). It is exemplified by Armand Mattelart’s stinging 1970s denunciation of external cultural influence on the Third World: In order to camouflage the counter-revolutionary function which it has assigned to communications technology and, in the final analysis, to all the messages of mass culture, imperialism has elevated the mass media to the status of revolutionary agents, and the modern phenomenon of communications to that of revolution itself . . . an element in a total system answering to the imperialist metropolis’s conception of the role of the superstructure in the counter-revolutionary struggle in Third World countries, i.e. that of smuggling in its models of development and social relations (9, 17). How should we evaluate these models? The DEM suffers the disadvantages of ideal-typical psychological reasoning. It relies on methodological individualism, failing to account for cultural norms and politics, let alone the arcs of history that establish patterns of text and response inside politics, war, ideology, and discourse. Each massively costly laboratory test based on, as the refrain goes, “a large university in the Midwest” is countered by a similar experiment, with conflicting results. As politicians, grant-givers, and jeremiad-wielding pundits call for more and more research to prove that popular culture makes you stupid, violent, and apathetic—or the opposite—academics line up at the trough to indulge their contempt for everyday life and their rent-seeking urge for public money. The DEM rarely interrogates its own conditions of existence—that governments and the media use it to account for social problems, as unruly private and shared experiences trouble those authorities who desire surveillance and control of the population. In response to a referral from Bill Clinton following several school shootings, the Federal Trade Commission surveyed studies of “exposure to violence in entertainment.” It concluded that consuming violent texts was only one “factor contributing to youth aggression, anti-social attitudes and violence. Nevertheless, there is widespread agreement that it is a cause for concern.” The Commission noted that high levels of exposure to violent texts generated “an exaggerated perception of the amount of violence in society” (i–ii). Thank you, Aristotle of The Poetics—and thousands of overemployed behavioral scientists since the 1960s. As for the GEM, its concentration on national culture denies the potentially liberatory and pleasurable nature of different takes on the popuThe Reception Deception

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lar, forgets the internal differentiation of publics, valorizes frequently oppressive and/or unrepresentative local bourgeoisies in the name of maintaining and developing national culture, and ignores the demographic realities of its “own” terrain. For example, alternatives to Hollywood funded under the sign of the GEM frequently favor exclusionary, art-house-centered hegemons who privilege above-the-line talent over below-the-line labor, and centralized authority over open decision making. All too often, the GEM leads to massive public subvention of indolent bourgeoisies. Both the DEM and the GEM implicitly draw on Harold Garfinkel’s notion from forty years ago of the “cultural dope,” a mythic figure “who produces the stable features of the society by acting in compliance with preestablished and legitimate alternatives of action that the common culture provides.” The “common sense rationalities . . . of here and now situations” are obscured by this condescending categorization (68). When the audience is invoked as a category by the culture industries or their critics and regulators, it immediately becomes such a “dope,” for example via the assumption that “children are sitting victims; television bites them” (Schramm et al. 1). This insight from Garfinkel has been crucial to populist theorists who argue for intense differentiation between cultural technologies and the ability of readers to interpret. Whereas radio, Marshall McLuhan said, was a “hot medium” because it contained a vast array of data that led the audience in a definite direction, television was “cool,” leaving more for the viewer to sort out (31). On the readership front, Umberto Eco’s mid-1960s development of a notion of encoding-decoding, open texts, and aberrant readings—developed as a consultancy on audiences for Italian television—was crucial. His insights were picked up by Frank Parkin and then Stuart Hall on the left and Elihu Katz on the right. These active-audience perspectives, expressed here in Rhiannon Bury’s essay and further engaged by both Janice Radway and Jack Bratich, take the reverse position from rat-catching psy-doomsayers. Instead of issuing jeremiads, the line is that audiences, like the consumers conjured up by neoclassical economics, are so clever and able that they make their own meanings, outwitting institutions of the state, academia, and capitalism that seek to measure and control them. The Wall Street Journal welcomes such research, describing it as “deeply threatening to traditional leftist views of commerce” because active reception is close to the sovereign consumer beloved of the Right. The Journal suggests that “cultural-studies mavens are betraying the leftist cause, lending support to the corporate enemy and even training graduate students who wind up doing market research” (Postrel). And Todd Gitlin argues that some sectors of cultural studies are indeed in synch with neoclassical economics and the Right: “What the group wants, buys, demands is ipso facto the voice of the people. Supply has meshed with demand” (32). The direct opposition that is frequently drawn between political economy (production matters) and active-audience theory (interpretation matters) assumes that the fragmentation of audience niches and responses nullifies the concentration and reach of economic power in mass culture—that pluralism 360

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ensures diversity (Schiller, Culture 147–48, 153). Reception becomes an independent variable. How can we elude the reception deception without falling into an unreflective populism or neglecting the importance of audience experiences? Perhaps the most significant innovation beyond the DEM/GEM binary and its populist counter has been a radical historicization of context, which builds on critiques of ethical self-stylization to argue that engagements with audiences and texts must now be supplemented by detailing the conditions under which popular culture is produced, circulated, received, interpreted, and criticized. The life of any text is a passage across space and time, a life remade again and again by institutions, discourses, and practices of distribution and reception—in short, all the shifts and shocks that characterize the existence of cultural commodities, their ongoing renewal as the property of productive workers and publics, and their contingent status as the property of unproductive businesspeople. The cultural historian Roger Chartier proposes a tripartite approach to reception, namely, reconstruction of “the diversity of older readings from their sparse and multiple traces”; a focus on “the text itself, the object that conveys it, and the act that grasps it”; and an identification of “the strategies by which authors and publishers tried to impose an orthodoxy or a prescribed reading on the text” (157, 161–63, 166). This grid turns away from reflectionism, which argues that a text’s key meaning lies in its overt or covert capacity to capture the Zeitgeist. It also rejects formalism’s claim that a close reading of sounds and images can secure a definitive meaning, because texts accrete and attenuate meanings on their travels as they rub up against, trope, and are troped by other fictional and social texts. And it suggests that cognitive and narrative theories’ rational-choice assumptions must be mediated through more than narrative cues, to take account of linguistic translations, material publications, promotional paratexts, and the like. In short, we must consider the life cycle of texts. Barbara Hochman’s contribution here on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ellen Gruber Garvey’s on press scrapbooks, David Nord’s on newspaper readers, and Amy Blair’s on fan letters to Sinclair Lewis show that reception studies can be archival. They do the very difficult work of uncovering the circulation of texts from another time, utilizing conventional sources, such as reviews, along with marginalized forms of readers’ creativity. At an ethnographic level, Paul Lichterman finds quite ambivalent readers in his study of communities of straight women seeking to improve their romantic lives by reading self-help books that instruct them to be less emotionally demanding and not endeavor to change men too much. These readers neither embrace nor resist the books but assimilate them with numerous other inputs into their lives “loosely, tentatively, sometimes interchangeably, without enduring conviction” (439). In the case of children and popular culture—perhaps the most contentious, loaded area of studying reception—the usual anxieties from the effects tradition about turning Edenic innocents into rabid monsters have been challenged by this The Reception Deception

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culturalist perspective, which has animated research into several topics: how children distinguish between fact and fiction; the particular generic features and intertexts of children’s news, drama, action-adventure, education, novels, cartoons, and play; and how talking about the popular makes for social interaction (Buckingham 364–65). Regardless of their origin, today’s cultural texts move within a multiform network of entertainment via books, movies, CDs, the Web, DVDs, electronic games, television, computers, telephones, and multiplexes that can bring surprising outcomes. Crime-fiction stalwart Michael Connelly’s novel Echo Park was promoted to potential readers in 2006 through a partial dramatization available on YouTube (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ndCN3uHinE). Some argue that “a film today is merely a billboard stretched out in time, designed to showcase tomorrow’s classics in the video stores and television reruns” (Elsaesser 11)—an aesthetic “engine driving . . . interlinked global entertainment markets” (Prince 141). In the words of Screen International, the global weekly magazine of the industry, films are an “international marketing tool for DVD and other media” (Green). The same thing increasingly applies to television drama: Alias continued its U.S. network television run from 2001 to 2006 not because of high ratings but because it posted the highest DVD sales ever for a drama series. Which came first—the work or its advertisement? The terms come to lose meaning. This variability applies across geography as well as genre. Those protean, unstable creatures known as “Hollywood films” are allotted various generic descriptions for use in specific markets, based on recipient design. What could a static textual criticism or effects study tell us about the content and impact of Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula when it circulates differently in various parts of the world? For the British release, Columbia TriStar arranged a fashion extravaganza for journalists to encourage talk about a new Goth look, leading to a spot on the BBC’s Clothes Show and stories in Harpers and Queen magazines that located the meaning of the film in white urban style. Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves was sold in France as a documentary-style dramatization of Native American life, and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X was promoted there with posters of the Stars and Stripes aflame. Phillip Noyce’s Sliver, which was shown in the United States with four minutes cut by Paramount censors, was marketed overseas as “the film America didn’t see,” returning twice its domestic revenue in foreign sales. Whereas U.S. trailers for Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! featured a syrupy moment of terpsichory between lovers, Japanese audiences were provided with a deathbed scene of (and as) consumption, owing to their alleged interest in tragedy as honor. Michael Bay’s Pearl Harbor was promoted in Japan as a love story rather than the blend of righteous revenge and forgiving passion that provided a focus elsewhere. Its Tokyo trailer even showed a Japanese airman warning children to take cover. After Minority Report failed domestically, Steven Spielberg and Tom Cruise traveled everywhere they could to recoup a seemingly unwise investment via personal appearances, amid new commercials that made 362

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the film “not like schoolwork.” The overseas release of Roger Kumble’s The Sweetest Thing included a segment considered too touchy for U.S. audiences: a performance number called “The Penis Song,” which featured the female leads singing “You’re too big to fit in.” Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World was sold by Fox to transnational audiences by linking it to the men’s Rugby World Cup. Russell Crowe appeared on the Fox Sports World cable channel, interspersed with footage of rugby games and his performance in the film, to talk about how the sport was both a metaphor and a technique for male bonding on the set. He did not mention that it was also a means for the network to cross-promote the movie with coverage of other spectacles (Miller et al.). The global South experiences Hollywood films in a different context again from such First World reception. Jeff Himpele has followed the life of such texts in La Paz, Bolivia, from their debut at the elite theater in the city centro, then up the surrounding canyon walls, where they play at movie houses frequented by Aymara immigrants and their families. All the while, pirated video copies multiply and circulate. Using interviews with distributors and theater owners, Himpele demonstrates how print quality and exhibition map onto social structure, with increases in altitude corresponding to heightened indigenous identity and decreased social rank. Particular genres become associated with particular zones of people, who get access to “new” releases at different times, depending on their status. Although official itineraries can be undermined by piracy, there is a certain status in renting from specific stores or attending particular theaters. Himpele’s willingness to follow both dominant and subaltern circulation is significant. He does not valorize resistance or demonize ideology. Rather, he investigates how texts accrete and abandon meaning in their travels across a country structured by inequality. This is a necessary move away from research that dwells purely on the interpretation or psychological impact of culture. Today’s most vibrant political-economic and ethnographic studies of reception move beyond textual parameters to show the diverse critical uptakes and social worlds in which production, distribution, and reception occur, following scholars who have been doing such work for decades in the global South (Abbas and Erni). This research intervenes in larger discourses: the status of the sovereign state as a framework for understanding culture; issues of cultural imperialism and local autonomy; the political economy and social life of institutions; and the dynamics of transnational circulation and consumption. Political-economic and ethnographic approaches that track the life of the commodity sign or “follow the thing” bring attention to the fact that cultural texts change their meaning and value depending on where and when they are experienced, as Andrea Press and Camille Johnson-Yale demonstrate here with their contribution on the circulation of Oprah in an African American hair salon. Such syncretic cultures of reception are frequently created by diasporic communities. Marie Gillespie shows how elderly Punjabi expatriates in London take the viewing of Hindi films with their children and The Reception Deception

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grandchildren as opportunities to reminisce and educate about India. In other cases, identifications can fuel chauvinistic nationalism. Controversy and even violence erupted among exiled audiences in 1990 when their image of Iran was challenged during a film festival devoted to postrevolutionary cinema in Los Angeles. And diasporic Vietnamese in Southern California picketed a video store for weeks in 1999 because its owner, Truong Van Tran, displayed a picture of Ho Chi Minh in his Little Saigon shop (Naficy; Shore). On the other hand, gay Asian Caribbean Canadian videomaker Richard Fung talks about searching for Asian genitals in the much-demonized genre of pornography, an account not available in conventional denunciations of porn and its impact on minorities. And when JoEllen Shively returned as a researcher to the reservation where she grew up, her fellow Native Americans were reading the western genre as they had done during her childhood, in an actantial rather than political way that found them cheering for “cowboys” over “Indians” because heroic narrativization had overdetermined racial identification. At an authorial level, Staiger’s essay here looks at how popular-culture creators conduct reception studies. And Radway’s account of a tenure case indicates how reception studies are themselves received. Reception keeps on happening, continuing its transformative work. None of this is to argue for the irrelevancy of interpreting texts. Rather, it means recognizing their contingency. We must pay attention as texts move through time and space, noting their malleability—and their form (provided that this is understood as itself conjunctural) via “discursive analysis of particular actor networks, technologies of textual exchange, circuits of communicational and textual effectivity, traditions of exegesis, commentary and critical practice” (McHoul and O’Regan 5–6, 8–9). At the same time, the struggles for money and power identified by Ivy League tyros-cum-reactionary pundits such as Tushnet provide strong hints about the who-what-when-wherehow of textual circulation. With that help from an improbable quarter, we can transcend the reception deception. The essays by Bennett and Philip Goldstein here offer just such “conjunctural interpretation.”1 At a theoretical level, Bennett argues for a multivariate analysis of the relationship between autonomy and heteronomy in the arts and how this connects to social relations, as opposed to reflectionist accounts that assume absolute correspondences between educational and aesthetic regimes and textual output or interpretation. At the actual level of reception, Goldstein’s investigation of critical engagement with Richard Wright’s Native Son points to the blinkers that blinded midcentury Manhattan modernists to the power of naturalistic and protest literature and hence to a demographically realistic canon of U.S. art and life. He also warns against latter-day neoliberal inclusiveness that adds a little bit of difference to the mix, for it will not deliver a decolonized university when twinned with corporate priorities. While I favor a way forward for progressives in such approaches, I can also see value in effects research—of a new kind. Rather than obsessing over the popular classes and their cultural proclivities, a major program of in364

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vestigation is needed to look at the textual habits since early childhood of congressional representatives, Defense Department officials, and politicians and judges who preside over death. This might allow us to understand the United States’ bloodthirsty conduct in world affairs and domestic “justice.” Successive administrations have supported the death penalty, despite a welter of evidence that it fails to deter criminals and arguments against its constitutionality. They have thus presided over the most violent developed capitalist society in world history. And they have hewn to a foreign policy opposed to international law’s democratically derived and enforced norms of conduct (Sarat). Put another way, and following Laura Nader’s imprecation to her fellow anthropologists that they “study up,” let’s investigate hegemony through reception studies. Here are some threshold questions: How many war films have secretaries of defense seen? Do foreign-policy advisors have a history of antisocial conduct after watching Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch or playing Grand Theft Auto—Vice City? When a president’s cabinet is shown graphics referring to “collateral damage” from proposed military interventions, are members’ heartbeats and other signs of excitation regularly measured? And finally, does the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, the key means of establishing sanity and insanity cross-culturally (Katigbak et al.), need rewriting to account for the U.S. government? If we subjected our political and economic elites to the tests we require of ordinary people, reception studies would grow in interesting and productive ways, taking the reception deception and turning it on its head! But that time may never come! We are lucky in any event to have this volume. It offers valuable insights into the current shape and probable future of reception studies.

Acknowledgment Thanks to the editors for their comments.

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Notes on Contributors

tony bennett is Professor of Sociology at the Open University, a Director of the Economic and Social Science Research Centre on Socio-Cultural Change, and a Professorial Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Melbourne. His publications include Bond and Beyond:The Political Career of a Popular Hero (1987), Outside Literature (1990), The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (1995), and Culture: A Reformer’s Science (1998). His most recent books are Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (2004) and the coedited volume New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society (2005). amy l. blair, Assistant Professor in the Department of English at Marquette University, is currently completing a manuscript about the impact of reading advice in mass-market magazines on contemporaneous reader reception of American realist fiction at the beginning of the twentieth century. Work related to this project has been published in American Literature and Studies in American Fiction. jack bratich is Assistant Professor of Journalism and Media Studies at Rutgers University. He has written articles that apply autonomist thought to such topics as audience studies, reality TV, political intellectuals, and

popular secrecy. He is coeditor of Foucault, Cultural Studies and Governmentality (2003). His book Conspiracy Panics: Popular Culture and Political Rationality is forthcoming. rhiannon bury received her Ph.D. from the University of Toronto and has taught communication studies and women’s studies at several universities in Ontario, Canada. She is currently Assistant Professor in Women’s Studies at Athabasca University, Alberta. She is the author of Cyberspaces of Their Own: Female Fandom Online (2005). leonard diepeveen is Professor of English at Dalhousie University. He is the author of The Difficulties of Modernism (2003) and Changing Voices: The Modern Quoting Poem (1993) and coauthor of Art with a Difference: Looking at Difficult and Unfamiliar Art (2001) and Active Sights: Art as Social Action (1998). ellen gruber garvey is Associate Professor of English at New Jersey City University. In addition to coediting Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals (2004), she is the author of The Adman in the Parlor: Magazines and the Gendering of Consumer Culture, 1880s to 1910s (1996). She is currently writing a book on how nineteenth-century Americans used scrapbooks to negotiate their reading of the press and their understanding of their worlds. philip goldstein, who earned his Ph. D. from Temple University, is Professor of English at the University of Delaware. Recently he has published PostMarxism: An Introduction (2005) and Communities of Cultural Value: Reception Study, Political Differences, and Literary History (2001) and, with James L. Machor, has edited Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (2001). He is currently completing a book entitled American Reading Practices: Between Aesthetics and Politics. marcial gonzález is Assistant Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the forthcoming Beyond Reification: Chicano Novels and the Politics of Form. He is currently working on a project that traces the cultural history of Mexican migratory labor in the United States since the 1930s. barbara hochman is Associate Professor of American Literature at BenGurion University of the Negev, Israel. She has published widely on nineteenth- and twentieth-century American fiction. Her most recent book is Getting at the Author: Reimagining Books and Reading in the Age of American Realism (2001). Her essay in this collection grows out of her work-inprogress “Uncle Tom’s Cabin and the Reading Revolution.”

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camille johnson-yale is a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana. Her research interests include media industries, communications technologies, and discourses of globalization. She has coauthored reports on everyday uses of the Internet for the Pew Internet and American Life Project and also the chapter “Web Use and Web Studies,” which appeared in Web Archiving. james l. machor is Professor of English at Kansas State University and a former senior Fulbright Fellow. His books include Readers in History: Nineteenth-Century American Literature and the Context of Response (1993), Pastoral Cities: Urban Ideals and the Symbolic Landscape of America (1987), and (with Philip Goldstein) Reception Study: From Literary Theory to Cultural Studies (2001). He is currently completing a book on informed response, middle-class reading, and American fiction before the Civil War. steven mailloux is Chancellor’s Professor of Rhetoric, Professor of English, and Director of the Critical Theory Emphasis at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Interpretive Conventions: The Reader in the Study of American Fiction (1982), Rhetorical Power (1989), Reception Histories: Rhetoric, Pragmatism, and American Cultural Politics (1998), and Disciplinary Identities: Rhetorical Paths of English, Speech, and Composition (2006). toby miller teaches at the University of California, Riverside. His books include The Well-Tempered Self: Citizenship, Culture, and the Postmodern Subject (1993), Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media (1998), Global Hollywood (2001), and most recently, Cultural Citizenship (2007). He edits the journals Television & New Media and Social Identities. david paul nord is Professor of Journalism and Adjunct Professor of History at Indiana University. He is the author of Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in America (2004) and Communities of Journalism: A History of American Newspapers and Their Readers (2001). He is a former interim editor and associate editor of the Journal of American History. andrea press is Chair of the Media Studies Department at the University of Virginia. She is the author of Women Watching Television: Gender, Class and Generation in the American Television Experience (1991) and coauthor of Speaking of Abortion: Television and Authority in the Lives of Women (1999). She has received fellowships from the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Mental Health. Her current projects concern media culture among fundamentalist political activists in the United States and the use of new media in American political culture.

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janice radway is Professor and Chair of the Literature Program at Duke University. She received her Ph.D. in English and American Studies from Michigan State University and is past President of the American Studies Association and past editor of American Quarterly. She is the author of Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarchy, and Popular Literature (1984) and A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste and Middle-Class Desire (1997). She is currently working on a book about girls, zines, chick lit, and subjectivity in the 1990s. kenneth m. roemer is Academy of Distinguished Teachers and Academy of Distinguished Scholars Professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. He has received four grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to direct Summer Seminars and has been Visiting Professor in Japan and a guest lecturer at Harvard. His books on utopian literature include The Obsolete Necessity (1976), which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize; America as Utopia (1981); and Utopian Audiences (2003). Most recently he has coedited The Cambridge Companion to Native American Literature (2005). patrocinio schweickart is Professor of English and Women’s Studies at Purdue University. Her current research focuses on the intersection of theories of communicative action and theories of reading, with particular attention to ethical and social implications. She has coedited Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response (2004) and Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts (1986). janet staiger is William P. Hobby Centennial Professor in Communication and Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is a former Director of that university’s Center for Women’s and Gender Studies. Her recent publications include Media Reception Studies (2005), Authorship and Film (2003), Perverse Spectators: The Practices of Film Reception (2000), and Blockbuster TV: Must-See Sitcoms in the Network Era (2000). She is beginning work on a study of genre and affect. charlotte templin is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Indianapolis. She is the author of Feminism and the Politics of Literary Reputation (1995) and editor of Conversations with Erica Jong (2002). She has written articles on literary reputation, comedy, and women authors. Her interviews with contemporary women novelists have appeared in the Boston Review, the Missouri Review, the Indiana Review, and Glimmer Train Stories.

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Index

Aldrich, Robert, xix–xx, 280, 282–88 Ang, Ien, 52 on the encoding/decoding model of audiences, 37 Arendt, Hannah, 30 on thinking, 24–25 Armstrong, Isabel, xxiv audience, 3, 344 active theory of, xv, xxv, 33–49, 360–61 Adorno, Theodore, on, 36, 50 constituent power of, 35 and consumer power, 40–41 encoding/decoding models of, 37–38 ethnography of, 39–40 as fiction, 36 Frankfurt School on, 36 ontology of, 35 and resistance, 44–46 Baker, Houston, 134 on black aesthetics, 120–31 on Native Son, 128 Bellamy, Edward Jameson, Fredric, on, 100, 109 Looking Backward, xvi, 116 modern “alien” readers of, 108–14

and other utopias, 113 questionnaire on, 115 readers of, 99, 100–101, 108–14 reviews of, 101–7 and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 103 Belsey, Catherine, 207 on realism, 199 Bennett, Tony, xiv, xv–xvi, xxv, 52, 57–84 on Bourdieu, Pierre, 58–60, 74–81 and Cultural Capital and Social Exclusion, 80 Culture: A Reformer’s Science, xv Outside Literature, xvi profiles of class taste, 62–70, 80–81 on Rancière, Jacques, and aesthetics, 72–75 reading formations, xv, 198 Berg, Temma, 20 Berubé, Michael, xxiv, xxv Bible, Higher Criticism of, xxii Blair, Amy L., xvii–xviii, 139–58 Bleich, David, xii, xvii, xxv Bloom, Allan, xxiii, xxv book, histories of the, xix Booth, Wayne, coduction, 8–9, 12, 21

Bourdieu, Pierre, xv–xvi, 83 Distinction, 58–60, 75–80 on the habitus, 57 In Other Words, 59 and Kant, Immanuel, 71–72 Lahire, Bernard on, 60–62 Outline of a Theory of Practice, 58–59 Pascalian Meditations, 59 and Wolff, Christian, 72 on the working class, 77–80 Brantlinger, Patrick, xxiv, xxv Bratich, Jack, xv, 33–56 on Gramsci and hegemony, 44, 46–47 on value production, 42–43 Bury, Rhiannon, xx, 289–306 Card, Claudia, 20, 21 care, ethics of, xiv, 13–14, 20 as reading, 14–15 Clark, Michael, xxiv Dasenbrock, Reed Way, xiii–xiv, xxii, xxv Day, Ron, on desire and capital, 42 de Certeau, Michel, 53 and active audience studies, 50 Delbanco, Andrew, xxiv, xxv Derrida, Jacques, 6–7, 8, 19, 21 Diepeveen, Leonard, xviii, 159–78 Eagleton, Terry, xxiii, xxv Erickson, Darlene, on Reading Lolita in Tehran, 30 Escarpit, Robert, 116 the alien reader of, 101, 113 Famous All over Town, xviii, 179–80, 189–91 and cultural authenticity, 180–81, 186, 191–92 negative views of, 183–85 positive views of, 185–86 and readers, 187–91 and reification, 189–92 Felsi, Rita, 198, 207 on realism, 199 feminism, xviii, 198 film, global markets of, xxi–xxii, 362–63 and reviewers of fiction, 204 Fish, Stanley, xi, xii, xvii, xxiii, xxiv, xvv, 8, 21, 349 Fiske, John, 33, 40, 43 on audience constituent power, 38–39 on audience resistance, 47 McGuigan, Jim, on, 40 and relativism, 50–51 376

INDEX

Fitzgerald, F. Scott (The Great Gatsby), 23, 25, 26 Fiumara, Gemma Corradi, 19, 21 Flint, Kate, 30 on Nafisi, Azar, 24 on Reading Lolita in Tehran, 25 Fluck, Winnifred, xxiv, xxv Flynn, Elizabeth, 21, 22 Foucault, Michel, 207 on power/knowledge, 197 Frow, John, 120, 292 Frye, Northrop, xxiii Garvey, Ellen Gruber, xix–xx, 211–31 on Carolyn Wells, Healey Dall, and women’s issues, 213–16, 230 on Elizabeth Boynton Harbert and women’s issues, 216–20, 230 on Harry Ingersoll Bowditch and his son’s death, the abolition of slavery, and Civil War and other poetry, 220–29 on the reading and recirculation of nineteenth-century newspaper scrapbooks, 211–28 Gilligan, Carol, 20 Goldstein, Philip, xvi, xvii, xxv, xxvi, xxvii, 119–37 on academic criticism and the university, 130–32 on naturalism, 120, 127–28 Gonzáles, Marcial, xviii, 179–94 Graff, Gerald, xiii, xxiii, xxv Great Gatsby, The. See Fitzgerald, F. Scott Greenblatt, Stephen, xxiii, xxv Gubar, Susan, xxiii, xxv Guillory, John, xxiii, xxvii Habermas, Jürgen, xiv, 7–9, 15–18, 19, 20, 21 communicative action, theory of, 3–5 discourse ethics, 12–13 Hall, Stuart, 33, 53 on encoding and decoding, 37–38 Hardt, Michael, xv, 54 Hartley, John, 43, 54 on audience as fiction, 36 Hewitt, Heather, 30 on Reading Lolita in Tehran, 26. Hirsch, E. D., Jr., xiii, xxiii, xxvii, 19, 21 Hoagland, Lisa Maria, 207 on feminist fiction and its reviewers, 204 Hoagland, Sara, 20, 21 Hochman, Barbara, xix, 255–76 Holland, David, xvii, xxvii, 21

Hurston, Zora Neale, 135 left-wing criticism of, 127 Their Eyes Were Watching God, 124–26 interpretation, xi interpretive community, xii–xiii Iran, xv, 23 Iser, Wolfgang, xi, xvii, xxiii, xxvii Jameson, Fredric, xxiii, xxvii, 116–17, 346, 349 Archaeologies of the Future, 99–100 Jauss, Hans Robert, xii, xvi, xxiii, xxvii, 161, 174, 177 Jenkins, Henry, 54 on convergence culture, 40 Textual Poachers, 289, 305 Johnson-Yale, Camille, xx–xxi, 307–24 Kamran, Cameron, 30 on Reading Lolita in Tehran, 26 Kernan, Alvin, xiii, xxii, xxiii, xxvii Krieger, Murray, xxiv, xxvii Levinas, Emmanuel, 11, 20, 22 Lewis, Sinclair, Main Street, xvii–xviii, 157 fans’ views of, 142–56 and middlebrow culture, 140–42 the popularity of, 139–40, 155 the realism of, 145 literary criticism academic, xxiv–xxv aesthetic, xxiv ethical, 9 historical method of, xxiii history of, xxiii–xxv reader-response, xiv, xvii–xviii, xxiii validity in, 8–9, 17–18 literature, Hispanic, xviii Machor, James, xvi, xxvii, 20, 87–98, 117 Mailloux, Steven, xiv, xxv, xxvii, 23–31, 157 Reception Histories, xiv media, xix–xx networks of, 362 ontology of, 33–56 Melville, Herman, 97 “Bartleby the Scrivener,” the reception of, 91–92 “Benito Cereno,” the reception of, 92–94 magazine publication, knowledge and benefits of, 88–89, 95 Moby Dick and Pierre, sales and reception of, 87, 95

Piazza Tales, the reception of, 89–96 and Poe, Edgar Allen, 89–91 short stories of, xvi, 87–89, 95 White Jacket, 93–94 Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, xviii, 195, 200 conservative reviewers of, xviii, 195–96, 199, 200–204 feminist reviewers of, xviii, 195–96, 200, 204–6 See also Shulman, Alix Kates Michaels, Walter Benn, xiii, xxii, xxvii, 131 Miller, Toby, xxi–xxii, 353–70 on the public circulation of texts, 363–64 Mills, Sara, on discourse, 195 modernism, xviii, 161–62, 173–74, 175–76 and argument, 169–70, 172 changes of, 161–62, 173–74, 175–76 and honesty, 170–71 and interpretation, 170 recalcitrant readers of, 159–61, 162–69, 174–75 Morris, Meaghan, 55 on audience studies, 48 Nafisi, Azar, 24, 30 on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, 28–29 and neoconservatives, 28 Reading Lolita in Tehran, xv, 23–29 on reading The Great Gatsby, 27–28 Native Son, xvii and Black Studies, 128–29 defenses of, 127–28, 129 and Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, 120–23, 132–33 and humanism, 123–24 and Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, 124–26 modernist views of, 119, 120, 123–24, 132 naturalist views of, 119, 120, 123, 124, 132 the reception of, 119–37 Negri, Toni, xv, 55 and Marx, 49, 51 on multitude, 34 on ontology and affective production, 41–42 newspapers, early twentieth-century growth of, 235 the New York World, accuracy and fair play in, xix, 233–53 the reading and recirculation of nineteenth-century scrapbooks of, xix–xx, 211–28 reading of, xviii–xix INDEX

377

New York World and cultural politics, 245–48, 249–50 managers’ views of accuracy and fair play in, 234–40 readers’ views of accuracy and fair play in, 233–35, 243–45 reporters’ views of accuracy and fair play in, 234, 240–42, 248–49 and sources of, 250, 251 Nodding, Nel, 13–15, 22 Nord, David, xix, 233–53 ontology, 34 Negri, Antonio, on, 34–35 Oprah Winfrey Show, 311–12 female viewers of, xx–xxi, 312–20 and Janelle’s hair salon, Hurricane Katrina, racism, and political talk, 312–21 Ostrow, Sonja, 30 on Reading Lolita in Tehran, 25–26 Phelan, James, 11, 22 Press, Andrea, xx–xxi, 307–24 Rabinowitz, Peter J., 11, 22 Radway, Janice, xxi, xxvii, 324, 327–51 A Feeling for Books, xxi on girls and culture, 339–41, 343, 347 Reading the Romance, xxi, 335–38, 346 on reception study, views of, 327–34, 341–45 on reification, 338 Rancière, Jacques, xvi, 84 on aesthetics, 72–75 on Bourdieu, 71, 77 Ratcliffe, Krista, rhetorical listening, 15–17, 19, 22 Raynor, Alice, 3, 22 reading as communicative action, 9–11 ethics of, 11–15 and film adaptations, 280 histories of, xviii–xix Readings, Bill, xxiv, xxvii realism, 198–99 Belsey, Catherine, on, 199 Felski, Rita, on, 199 Howells, William Dean, on, 198 Martin, Wallace, on, 198 reception anthropological and sociological versions of, xxi deception of, 353–57 and the Defense Department, 365 378

INDEX

domestic effects model of, 357–58, 359–60 ethnographic versions of, xxv global effects model of, 358–60 and media studies, 279–80, 285–86 modern versions of, 354–57 sixteenth- to eighteenth-century versions of, 353–54 social versions of, 361–62 study of, xi–xiii, xvi–xviii, 3 theories of, xiv–xvi, xxiv, 327–34, 341–45 and thinking, 24, 27 and utopian fiction, 100, 113, 114 Roemer, Kenneth M., xvi–xvii, 99–118 Utopian Audiences, 100, 115, 118 Rorty, Richard, 17, 22 Said, Edward, xxiii, xxvii Santiago, Danny, 180, 181–83, 192–93 Schwab, Gabriele, xxiv, xxvii Schwartz, Daniel, 19, 22 Schweikart, Patrocinio, xiv, xxiv, xxvii, 3–22 Shulman, Alix Kates, 208 and bra-burning, 206 A Good Enough Daughter, 206 on life before feminism, 206 on Memoirs of an Ex–Prom Queen, 199–200, 206 and realism, 196 Six Feet Under, xx, 291, 304 elite and non-elite fan forums of, 291–92, 295–303 slavery, legacy of, 257–58 Spillane, Mickey, 281–82, 288 and the cold war, 280–81 Kiss Me, Deadly, Robert Aldrich’s film adaptation of, xx, 282–85, 286, 287–88 Staiger, Janet, xx, xxvii, 279–88 Stowe, Harriet Beecher and the Columbian Exposition, 263–65 editions of, xix, 255, 256, 262–63, 266–71 as purposive, 261–62 reading protocols of, 255–56, 258–59, 265–66 reception of, 255, 259–61, 271–73 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, xix, 275–76 technologies, cultural, xv television fans of, 290–304 McCarthy, Anna, on, 320

and women and the engaged public, 307–12 television fans and literary criticism, 290–91, 292–94, 303–4 media forums of, 290 and poaching, 289 Templin, Charlotte, xviii, 195–208 on feminism, 198 on Foucault on power/knowledge, 197 on Mills, Sara, on discourse, 195 on realism, 198–99

Thomas, Brook, xxiv, xxvii Tompkins, Jane, xxvii utopian fiction, xvi–xvii definition of, 115 Jameson, Fredric, on, 99–100 reception of, 99–118 studies of, 100, 114 White, Hayden, xxvii Tropics of Discourse, xxiii Wright, Richard, 137 political beliefs of, 126–27, 133

INDEX

379