Books in Public: Recognition of Evaluative Discourses in Popular Reading

Independent bookstores and online spaces like Goodreads.com have been celebrated as spaces that enable readers to form a community to evaluate books and discuss emotional impacts of reading, allowing space to bring embodied experiences to bear on reading and potentially open new avenues of discourse. Yet, at the same time, these spaces are marked by a reluctance to engage publicly as well as a continued deference to or centering of a perceived literary elite. This dissertation first argues that, regardless of how powerful reading seems to be, actual reading practices have largely been oriented toward authorities. While these spaces seem like a way to evade this orientation, the context of consumer capitalism in which these spaces inevitably must exist ensures that utterances of intimacy and embodiment, utterances that look challenging to the rational-critical discourse of literary aesthetics, still reproduce self-alienation and preclude the possibility of poetic world-making, the act of calling into being new publics and discourses.

Author

• Aust, Erin Jean

• consumerism
• cultural studies
• literacy
• popular culture
• publics
• reading

Identifier

hdl:1920/14025

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:MARS:1920/14025