Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.5325/reception.15.1.0025
Charles Matthews
abstract:Bibliophiles often imagine a pre-digital golden age of undistracted reading, but recent scholarship in the history of reading has refuted the existence of this past idyll. This short article introduces the diaries of Anne Lister (1791–1840) as a useful case study for considering how historical readers managed and worried about their intellectual time, and how this process was influenced by competing social pressures. The article discusses some episodes from the diaries that suggest that reading was subject to class-based expectations about the economy of time during this period, and that Lister carefully managed their reading time to develop a modern gentlemanly persona as part of their endeavor to inherit their uncle's estate.
{"title":"\"To do a little and well\": Anne Lister's Reading Routine","authors":"Charles Matthews","doi":"10.5325/reception.15.1.0025","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.15.1.0025","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Bibliophiles often imagine a pre-digital golden age of undistracted reading, but recent scholarship in the history of reading has refuted the existence of this past idyll. This short article introduces the diaries of Anne Lister (1791–1840) as a useful case study for considering how historical readers managed and worried about their intellectual time, and how this process was influenced by competing social pressures. The article discusses some episodes from the diaries that suggest that reading was subject to class-based expectations about the economy of time during this period, and that Lister carefully managed their reading time to develop a modern gentlemanly persona as part of their endeavor to inherit their uncle's estate.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"238 1","pages":"25 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73846317","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.5325/reception.15.1.0065
R. Johnsen
abstract:This article builds on the models of the teacher-scholar and the public scholar to delineate the role of the scholarly administrator. Literary studies faculty members who transition to the administrative ranks face obstacles to continuing their scholarly research and writing, and Johnsen argues that such administrators should persevere in their efforts as these can serve ethical, civic, and institutional progress. Reading is the foundation for this work, and scholarly administrators should read widely for pleasure and productivity. Sources include literary criticism on women's writing, crime fiction, and mass observation along with personal experience as faculty member and academic affairs administrator.
{"title":"Reading on the Dark Side: Or, the Productive Pleasures of the Scholarly Administrator","authors":"R. Johnsen","doi":"10.5325/reception.15.1.0065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.15.1.0065","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:This article builds on the models of the teacher-scholar and the public scholar to delineate the role of the scholarly administrator. Literary studies faculty members who transition to the administrative ranks face obstacles to continuing their scholarly research and writing, and Johnsen argues that such administrators should persevere in their efforts as these can serve ethical, civic, and institutional progress. Reading is the foundation for this work, and scholarly administrators should read widely for pleasure and productivity. Sources include literary criticism on women's writing, crime fiction, and mass observation along with personal experience as faculty member and academic affairs administrator.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"67 1","pages":"65 - 72"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90162871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.5325/reception.15.1.0059
E. Laine, Michelle Liu Carriger
abstract:In the arts and humanities, reading is both an obligation and an indulgence—on the one hand, reading another article or book chapter when you should be writing is the height of procrastination; on the other, reading is a fundamental prerequisite to knowing the field, situating oneself in it, and completing responsible research. In excerpts from the authors' ongoing oral history project with journal editors from the fields of theater and performance studies, the editors wonder: who is reading the materials that is published? What aspects of reading might be illuminated from the perspective of the people working to provide various disciplines with texts to read? Indeed, what if editors are the only ones reading some of the work in journals?
{"title":"The Labor of Academic Journals: Or, Is Anyone Going to Read This?","authors":"E. Laine, Michelle Liu Carriger","doi":"10.5325/reception.15.1.0059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.15.1.0059","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In the arts and humanities, reading is both an obligation and an indulgence—on the one hand, reading another article or book chapter when you should be writing is the height of procrastination; on the other, reading is a fundamental prerequisite to knowing the field, situating oneself in it, and completing responsible research. In excerpts from the authors' ongoing oral history project with journal editors from the fields of theater and performance studies, the editors wonder: who is reading the materials that is published? What aspects of reading might be illuminated from the perspective of the people working to provide various disciplines with texts to read? Indeed, what if editors are the only ones reading some of the work in journals?","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"1 1","pages":"59 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"89867230","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.5325/reception.15.1.0079
Margaret Mackey
abstract:A reading life is not simply an aggregation of singular experiences with particular materials. This article focuses on how the rhythms of a reading life include the time between one book and the next and explores how this interval is differently experienced by different readers. "Flow [or constant] readers" and "event [or intermittent] readers" experience time between books in very different ways. Similarly, readers who prefer a "big world" narrative across many books experience between time differently from those who prefer "stand-alone" titles. The article looks briefly at the kinds of enforced between times that may be enforced by external factors of access, such as the library hold list for popular #BookTok choices. It concludes with a short discussion of potential implications for research and practice.
{"title":"Time between Books: Selection, Access, Fallowness, and #BookTok","authors":"Margaret Mackey","doi":"10.5325/reception.15.1.0079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.15.1.0079","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:A reading life is not simply an aggregation of singular experiences with particular materials. This article focuses on how the rhythms of a reading life include the time between one book and the next and explores how this interval is differently experienced by different readers. \"Flow [or constant] readers\" and \"event [or intermittent] readers\" experience time between books in very different ways. Similarly, readers who prefer a \"big world\" narrative across many books experience between time differently from those who prefer \"stand-alone\" titles. The article looks briefly at the kinds of enforced between times that may be enforced by external factors of access, such as the library hold list for popular #BookTok choices. It concludes with a short discussion of potential implications for research and practice.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"49 1","pages":"79 - 88"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"90666689","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.5325/reception.15.1.0015
W. Johnson
abstract:Readers in ancient Rome did not have efficiency of reading as a goal. The much-cited exception that proves the rule is a letter of the Younger Pliny (Letter 3.5, early 2nd c. CE) that describes the extraordinary reading habits of his uncle the Elder Pliny, as he read and digested the 2000 works used as sources for constructing his encyclopedic Natural History. Famously, the Elder, as he rode in his carriage or litter, would have a lector read to him and a stenographer take notes. This article examines in detail how an ancient reader would imagine such a scene. The aims of the article are two: (1) to shine further light on the enslaved persons enabling Pliny's project; (2) to elucidate how and why an ancient reader would see (as modern commentators have not) the comical impracticalities behind the Elder's extreme "efficient" reading behavior.
{"title":"Reading for Efficiency in Ancient Rome: The Case of Pliny the Elder","authors":"W. Johnson","doi":"10.5325/reception.15.1.0015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.15.1.0015","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:Readers in ancient Rome did not have efficiency of reading as a goal. The much-cited exception that proves the rule is a letter of the Younger Pliny (Letter 3.5, early 2nd c. CE) that describes the extraordinary reading habits of his uncle the Elder Pliny, as he read and digested the 2000 works used as sources for constructing his encyclopedic Natural History. Famously, the Elder, as he rode in his carriage or litter, would have a lector read to him and a stenographer take notes. This article examines in detail how an ancient reader would imagine such a scene. The aims of the article are two: (1) to shine further light on the enslaved persons enabling Pliny's project; (2) to elucidate how and why an ancient reader would see (as modern commentators have not) the comical impracticalities behind the Elder's extreme \"efficient\" reading behavior.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"78 2 1","pages":"15 - 23"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87909534","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.5325/reception.15.1.0097
Sarah Pyke
abstract:How can attention to queer adults' childhood reading illuminate the complex temporalities of queer experience—and of reading itself? Developing existing critical work on non-linear time, reading and book use, this article proposes queerness as a mode and oral history as a method for provoking new thinking about reading-intime and how the manipulation of the material book might facilitate time unfolding differently. Analyzing the Textual Preferences archive, in which ten LGBTQ+ adults reflect on their formative reading, the article shows how recalling and rereading key books from childhood enables readers to produce belatedly legible aspects of their "protoqueer" child-selves. Through encounters with texts by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ruby Ferguson, Louisa May Alcott, Enid Blyton, Kenneth Grahame, Susan Coolidge and Joanna Trollope, these readers use books to negotiate growing up, to disrupt and defend against the progress of chronological time, and to reshape their past experiences, both in life and in reading.
{"title":"\"The childhood I was meant to be in\": The Queer Time of Reading","authors":"Sarah Pyke","doi":"10.5325/reception.15.1.0097","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.15.1.0097","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:How can attention to queer adults' childhood reading illuminate the complex temporalities of queer experience—and of reading itself? Developing existing critical work on non-linear time, reading and book use, this article proposes queerness as a mode and oral history as a method for provoking new thinking about reading-intime and how the manipulation of the material book might facilitate time unfolding differently. Analyzing the Textual Preferences archive, in which ten LGBTQ+ adults reflect on their formative reading, the article shows how recalling and rereading key books from childhood enables readers to produce belatedly legible aspects of their \"protoqueer\" child-selves. Through encounters with texts by Laura Ingalls Wilder, Ruby Ferguson, Louisa May Alcott, Enid Blyton, Kenneth Grahame, Susan Coolidge and Joanna Trollope, these readers use books to negotiate growing up, to disrupt and defend against the progress of chronological time, and to reshape their past experiences, both in life and in reading.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"3 1","pages":"113 - 97"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"81639902","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.5325/reception.15.1.0041
Tamara Bhalla, Lindsay Dicuirci
abstract:In this micro article, the authors survey the media landscape, including bestseller lists and celebrity book club culture, think pieces and mommy blogs, to examine the discourse around "me time," reading, and motherhood. The article explores how the cultivation of "me time," which is ostensibly about taking time away from mothering, returns mothers to the work of self-improvement, disguised as self-care. The books that mothers are reading (judged by their posts online, book awards, bestseller lists, book club culture, etc.) and the ways they are blogging about "me time" reading suggests that under the conditions of twenty-first-century neoliberalism, reading mothers must use this time to meditate upon and improve their mothering. "Me time" reading is framed as a separation from maternal labor but instead impels mothers to justify their solitary habit and redeem reading as a contribution to—rather than detraction from—family life.
{"title":"\"Me Time\": Motherhood, Reading, and Myths of Leisure","authors":"Tamara Bhalla, Lindsay Dicuirci","doi":"10.5325/reception.15.1.0041","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.15.1.0041","url":null,"abstract":"abstract:In this micro article, the authors survey the media landscape, including bestseller lists and celebrity book club culture, think pieces and mommy blogs, to examine the discourse around \"me time,\" reading, and motherhood. The article explores how the cultivation of \"me time,\" which is ostensibly about taking time away from mothering, returns mothers to the work of self-improvement, disguised as self-care. The books that mothers are reading (judged by their posts online, book awards, bestseller lists, book club culture, etc.) and the ways they are blogging about \"me time\" reading suggests that under the conditions of twenty-first-century neoliberalism, reading mothers must use this time to meditate upon and improve their mothering. \"Me time\" reading is framed as a separation from maternal labor but instead impels mothers to justify their solitary habit and redeem reading as a contribution to—rather than detraction from—family life.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"26 1","pages":"41 - 49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75051406","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-01DOI: 10.5325/reception.15.1.0144
Kristin L. Matthews
{"title":"Winning Women's Hearts and Minds: Selling Cold War Culture and Consumerism through the \"Ladies Home Journal\" and \"Amerika.\" by Diana Cucuz (review)","authors":"Kristin L. Matthews","doi":"10.5325/reception.15.1.0144","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5325/reception.15.1.0144","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":"33 1","pages":"144 - 147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.1,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73096848","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}