Reading Beyond the Book

The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture

Danielle Fuller, DeNel Rehberg Sedo

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135080372
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatura
• Categoría: Historia y teoría de la crítica literaria

Literary culture has become a form of popular culture over the last fifteen years thanks to the success of televised book clubs, film adaptations, big-box book stores, online bookselling, and face-to-face and online book groups. This volume offers the first critical analysis of mass reading events and the contemporary meanings of reading in the UK, USA, and Canada based on original interviews and surveys with readers and event organizers.

The resurgence of book groups has inspired new cultural formations of what the authors call "shared reading." They interrogate the enduring attraction of an old technology for readers, community organizers, and government agencies, exploring the social practices inspired by the sharing of books in public spaces and revealing the complex ideological investments made by readers, cultural workers, institutions, and the mass media in the meanings of reading.

1 Reading

When Mary Worrall, a Reader Advisory librarian from Solihull in the United Kingdom declared that “reading is the new rock n'roll” at a Readers' Day held in Birmingham in 2003, she expressed the excitement that many members of her profession, and keen readers, felt about the situation of book reading in the early twenty-first century. Suddenly, it seemed, reading was fun and sharing books with others was in vogue. Books and book clubs certainly appeared to be everywhere, or, at least, they were represented in places other than just branch libraries, bookstores, and people's homes. Supermarkets and newsagents sold books alongside groceries. The Starbucks chain of coffee shops hosted book clubs across the US, whereas in the UK shelves of books that could be borrowed or swapped started appearing in pubs, doctor's offices, and home hardware stores. These shelves were often stocked by groups of readers who had come to know each other in person because of their involvement in the practices associated with BookCrossing. By registering a book on the BookCrossing website, downloading and attaching to it a label showing a unique identification number, and then “releasing” that book into the public domain, a BookCrosser could track the journey of a specific book through several readers' hands and sometimes across considerable geographic distances. Additionally, online forums within the BookCrossing website enabled readers to share reading suggestions, and to interact socially both on- and off-line. Even as the corporate world jumped on the book club bandwagon, eager readers continued to find innovative means of sharing their love of an activity that has often attracted denigrating labels to its enthusiasts, such as a “book worm.” Whereas some journalists continued to scorn book clubs and the readers who joined them, the media outlets they worked for were using them to sell newspapers or keep listeners tuning in and visiting their websites. By adapting the book club format, the mass media of television, radio and newspapers substantially increased the visibility of shared reading as a cultural activity.

Meanwhile, the adaptation of literary best sellers and prize-winning books for the screen, while not a new practice, became more lucrative for production companies, literary agents, and—in some cases—authors (Collins 2010; S. Murray 2011). In addition to face-to-face, online, and mass-mediated book clubs, readers could access “literary experiences” in various nonprint media through cinema-going, by visiting book festivals, or attending One Book, One Community (OBOC) activities. All of these bookish encounters occurred outside the academy, which, as Jim Collins convincingly demonstrates, was no longer viewed by nonprofessional readers as a source of expertise about which books to read and how to read them. Instead, new media authorities such as Oprah helped to legitimate the “personal reading” strategies already pursued by many readers within book clubs (2010, 44). Literary culture had become part of popular culture in terms of its cross-media presence and in terms of the reading practices advocated by readers from media stars to amateur book reviewers posting online. Reading may not have acquired the subversive or counter-cultural appeal of rock n'roll by the first decade of the twenty-first century, but it certainly seemed to have shed its popular image as a serious, solitary, and academic pursuit.

Reading was also on-trend in the sense that at least some of its practitioners kept pace with online media practices that enabled them to share reading via blogs (Pedersen 2008), fan sites (Skains 2010), customer reviews (Steiner 2008), virtual communities (Pinder 2012; Rehberg Sedo 2003, 2011b), and social media such as Facebook and Twitter (Gruzd and Rehberg Sedo 2012; Lang 2012). As the decade progressed, new digital devices such as e-readers, tablets, and smartphones enabled those readers who could afford them almost instant access to books. Far from disappearing, as some late twentieth-century doomsayers, such as Sven Birkets (1996), had predicted, the book was (at least partially) remediated, the codex remained a significant material form for many people, and more books were published in North America and the UK than ever before (see Chapter 4, “Money”). Certainly, the “late age of print”—to coin Ted Striphas's (2009) phrase— operated differently for both producers and consumers of books than it did in earlier periods of the twentieth century. The ability to reproduce content across multiple media platforms, and the facility of the largest publishing and media companies to pour millions of dollars into the branding and marketing of select lead titles contributed significantly to the outstanding success of some books, most famously the Harry Potter and Twilight series (Larsson and Steiner 2011; Striphas 2009, 141–74). Strategic marketing campaigns also played a role in the creation of several “cross-over” best sellers that found both an adult and a younger audience of readers. These included Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2003), and the Potter series, all of which were published in “adult” and “teen” editions (Beckett 2009; Falconer 2009 Siebert 2011; Squires 2007, 147–75). The scale of popularity of these books suggests that, for a sizeable portion of younger people, reading was not entirely uncool. Perhaps only a minority of such readers, however, would proudly declare themselves to be “book geeks”—even to researchers investigating reading events. Members of the Teen Book Club at the Kenwood Academy High School on the south side of Chicago were enthusiastic participants in the city's OBOC Chicago program, treasured the books they were given as part of the city's Teen Book Club network, showed great skill at running a book discussion, but told us that they had, nonetheless, to defend their hobby against the occasional taunts of classmates. Reading, especially the reading of fiction, may have become a part of popular culture, but the older cultural values that are attached to it appear to be in tension with its more recent cultural forms.

Mass reading events (MREs) are one of these forms and part of a popular literary cultural arena that positively bristles with various media practices, technologies, and opportunities to interact with other readers. Like all cultural producers, those involved in the design and delivery of large-scale shared reading events have to compete for their audience with many other cultural activities, entertainment options, and leisure pursuits. As will become clear as our chapters unfold, the quest for audience share is driven by both economic factors and struggles over symbolic capital. From the inception of our study, we have been intrigued by the ways that the various agents involved in MREs (including readers, event organizers, publishers, media producers, government representatives, arts organizations) promote, contest, and negotiate the value of shared reading. At the same time, our past professional lives in communications, marketing research, and book publishing, and studies of cultural and media industries produced by book historians and cultural studies scholars, made us keenly aware of the need to take commercial concerns and the influence of cultural policy into account. Meanwhile, structural changes in the cultural and media industries have transformed the field of literary production so that Pierre Bourdieu's (1993) model of restricted and large-scale production no longer adequately conceptualizes how books are made and how literary value is brokered. In order to situate MREs within the contemporary literary cultural fields of the twenty-first century, therefore, we need to reframe the terrain. Our notion of the reading industry enables us to make better sense of contemporary cultures of leisure reading in general, and of MREs in particular. We therefore follow our explication of the reading industry below by mapping the evolution of large-scale reading events within the context of popular reading culture. Our discussion then turns to our conceptualization of shared reading as a social practice, and the methodologies and methods that we used to investigate a specific iteration of that practice: MREs.

FROM THE LITERARY FIELD TO THE READING INDUSTRY

Throughout Reading Beyond the Book, our analyses are indebted to Pierre Bourdieu's theories, and to the scholarship that has updated, complicated, and problematized the insights and methods of his original studies into cultural production and consumption. As our brief discussion of our own methods later in this chapter and, more explicitly, in the Methods Appendix, make clear, we did not set out to investigate the logics of a particular field or to replicate Bourdieu's actual methods. However, one aspect of Bourdieu's (1993) theory of the field of cultural production that remains conceptually compelling in the context of our study and of contemporary media production is his formulation of the literary field as “a space of literary or artistic position-takings” by “social agents” (30). Whereas these social agents (individuals, institutions, groups) can exercise some agency in terms of decisionmaking, their actions and position-taking occur within the context of a structured set of economic, political, and social relations (23–73). Although this description appears to constitute a system, Bourdieu is careful to make a distinction between his method of analysis, which requires him to delimit the object of enquiry, and his notion of the system as “the product and prize of a permanent conflict” (34). It is, as he argues forcefully in The Field of Cultural Production, the “struggle” that is “the unifying principle of this ‘system’ … with all the contradictions it engenders” (ibid.). In other words, alliances may be formed between agents but these are tactical arrangements in a competition for varying degrees of economic profit and cultural status. Whereas relations of power derived from economic or symbolic capital can be realigned by the actions of agents, their interests drive the conflict. Key to our analysis in Reading Beyond the Book is our effort to understand the interests of the agents who create and participate in MREs.

However, as our opening image of reading as “the new rock n'roll” intimates, twenty-first-century popular literary culture and contemporary practices of leisure reading are not easily locatable within one field of production or consumption. Moreover, there are several complications that arise from the reality that, increasingly, fields of cultural production intersect. In her study of the literary “adaptation industry,” for example, Simone Murray (2011) offers an incisive analysis of the transactions among multiple agents operating within the fields of film and literary production. Although films that adapt literary texts are trading on the cultural value of prestige markers such as literary prizes in order to target the “well-educated and affluent urban” audience demographic who bought the book (167), these same connotations of cultural esteem can have a huge commercial impact. That is, whereas at first glance the marketing and branding of arts-house films such as The Reader (2008) seem to locate them within a restricted mode of production, they can end up capturing a sizeable box-office (169–84). At the same time, the media industries keep “cultural hierarchies … alive” by, on the one hand, “push[ing] audiences to consume near-identical content across multiple media platforms” and on the other, “by constantly reiterating a filmmaker's respect for a content property's prizewinning literary pedigree” (18). Playing at both ends of the field, as it were, is a paradoxical but increasingly common practice for the producers of contemporary literary experiences.

Intersecting fields of production also complicate critical attempts to delimit where one field begins and another ends. Television and books offer another convincing illustration of this situation. Far more agents are hustling for profit and shaping notions of cultural value within the field of contemporary English-language literary production than Bourdieu could envisage given his own temporal and geographic location, as David Wright (2007) observes in his critique of the British Broadcasting Corporation's 2003 television series The Big Read. It is not simply a matter of producers of television book clubs and book-focused programming influencing the sales of featured books, or blurring the boundaries of literary and popular books by championing eclectic lists. Rather, production companies, media giants such as Oprah Winfrey, and even nationally recognized television personalities, from gardeners to cooks, are able to wield “metacapital” (symbolic capital accrued in non-literary fields) that mediates positions and the organization of social space in the literary field (Wright 2007, 10). A further complication to the dynamics of the literary field is produced through the many “assemblages and linkages” forged by producers of mass-mediated events such as the BBC's The Big Read with a variety of institutions within and outside the book industry (Wright 2007, 4). Our own research concurs with Wright's: the relationships among for-profit organizations, and agencies with policy interests in libraries, schools, and “cultural” provision for local communities, “are emblematic of a particular orientation to the production of culture from policy-makers, a belief that ‘culture’ can do civic work and contribute to social goods” (5, see our Chapter 4, “Money”). Iterations of the OBOC model tend to adopt this orientation more explicitly than broadcast MREs, as our analysis of the National Endowment for the Art's Big Read program illustrates. Contemporary literary production is thus shaped by cultural policy discourse as well as the organization of media corporations and interlocking fields of cultural production. In order to represent this early twenty-first configuration of book production, we have adopted the term “the reading industry.” More than a descriptor, it is also an effort on our part to move on from the anachronistic aspects of Bourdieu's ([1979] 1984, 1993) analysis, such as restricted and large-scale production.

For our purposes, the reading industry is primarily a useful conceptual framework that enables us to focus on the various agents and agencies that produce MREs. In this book, we examine the relations among them, paying particular attention to the kinds of power that various organizations and individuals possess and deploy. In an important sense, the reading industry is our way of giving a name to the various social and economic structures that together produce contemporary cultures of reading. However, the reading industry is not simply an abstraction. In other words, although it cannot be identified as one coherent material entity, its working parts are visible. For us, the reading industry refers to the organizations, institutions, and businesses that produce a series of cultural artifacts and events. Our choice of terminology is deliberate. “Industry” connotes the production of material goods for profit, large-scale manufacture, and the presence of a market. It also suggests that labor and capital are required for the industry to function. But when we think about the ways that money is dispersed across the organizations that make up the reading industry, it is clear that we are not only referring to activity in the private sector. That said, we consider the reading industry to include for-profit organizations such as book publishing and book-selling. But it also includes not-for-profit agencies, such as public library systems funded by the state and arts organizations, many of which are financed by a combination of private and public monies. So, the reading industry's primary product is not books (they are the primary product of the book publishing and retail industries) but the artifacts, programming, events, and literary adaptations that represent books (both fiction and nonfiction). The “market,” or target audience for these products, are ordinary, or, nonprofessional, readers.

An important resonance that we want to convey through this notion of “the reading industry” is the specificity of its temporal situation. By using a new term we want to register the “here-and-now,” contemporary aspect of the forces that constitute and circulate reading cultures. The reading industry has emerged in part from the late-twentieth-century/early twenty-first-century formation of the entertainment industry, itself a conglomeration of media organizations and companies, that produces a variety of publications and events across a range of platforms (Collins 2010, 1–35; Murray and Weedon 2011). The reading industry's “business” is to make leisure reading entertaining and to do so using any of the delivery methods, formats, and sites (both physical and virtual) that contemporary and older forms of media technology and communications enable. Unlike the directors and producers of the entertainment industry, many of the reading industry's producers and managers are not working for commercial companies, and so profit margins are not always their primary concern. Nonetheless, as we explore in Chapter 4, “Money,” securing funds, brokering deals with for-profit organizations, and accounting for money spent in terms of audience participation, artifacts distributed, and media visibility form a central part of their “business.” As we argue in Chapter 4, “Money,” commercial profit coordinates with neoliberal cultural policies in the funding of MREs, specifically those that adapt the OBOC model. Along with the economic configuration of the entertainment industry, then, neoliberal cultural policies provide an important context for the emergence of the reading industry in the three nation-states of our study.

Our analysis of the production, circulation, and reception of MREs in this book is thus informed by our desire to interrogate the social and material relations among the reading industry's agents and agencies. Our original research investigation examined the institutions and the individuals who fund, organize, and participate in these shared reading events. Only by disaggregating the constituent processes that produce this cultural formation while attending to the economic, ideological, and social contexts of its proliferation could we approach what we felt would be a sufficiently multilayered appreciation of its function. The organization of this book into chapters, focused on two forms of mass media (television and radio), money, workers, and readers, allows us to consider the platforms, processes, and people involved in MREs. Approaching our subject in this way also enables us to make connections between case studies occurring in diverse locations, while also maintaining a sense of their cultural, political, and historical specificity.

Fun, and Other Reasons to Share Reading with Strangers: A Brief History of a Model

What all the events in our study have in common is an unquestioned acceptance by those producing and managing them of the idea that reading and sharing books is a worthwhile pursuit. None of the events that we analyzed were designed to test whether sharing reading was preferable or more appealing to people than other types of leisure practices that can be shared, such as gaming, for example. Rather, driven by their own “passion for reading,” their professional involvement in the reading industry, and, sometimes by commercial goals, producers of events implicitly reconfirm the cultural legitimacy of reading and sharing books by making these practices center stage. The MREs that they create and deliver may vary in size, scale, medium, and degree of spectacle, but, as our analyses in this book reveal, the messages that are communicated to the public about shared reading through publicity, support materials such as reading guides and online resources, the event frames, and the activities that constitute the events themselves are inflected by historically persistent ideas about the socially transformative and civilizing effects of book reading. To varying degrees and with different emphases, MREs engage with these ideas, while promoting a third: the sharing of reading is pleasurable, fun and entertaining. In an important sense, then, it is the style of MREs, and their situation within what Elizabeth Long calls a “new matrix of mass communication,” rather than their aims and ideals that are new (2003, 217). That said, as we argue throughout this book, the meanings of shared reading in the twenty-first century are imbricated with imperatives that are specific to this era, and inflected by the locations (in terms of space and place) where MREs unfold.

Whereas some event organizers may hope to create social change through programs that contextualize, historicize, and explore complex issues, many, such as Nan Alleman, the first director of OBOC Chicago, are pragmatic in their aims. As a professional librarian with a strong public service ethic, Alleman remarked in an interview with us that her main goal for the twice-yearly program was to publicize the ...