kfitz

Reading, Anxiety, Possibility

Every so often you come across That Book, the exact thing you need to read, and a lot of the time it’s something that you might not have run into before and that you certainly had no idea you needed to read, and probably wouldn’t have except that more than one person pointed you toward it, and then it’s so much the thing you needed that you kick yourself for not having found it sooner yourself.

Or maybe that’s just me.

Anyhow: Anne Gere’s Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Women’s Clubs, 1880-1920 is this week’s That Book. And I’m more than a little bruised from all the self-kicking I’ve been doing.

I might be willing to forgive myself, if the title turned up in my previous research, for assuming that it was a history of turn of the century women’s clubs, and thus that it didn’t have much to tell me about my own current project — but a slightly deeper glance might have given me a hint that there was something I needed here. The book focuses on those clubs’ reading and writing practices at the heart of their self-formation and their public and private work. Even more, her chapter on “(un)professional reading and writing” makes a compelling argument about the ways that scholars of literature came to professionalize in no small part in opposition to the models of reading and writing embraced by clubwomen. This bit of the narrative of how we got to be the way we are is exactly what I’ve been missing, so completely at the heart of the argument I’ve been trying to make (about the dominant role that competition plays in today’s university structures, and the ways that a more generous engagement with the “common reader” might help promote a recommitment of our institutions to the public good) that I’m both overjoyed to have found it and mortified not to have found it sooner.

This is why I wish I had time enough to stop and read all the things.

That Intimate Practices is That Book, if it hadn’t already become clear, would have been made glaringly obvious when I ran into one uncanny bit of overlap. In a section that I’ve entitled “Why Do Readers Read?”, I note that dismissing pleasure in reading (whether as illicit, or unserious, or whathaveyou) opens space for anxiety to become one’s dominant reading affect, and particularly “anxiety about whether we’re reading the right stuff, or reading for the right reasons, or reading in the right way.” Gere, for her part, describes professionalized scholars of English, claiming for themselves a role as arbiters of taste, as having the effect of “making nonprofessionals fearful they were reading the wrong books or reading them in the wrong ways” (217). I’ve scoured my notes, as well as the texts I previously cited around that spot, to be sure that I didn’t somehow pick Gere’s phrasing up at second hand, but I’ve found nothing. So I’m taking this coincidence as a sign of deep connection, if an unknowing one, and I’m working on how I might build on it, what the rest of my argument might still have to learn.

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