ENGLISH

Paraliterary: the making of bad readers in postwar America

By Emre , Merve

Book information

Publisher
University of Chicago Press
ISBN
9780226473833, 9780226473970, 9780226474021, 022647402X
Language
english
Format
EPUB
Filesize
3 MB (2726369 bytes)
Pages
\0
Time added
2020-07-26 19:24:52
Books and reading;Books and reading--Sociological

Description

Literature departments are staffed by, and tend to be focused on turning out, 'good' readers - attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the vast majority of readers are, to use this book's tongue-in-cheek term, 'bad' readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think about those readers, and what should we make of the structures, well outside the academy, that generate them? We should, the text argues, think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary - thriving outside the institutions we take as central to the literary world. The author explores this phenomenon in the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power.

Similar books