Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response (review)

The month of August, when summer is still in full swing but English professors are tending to fall book orders and syllabi, is the perfect month for Patrocino P. Schweickart and Elizabeth A. Flynn's edited collection of essays, Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response. I am writing this review during an August that marks, for me, the end of a longer-than-usual hiatus from teaching: two maternity leaves, one sabbatical semester, and two summers combined have given me nearly a year and a half at home caring for two perfect girls. This fall, I leave them both with babysitters for whom, no matter how loving, my daughters are not miracles, as Tillie Olsen's narrator reflects in "I Stand Here Ironing." Reading Sites, however, offers the finest possible consolation: It revitalizes my conviction that doing my university job—teaching literature and writing; reading and teaching critical theory—can help transform the racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes and behaviors that threaten my girls.

Reading Sites is a collection of twelve essays that each elaborate a slightly different meaning of the term "reading" in order to clarify the socially transformative potential of reader response theory and to outline reading strategies that can contribute materially to the production of social justice. Each emphasizes the social and political significance of readers' responses and pushes back against theories of reading that emphasize the private nature of those responses. The collection as a whole reflects the editors' desire to transform the fields of literary studies, rhetoric, and composition by integrating them with feminist and antiracist scholars' insights about reading within and across social difference.

Schweickart and Flynn's lucid and helpful introduction to Reading Sites chronicles the development of reader response criticism and proposes revised reader response theories that integrate scholarship on the ethics of reading. As a result of this scholarship that extends over thirty years, there is widespread acceptance of the notion that texts and their meanings are intersubjective and many-sided. Schweickart and Flynn combine these insights from reader response theory with two of the central ideas from scholarship in literature and ethics: (1) reading is an activity that generates other activities, and (2) reading brings readers into contact with otherness in literary texts, including people with different experiences—authors, other readers, and characters—and illusive meanings.

This theoretical combination informs the essays in Schweickart and Flynn's collection. Each essay describes a reading strategy in which readers attend to difference in texts, and interpret the differences they encounter not as general otherness, but rather in terms of specific people and situations that are differentiated, among other things, by race, ethnicity, and class. As a whole, the book offers a jargon-free introduction to philosophical debates raised by reader response theorists since the 1970s as well as by theorists concerned with the ethics of reading. These debates revolve around questions of who has authority over the meanings of texts: Does meaning come from the authors who write stories and poems, from the readers who interpret them variously depending on their specific positions and experiences in the world, or from the dynamic interaction between authors, readers, and communities of readers?

The strongest of the essays in Reading Sites give concrete examples of reading strategies through which readers with agency use texts to rethink relationships between themselves and others. Some of the essays are addressed specifically to teachers, and explain how we can encourage reading practices and class discussions that create such challenges for student readers. Others are addressed to individual readers in a variety of contexts and describe reading practices that have personally and socially transformative effects. For instance, the essay by James Phelan and the one by Angeletta KM Gourdine analyze readers' experiences with a wide variety of fiction, including novels by John Edgar Wideman, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ama Ata Aidoo among others.

The collection avoids naïve optimism...