Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans

Acknowledgments

A c k n o w l e d g m e n t s Several research grants made it possible for me to finish this book. I was supported in the 2007–2008 and the 2008–2009 academic years by PSC-CUNY, and in the spring of 2007 and the fall of 2008 by the Weissman School of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Fund. I am especially grateful to the Whiting Foundation, whose generous grant allowed me to devote the 2007– 2008 academic year solely to the task of working on this manuscript. Certain sections of this book are revised versions of essays that appeared earlier. “Beware the Furrow of the Middlebrow: Searching for Paradise on The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Modern Fiction Studies 52 (2006): 350–73,© Pur­ due Research Foundation, reprinted with permission of Johns Hopkins University Press; “Selfless Cravings: Addiction and Recovery in David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest,” American Fiction of the 1990s, Routledge (2008): 206–19; “The Pain of Reading A Million Little Pieces: The James Frey Controversy and the Dismal Truth,” a/b: Auto/Biography Studies 22 (2007): 155–80; “Middlebrow Aesthetics and the Therapeutic: The Politics of Interiority in The Pilot’s Wife,” Contemporary Literature 49 (2008): 85– 110, © Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System, reprinted with permission of the University of Wisconsin Press; and “Afghanistan Meets the Amazon: Reading The Kite Runner in America,” PMLA 124 (2009): 24–43, reprinted with permission of Modern Language Association of America. While I have been writing Literature as Therapy, many people helped me clarify my arguments, avoid pitfalls, and figure out what exactly I wanted to say. Several of my colleagues at Baruch College, including John Brenkman, Elaine Kauvar, Mary McGlynn, and Shelly Eversley, read and critiqued chapters, and I am indebted to their smart and illuminating feedback . The members of my reading group in the CUNY Faculty Fellowship Publications Program, Brij Singh, Sarah Covington, Sarah Chinn, Barbara viii : acknowledgments Montero, Nancy Berke, and Ting Man Tsao, helped me work through my ideas about The Kite Runner and Amazon. A number of friends, including Sandra Parvu, Michael Sayeau, and Evan Horowitz, reviewed parts of this manuscript and offered some indispensably honest and rigorous criticisms. I want to thank my editor, Joseph Parsons, for his encouragement and his thoughtful, hands-on approach and my two readers, Leah Price and Mark McGurl, for turning my attention to several pivotal questions, which I had neglected to address. I began to wrestle with many of the arguments developed here as a student at Princeton University, where my advisers Michael Wood and Diana Fuss, as well as several other professors, including Jeff Nunokawa, Bill Gleason , and Claudia Johnson, did a wonderful job of challenging and inspiring me. I am grateful also to Sarah Fan, Deirdre Lockwood, Hollis Robbins, Jim Moyer, and Laura Baudot, who read and responded to chapters in my dissertation—which formed the intellectual basis for this project. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and family—my mother and sister in particular—for their love and support, and of course my wife, Tala, for keeping my life exciting when I wasn’t stuck in the library. r e a d i n g a s t h e r a p y ...