In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

378 Chapter  Seeing the World in Print Robert A. Gross “So much of what I see reminds me of something I read in a book. . . . Shouldn’t it be the other way around?” So Meg Ryan muses wistfully at the opening of the romantic comedy You’ve Got Mail (1998). Ryan plays Kathleen Kelly, owner of an old-fashioned children’s bookstore on Manhattan’s West Side, whose cozy world is shattered when Fox and Sons, a Borders-style superstore, opens just a few blocks away. The Shop around the Corner is a neighborhood fixture, where Kelly presides as “the Story Lady,” reading aloud to children, greeting customers by name, and knowing just which book they would like. But how can she compete against the mammoth intruder, with its discount prices, espresso bar, and lively entertainment? In this battle of David and Goliath, Kelly faces off against her co-star Tom Hanks’s Joe Fox, the aggressive scion of the commercial empire, who views business as war and takes no prisoners. It is no contest; despite Kelly’s brave fight, the giant wins. The film’s more compelling struggle is for the heart, and the fun lies in watching love conquer all. What brings Kelly and Fox together is a most modern matchmaker: e-mail. Having met in that lounge for lonely souls—the chat room—the two carry on an earnest, affectionate exchange of messages, unaware of each other’s real identity. She is “ShopGirl,” he “NY152,” and the brightest spot of their day is the cheery news from AmericaOnline, “You’ve Got Mail!” Anonymity is the key to romance. The strangers employ the impersonal instrument of electronic communication to express the authentic feelings of the heart. E-mail proves as vital to courtship as ever were handwritten letters sealed with a kiss. Electronic technology, the high-tech agent of modern commerce , the secret weapon of mass retailing that enables Fox and Sons to crush . For information and excerpts from the film’s dialogue, see http://youvegotmail.warnerbros .com/. Nora Ephron’s cinematic indictment of chain bookstores is challenged in a recent essay by Brooke Allen, “Two—Make That Three—Cheers for the Chain Bookstores,” Atlantic Monthly, July–August 2001, 288. Seeing the World in Print 379 The Shop around the Corner, is simultaneously a transparent window into the soul. “You are what you read,” Kelly announces early on. On that principle she has run her little store and formed her life. You’ve Got Mail fosters that ideal of reading with a contemporary twist. Kelly, a saint of bookselling, carries the store as a cross, bequeathed by her beloved mother. Her working days are confined to the narrow limits of the shop, her evenings spent with a left-wing newspaper columnist whose hostility to computers—he collects old typewriters—is matched only by his eagerness for publicity. It is a companionable but passionless affair. Not that Joe Fox is doing any better. His longtime lover, a self-absorbed literary agent, pursues dollars as greedily as Joe’s father and grandfather, who run the family firm. In the director Nora Ephron’s vision, the whole world of print—authorship, journalism, publishing , and bookselling—has been corrupted by money and power. Only Kathleen Kelly and her devoted employees love literature for its own sake. Happily, through the auspices of AmericaOnline, she conveys that faith, Joe returns her sentiments, even reading Pride and Prejudice under her tutelage, and they fall in love. As the film brings the two together, reading and experience become one. With its love of books and transcendent ideal of reading, You’ve Got Mail provides a convenient entryway to a subject that has been engaging scholars on both sides of the Atlantic since David D. Hall announced two decades ago, in an influential lecture that helped to generate the American branch of this international scholarly endeavor, “The history of reading and of readers is central to the history of the book.” This was a summons to wide-ranging investigation. Who could read and write in the past? What titles and genres did they choose? What was “the process by which persons responded to a text”? Through such probes, Hall hoped to uncover the uses and meanings of literacy as a central theme in “the history of culture and society.” That goal remains, but in its pursuit, our scholarship has recently taken a distinct turn. Few students follow the lead of Kenneth Lockridge and...

Share