Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture by Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo (review)

In Reading Beyond the Book: The Social Practices of Contemporary Literary Culture, Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo ask, what might it mean to imagine—or assert—a beyond to the reading of books? “Beyond” has a philosophical and speculative ring; it gestures toward a time and place separate from the here and now. Indeed, in the last ten years, the rise of e-books and e-readers has prompted many to wonder about the “beyond” that technological innovation has wrought for the good or ill of reading. For Fuller and Sedo, however, reading beyond the book suggests something of a materially different register. In the wake of remediations that have changed the contemporary face of reading, they turn their gaze to the complex of state and commercial channels that have produced reading campaigns, library programs, and radio and television book features. These “mass reading events” (MREs) act as productions in which a host of agents (not just readers), ideological investments, institutions, and resources intermingle (1). As a result, Fuller and Sedo argue, these “new cultural formations” constitute reading “beyond,” rather than “between” the covers of a book, intensifying its familiar cultural resonances by framing its social impulse in systematic forms (17). If Reading Beyond the Book considers what happens when reading is a social event, it does so to expand the distinctiveness attributed to the experience into something like a reading industry.

The oddity of these events has everything to do with their scale. For reading might seem an unlikely candidate for mass campaigns, given the long-standing romanticization of its solitary pleasures—and given, too, the historical anxiety about mass readership. Yet the phenomenal success of Oprah’s Book Club in the United States has, as Fuller and Sedo remark early on, proven that the desire to share reading, and to do so across media and institutions, is no less forceful, even as its value is perhaps more openly contested in those contexts. Reading Beyond the Book thus tracks formations for which sheer numbers and bodies are pronounced factors of the materiality of reading. In so doing, Fuller and Sedo demonstrate how the scene of reading shifts when yoked to a broad impulse to produce effects on sets of readers: to “super size” the act, as they put it, by transplanting reading to public spaces via equally public outlets (4). While the MREs do not seek to quantify reading as the NEA has done in the past decade—with Reading at Risk (2004), To Read or Not to Read: A Question of National Consequence (2007), and Reading on the Rise (2009)—they do share with the NEA a scalar view, which assumes that reading indexes cultural health. Perhaps more to the point, where the NEA studies have expressed ambivalence about the increasing remediation of reading, Reading Beyond the Book marks that dynamic as its critical sweet spot. The One City, One Book campaigns that cropped up across the United States in the late 1990s are thus close cousins with Britain’s Richard and Judy Book Club, which was first a feature in the couple’s afternoon television show; the CBC’s Canada Reads, whose broadcast radio life began in 2001 as a forum in which well-known Canadian personalities debate the merits of books; and the NEA’s Big Read, established in 2004 to reestablish reading as central to American culture. From national to local communities, from radio to television to the Internet, the range of imprimaturs marks the reach of these events. The more telling point is that Fuller and Sedo mark reach itself as a quality that these events, thanks to their remediative impulses, confer on reading.

If the scale of MREs is novel, the belief in shared reading that underlies such scale is not. Insisting that this and other kinds of asymmetry are definitive of these events, Fuller and Sedo flesh out the...