Reading the Nineteenth Century

It is hard not to read the current interest in the history of reading as manifesting certain anxieties about the ongoing transformations to professional reading. In the face of relentless pressures to rationalize education, quantify its “outcomes,” and render efficient its modes of delivery, what place will there be for close reading, philology—“the art of reading slowly,” as Nietzsche once said—critical interpretation, or textual analysis? The nondiscipline of the history of reading reminds us in an era of high-stakes testing that any effort to situate the intellectual or economic value of reading in the present or future requires a sense of reading’s pasts—the practices that shaped reading, the debates reading spawned, the psychologies reading enabled, the values reading embodied in different times and places. Judging from recent forays into reading in nineteenth-century America, there are many histories to uncover and many questions to pose. However, the answers these works derive from readings of the past are not, I do not think, politically hopeful about reading in the future.

While the four books under discussion take different approaches to the question of reading in the nineteenth century—psychological (Gillian Silverman, Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America [2012]), affective (Michael Millner Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere [2012]), socio-cultural (David M. Stewart, Reading and Disorder in Antebellum America [2011]), and biographical (David Dowling, Literary Partnerships and the Marketplace: Writers and Mentors in Nineteenth-Century America [2012])—they share a strong dissatisfaction with abstract models of reading as a practice of critical, absorbed, and solitary reflection, which these authors assume to be the prevailing scholarly standard for picturing what reading is or should be. “[R]eading is never merely a cognitive experience” (8), Silverman writes, and the emphasis on “critique and resistance as models for understanding the activity of reading” (17) is limiting, especially for nineteenth-century contexts. Instead, she sees in nineteenth-century reading the “fantasy of communion” (ix), a desire for “mutual ensoulment” (19), or, more generally, “experiences of mental and bodily contact” (2) with absent others. Similarly, Millner wants to bracket the “decoding-interpretation model” of reading (xviii), to think instead about more febrile forms that reading has taken. In place of a liberal model of reading that presents selfintegration as its goal, Millner puts forward the practice of “reading badly.” “Reading badly” refers to experiences of reading that disrupt selfhood and agency, rather than illiteracy or the reading of “books that are considered bad in terms of content.” If bad books and bad readers have often been cast as negative inversions of enlightened debate, Millner argues instead that acts of reading badly “are critical, reflective, and essential to modern democracy and the public sphere” (xiii).

While Silverman and Millner critique the paradigm of reading-as-interpretation by way of psychoanalysis and affect theory, David Stewart and David Dowling adopt more descriptive historical approaches to reexamine the work of reading in nineteenth-century America. Stewart’s book—the most compelling and convincing of the four—uses reading (the “small topic” of his book [2]) as a means to “better understand … young, white workingmen of the northeastern United States for whom the shift from a predominantly rural, agricultural nation to one commercial, industrial, and urban profoundly affected lived experience. In helping to produce this shift, reading furnishes access to the more intimate negotiations required.” Those intimate negotiations are his “large topic” (3). Finally, Dowling, whose study is more about authorship than readership, seeks to estrange (further) a “romantic” notion of authorship as the effort of heroic genius by exploring how writers used “partners” or “intermediaries” (2...