Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere by Michael Millner (review)

Anyone who has heard, or used, the language of absorption to describe the experience of reading fiction—“escape,” “mesmerized,” “in another world,” “caught up in”—is already familiar with the early American tropes constructing the practice of “reading badly.” To read badly is to read in such a way that one’s critical faculties, and even one’s sense of self, are compromised by the seductive pleasures of the literary text. Injunctions against novel reading, as Cathy Davidson famously recorded, abound in the late eighteenth century, with critics (and even novel writers themselves) warning of the mental dissipation and moral depravity inevitably accompanying too much reading of fiction. “The menace,” writes Michael Millner in Fever Reading, “was in reading anything addictively, desultorily, too bodily, too inwardly, too voraciously, with utter absorption … or in a fever” (xiv).

Millner’s important, provocative, and meticulously researched study tells us that bad reading, while vociferously warned against, was also the norm (xvi). Hindering our appreciation of both this fact and bad reading itself is the historical development of an idea of what underwrites America’s most cherished conceptual space: a democratic public sphere. In an analysis of public sphere theory ranging from Jürgen Habermas to Michael Warner, Millner delineates the ways in which scholars have come to view a “proper” public sphere as a space of rational, critical, and disinterested discussion. “Good” reading—reading with a dispassionate eye (and body)—ostensibly contributes to this unbiased exchange of ideas by envisioning the reader in an oppositional relation to the text: wary, self-conscious, distanced. Yet how might our understanding of knowledge and agency—the very way notions of the self are produced—change, Millner asks, if we were to take seriously “emotional” reading as itself a critical practice, one crucial to the formation of the modern public sphere?

Drawing on work in cognitive psychology, neural science, anthropology, and philosophy, Millner explains the human brain’s reliance on emotion not just for feeling but for evaluative judgments. Our emotions play a key role in decision making; they provide a way for us to interact with and, importantly, assess our environment (14). The stubborn positing of emotion and affect as opposites of rationality and critical thinking makes no sense, argues Millner. We can’t think independently of our emotions: “almost all of the science scholarship agrees on the basic model that emotional response is an appraisal of the environment” (15).

Walter Reddy’s concept of “emotives” plays a crucial role in Millner’s explanation of the relationship between emotions, reading, and the public sphere. Emotives are expressions of emotion that seek to navigate through an array of stimulus information. These conventional or learned expressions of emotion are not simply expressing a feeling-thought complex but exploring or navigating it. The expression “I love you,” notes Millner, is to “see how the feeling feels”; it is to express but also evaluate, and perhaps be confirmed in a different feeling. Similarly, one might smile “as part of a formalized performance only to discover that one is happier or sadder” (18). Bad reading isn’t actually bad because the wide array of emotions that are engaged while reading are really tools for better understanding one’s world and one’s self.

The necessity for even making an argument about the efficacy of an affective-critical response to reading is a modern phenomenon, Millner notes. In the seventeenth century, reading was seen as an individualized, sacred transaction between reader and text, where the text served as mediator, as well as communicator, of a divine truth. Matthew P. Brown has called this “heart piety”: the idea that truth gets imprinted on the heart through reading. Such a reading practice seeks to eliminate, not create, a distance between text and self (32). In the last third of the eighteenth century, however, the growing number and variety of accessible publications gave rise to fears about what texts...