Fever Reading: Affect and Reading Badly in the Early American Public Sphere

2. Good and Bad Reading in the Early United States

 Chapter Two Good and Bad Reading in the Early United States Reading Becomes a Problem Although the indictments of reading badly are often accompanied by the breathless claim that we face a new cultural pathology (a “new kind of bacillus,” as one commentator warns), there is nothing new about an anxiety associated with reading.¹ From Don Quixote’s romance-induced insanity to the suicide-inducing Wertherfiebre in Goethe’s Leipzig, from nineteenth-century reform tracts linking reading with masturbation to present-day fears that hypertextual reading might be making us all, as one author in the genteel Atlantic puts it, “stupid” (Carr 56), certain kinds (and ways) of reading have often inspired unease, fear, and even panic. Within this long history, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries call for special attention, marking as they do a ferocious escalation in debates, theorizations, and conceptualizations around bad reading. In Germany the addiction to reading was given special names—lesewut, lesesucht , leseseuche, and schwärmer—while in the English-speaking world a manic reader was dubbed a helluo librorum, a reading worm. Hundreds of articles appeared in U.S. newspapers and journals attempting to shape the way people read and what they read. These polemics went by titles like “On the Art of Reading,” “On Novel Reading,” “Novel-Reading a Cause of Female Depravity,” “Reading and Information,” “On the Ill Effects of Reading without Digesting,” “On Reading to Excess,” “Sewing and Novel Reading,” “Reading Room Loafers,” “The Injurious Influence of Fictitious Reading,” “Daniel Webster’s Reading Habits,” and “Fatal { 29 30 } f e v e r r e a d i n g Effects of Reading Bad Books,” to name only a few. The discourse about reading also took other forms, perhaps most famously in the commentaries within novels themselves about novel reading. But the worry over reading appears as well in conduct books, statistical accounts of modern life, obscenity laws, anti-masturbation screeds, and religious sermons and tracts. Reading improperly is associated with delusion, passivity, inattention, sexual depravity, social isolation, ruined wills, and ruined women, not to mention commodity fetishism, the eradication of agency, the loss of objectivity, the confusion of proper relations between mind and body, and a host of other problems. But it is also worth noting that these negative accounts of reading always implicitly (and often explicitly ) picture good forms of reading. These debates over reading classify and hierarchize reading practices, outlining the proper and improper, providing a whole etiology and ethics of reading. This chapter reads discourses of good and bad reading from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as ultimately about the developing idea of the public sphere in the early United States. It recovers the primary tenets of normative reading to better understand how they contributed to the development of that public sphere. Sometimes the issue of reading in these discussions is explicitly about the public sphere, but most often the discussions outline the normative structures for the self, the passions, and reason that make a particular kind of public sphere imaginable and possible. The good/bad reading discourse addresses questions like what sort of relation should one have with information, what kinds of understanding of the self should flourish, and what is the proper relation between reason and feeling—all questions with consequences for understanding the public sphere. All these relations changed over time, and this chapter shows how their changes are connected to changes in the understanding of the public sphere. The chapter has one additional goal: it seeks to identify where the norms of reading and the public sphere began to fracture and break apart. Even as it changed, the good/bad reading discourse remained essentially conservative and hegemonic. Whether it describes the dangers or the benefits of a relation between reader and text, its purpose is to interpellate readers. But in so explicitly outlining fears of bad reading, the discourse also indicates what doesn’t fit into the norm; it suggests where normative ideas about the public sphere begin to break down. This is one reason the good/bad reading discourse of the newspapers and journals is so rich and helpful; unlike readers’ accounts of their own reading and educators’ accounts of good and bad reading { 31 reading pedagogies, both of which are often relatively unconflicted, the good/bad discourse offers a window into what troubles proper reading and why. Before Public-Sphere Reading...