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[ 217 ] 11 READING THE READING EXPERIENCE An Ethnomethodological Approach to “Booktalk” Daniel Allington and Bethan Benwell I nterviews and focus groups have long been employed to research the ways in which literary and televisual texts are understood by their contemporary consumers,1 and the historical study of reading and of reception has often taken the same approach to written descriptions of reading experiences.2 The appeal of this kind of information is obvious: where better to learn about readers than straight from the horse’s mouth? Nonetheless, there are problems with treating such data, whether researcher -elicited or spontaneous, as transparent. Acknowledgment of this has led to an emerging “crisis of representation”3 within the fields of cultural and reception studies, whereby researchers have begun to question their ability to represent social reality with any objectivity. Whether we are interested in acts of reading past or acts of reading and viewing present, this apparently leaves us with a choice of closing our eyes to obvious difficulties or restricting ourselves to only such topics of investigation as can be approached by the powerful but impersonal methods of quantitative sociology, book history, and economics.4 In this chapter we propose an alternative approach whose roots lie in ethnomethodology. Ethnomethodology is the study of the ways in which people display their understandings of the world around them to others, negotiating those understandings with one another and in this way producing social order as an achieved phenomenon. These displays and negotiations are referred to as “accounting practices” which are “contingent, ongoing accomplishments of organized artful practices of everyday life” and “are carried on under the auspices of, and . . . made to happen as events in, the same ordinary affairs that in organizing they describe.”5 Many reception data can be seen as the residue of such accounting practices: when people talk or write about reading and about texts, they are collaborating—cooperatively or [ 218 ] Daniel Allington and Bethan Benwell antagonistically—in the production of the (local) social order of reading and of texts. Statements describing a reader’s experiences in reading a particular book may appear to be literal reports of events taking place in a preexisting reality, but to an ethnomethodologist, these must be seen as accounts constructing reality. In common with the ethnomethodologically inspired research tradition known as discursive psychology (discussed later in this chapter), our approach to the analysis of readers’ discourse involves recording spoken interactions, examining the sequential organization of “turns” within those interactions, and assuming that this discourse is “constitutive of, performative of, and pervasively oriented to, the social interactional contingencies of whatever setting it is produced in.”6 As Jonathan Potter explains,7 this means that the researcher does not have to make inferences from the “data collection arena” (that is, the situation in which reading is discussed) to the object of research (that is, reading), since the two are identical: if we study the members of a book group talking about their private reading experiences, for example, this is because we are interested in what the study of their talk reveals about the constructions of their own reading practices. Far from making private reading experiences inaccessible, this involves analyzing the ways in which such talkers construct those experiences as accessible or inaccessible to one another.8 In this manner we attempt to fulfill Janice Radway’s plea for attention to “the ever-shifting nature of subjectivity produced through the articulation of discourses,”9 and to come closer to an understanding of why an individual’s responses to a text—and descriptions of his or her prior responses to that text—may be as myriad as the occasions on which his or her views are elicited.10 Other approaches to verbal representations of reading are of course possible . For example, reception researchers working in other traditions might seek to explain statements about reading experiences by relating them to the context in which those experiences took place (or are supposed to have taken place) and to the identities of the participants. Thus Megan Sweeney treats statements by female prisoners as indicative of their “general sense of frustration ” with aspects of Gayl Jones’s novel Eva’s Man, and then explains this frustration by reference to the those readers’ “first-hand experience with a justice system that leaves little room for accommodating ambiguity or complex and partial notions of agency, responsibility, guilt, and innocence.”11 In chapter 12 of this volume, Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo offer a “mixed research...

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