Bring on the Books for Everybody: How Literary Culture Became Popular Culture by Jim Collins (review)

An alternate subtitle for Jim Collins’ Bring on the Books for Everybody—less concise, but perhaps more accurate—might be “How Literary Culture Has Been Affected by the Same Market Forces that Every Other Aspect of Consumer Culture Has Been Affected by.”

In this engaging study of how literary reading has been incorporated into visual and electronic media, Collins considers how, through pervasive consumerism, an impulse toward self-improvement, and a widespread desire to use literature (like virtually all other purchases) as a lifestyle signifier, the formerly solitary activity has been reborn as a social expression of value and taste.

Collins examines how books are consumed, concluding that “the love of literature can now be fully experienced only outside the academy and the New York literary scene” (3), and observing that “The most profound change in literary America after the rise of postmodern fiction [. . .] was the complete redefinition of what literary reading means within the heart of electronic culture.” He analyzes online book retailers, chain superstores, literary adaptation films and Oprah’s Book Club, delivering rich case studies of how such relatively new institutions—which affect how books are distributed and valued—have profoundly altered when and where “literary” experience takes place.

Readers seeking arguments about these developments may be disappointed. Collins’ stated aim is to remain in the realm of the descriptive, and he adheres to this objective almost without fail. In his introduction, he explains: “My goal in this book is to trace the contours of a particular ‘media ecology’ shaped by the increasing convergence of literary, visual and material cultures” (8); although he expresses hope that it will not, the account sometimes comes across as detachedly observational.

Mostly, though, Collins’ writing is personable and accessible, and he draws on his expertise as a professor in the Department of Film, Television and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame to maintain appropriate ambivalence and to avoid speciously pitting various media against one another in a zero-sum game. For instance, he does good service to his subject by permitting himself to argue that notions like those espoused in the NEA’s 2004 report Reading at Risk—which asserted “that reading books and viewing electronic media are mutually antagonistic experiences”—are “troubling” conclusions based on a “highly debatable interpretation of data” (14).

Collins is best when most argumentative, as when, in the final chapter, he critiques “the relationship between the type of beauty offered by reading literary fiction and other sorts of aesthetic beauty, specifically those offered by material culture” (226). Here he notes that “Literary critics have theorized about the pleasure of the text for the past three decades,” and “In much the same way, the pleasures furnished by material objects have also been theorized [. . .] by sociologists eager to identify the underlying desires that animate consumer culture,” and concludes that “I know of no attempt to situate the two in reference to each other” (226).

Though critical at times of “the academy,” Collins comes across as a passionate teacher, often invoking student reactions in his analyses, and the book seems to reflect his commitment to fostering discussion; because it refuses—sometimes frustratingly, other times wisely—to offer a unified argument, Collins’ project stands as an invitation for readers to draw their own conclusions based on a wealth of curated evidence.