Radway (199)
Book of the Month Club: middlebrow, 199
[V. Woolf's term]
taste for bestsellers incompatible with graduate culture and "true literature",
200-201
acquires taste for modernist literature, but lacks passion of other reading,
201
her study of why women read romances, 202
Book of the Month Club sells taste, aspiration, search for transcendence,
202
defence of women's reading of romances, not formulaic, 203
Clubs editors, talk with passion about books, 203
Reader's reports on books, experiential, 204
High vs. popular literature, hierarchy in university, 204
Desire to experience not to evaluate reading, look at its effects on readers,
205
Club defining itself against the academic, even competing for cultural position
and general reader, 206
[Woolf's common reader]
reminder of being absorbed, captivated, etc. by reading, 207
[can't this happen with "high" literature?]
her work to establish the validity and coherence of middlebrow culture,
208
critique: affective resources but focused on individual, 209
self of the reader dissolves, etc., 209
[cf. Victor Nell, Lost in a Book (1988).]
Virginia Woolf on Middlebrows:"They are neither one thing nor the other. They are not highbrows, whose brows are high; nor lowbrows, whose brows are low. Their brows are betwixt and between. They do not live in Bloomsbury which is on high ground; nor in Chelsea, which is on low ground....The middlebrow is the man, or woman, of middlebred intelligence who ambles and saunters now on this side of the hedge, now on that, in pursuit of no single object, neither art itself or life itself, but both mixed indistinguishably, and rather nastily, with money, fame, power, or prestige" ("Middlebrow" from The Death of the Moth, pp. 179-180).
Booth (349)
[author role: how much are we aware of it?
Question it? What do we attribute to it? Cf. empirical studies of Bortolussi
and Dixon]
Care and concern for real author, to buy their work, to respect their privacy,
349-50
[does interest in author sometimes displace interest
in the work?]
Care seems reduced to sanction against plagiarizing, 350
To engage with the author's values, 350
[do you care about values when reading? E.g.,
while reading Heart of Darkness?]
Need to share ethical appraisals of writing, 351
[critical debate: who reads it, or who listens?
Oprah book club, etc.?]
Reductive aesthetic judgement vs. ethical criticism that leads us back to
conflicts of life, 351-2
[is this the issue that concerned Levine, in
"Reclaiming the Aesthetic"? - attempting to relate aesthetic to sense of
community]
How we are "occupied" by the stories we read, 352
[Oatley: a simulation]
Think the thoughts of another while reading, Poulet, 353
We have to embrace a reading in order to critique it, 353
To be "taken over": our responsibility to implied author, 353
[the "rights" of the author (or text); what it
is, before what it might have been, as basis for ideological criticism]
To absorb the givens of the story (its situation model), rather than use
it for another purpose (a puzzle or enigma), 354
[instrumental use of literature goes more widely;
its use in schools, etc.]
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Document created April 11th 2005