Abstracts

Anita Lam (University of Toronto)

Looking for X in Hamilton: One Book, One City and neoliberal governmentality

This paper examines how local civic leaders have constructed and given meaning to the act of reading in the current One Book, One City (OBOC) reading initiative undertaken by Hamilton, Ontario. Using a textual analysis of representations of the OBOC project found in promotional materials, local media coverage and on-line websites run by the project's organizing sponsors, this paper will examine how this OBOC program is built into a pre-existing civic initiative- namely, Hamilton's War on Poverty.

If the meaning of this OBOC initiative arises from both the local context and the larger sociopolitical context of neoliberalism, then the underlying logic of this OBOC project has been influenced by the neoliberal governmentality first embedded in policies associated with Hamilton's War on Poverty. In short, this paper examines how this mass reading initiative is understood by a form of politics that attempts to go beyond the State. If neoliberal governance focuses on the "community" as a means for government, then individuals' emotional allegiances to the community are instrumentalized as a means for responsibilizing and making active the citizens of Hamilton. While the act of reading has been previously associated with a transformative experience associated with self-help discourse, this form of self-help has been reconfigured in neoliberal terms as responsibilization, such that individuals have a personal responsibility to invest and participate in their communities, especially in a OBOC initiative that is meant to empower the community by providing and producing new power-knowledge to solve the local problem of poverty. Thus, reading the OBOC novel becomes the act of an active, responsible, empowered citizen in the Hamilton community.

Christiana Lambrinidis (Independent Scholar and playwright)

Kill you, kill you not: detoxifying comprehension to improvise knowledge among women in Athens

Are there parameters in between fe-[male] violence(s)? Are the narratives of violence empowerment for women and self-awareness for men? Within a stage of the unspeakable, violence becomes a language, a strategy of articulating rage and not destruction. The usefulness of this methodology is played out in constructing a subversive theater of testimony where book reading transforms soundless monologues to dialogues and impasses to solutions. I would like to discuss an 11 year old women’s literature seminar as a vibrant reading space that has undergone amazing changes over the last decade yet continues to produce social change.

Anouk Lang (University of Birmingham)

Real readers, virtual spaces: theorising new forms of reading

This paper considers how new technologies are changing the ways in which people read, in both social and solitary contexts, and suggests ways of understanding the kinds of social and hermeneutic work that are being carried out in conjunction with these new practices. Beginning with an overview of some of the new ways in which readers engage with each other and with texts over the internet – for example online book groups, interactive fanfic sites, online retailers’ use of book reviews, and book swapping sites – I suggest ways in which these technologies may be both changing reading patterns and practices, and illuminating aspects of the act of reading which may not be easily visible when carried out in the more familiar context of codex book reading.

As bewildering as these rapid changes and transmogrifications of the act of reading are, I argue that they are useful for those attempting to gain access to the complex of interior processes – intellectual, social, psychological, ideological – that occur when individuals read, both alone and with others. Furthermore, advances in digital technology have made public and permanent many interactions that would once have been conducted in private and ephemeral ways, something which has obvious ethnographic advantages.

Using several examples of technology-mediated reading formations, I consider what these suggest about internet-mediated reading more generally in terms of its potential to engage, connect and transform readers in ways as yet unobserved in face-to-face contexts. Rather than attempting to set out a taxonomy of a diverse constellation of organically developing practices, I seek a methodology for determining how these forms differ from and resemble each other, and for discovering what readers might be seeking when they engage in one of these modes and not others.

This paper examines the benefits of reading groups in homes for the elderly, and looks at two distinct client groups: the mentally alert but physically frail, and those suffering from dementia.

While active age centres offer a full programme of stimulating activity for the active in body and mind, there are large numbers of elderly people in care for physical reasons, who continue to be intellectually alert. Provision for this group is often severely limited. The purpose of setting up reading groups with these groups is primarily for increased well-being and I will report on the real benefits for mental health. The paper will argue the necessity for trained group facilitators; the importance of flexibility in the running and organization of the group and the consequences of choosing the right and wrong texts. Nostalgia and sentiment play a large part in the literature of these reading groups. Far from being worn out dead ends, I will argue that they are the means of reassessing the sum of past experience in order to give it its full value and place in present, ongoing life.

We will report also report on a group suffering dementia which meets twice weekly, spends an hour reading aloud together and looking at a diverse selection of material from Shakespeare through to A.A. Milne. The reading is shared in the purest possible sense as members take turns to read aloud but also read passages out altogether to enable less confident members to take part. this report will focus on the interesting distinction in the response to poetry and prose and consider the special connection members of the group have with poems, especially ones which they learnt in their childhood. In our work with this group we have found that old familiar poetry can start off a chain of thinking and remembering and affords moments of clarity and insights into a past life which has been lost from memory. We will outline the key benefits which we believe the experience has afforded to both patients and staff attending the group and put forward suggestions for how this project could be replicated on a larger scale.

Anthony Martin (Waseda University, Japan)

Empire of Signs?: The Reading Practices of Japanese University Students

This paper reports on part of a study of the reading and research practices of Japanese university students and academics in their use of English. The study is being conducted using a range of methods, including reading logs and diaries, surveys and questionnaires and follow-up interviews. In this paper I will consider the responses to surveys on reading and the reading logs completed by three groups of students (first-year undergraduates, final-year undergraduates, and postgraduates). The surveys and reading logs were designed to elicit data on how much students read for research and class purposes, and for leisure, contrasted with their use of online reading (for educational purposes and for leisure). Moreover, the participants were asked to rate their reading experiences for ease of use, for effectiveness (in research and study), and for the importance such practices play in their daily lives. The study thus covers areas of reading research (Guthrie, Mikulecky, Smith), and also considers how far theories of electronic textuality and cyberculture (Negroponte, Castells, Duguid and Brown) are borne out in the experiences of a digital generation. From the early days of theorizing about the effects of digital technology on cultural practices, Japan has been represented as something of a hi-tech, cyborg other to the West; both in its use in fictional representations such as the movie Bladerunner and the novels of William Gibson, and in various theoretical impressions, such as Roland Barthes' Empire of Signs. One major result of the study so far has been to reveal that younger Japanese adults function fluently and discretely in print culture and electronic culture, and indicate a marked preference to keep the two reading experiences separate.

Shannon Mattern (The New School, New York)

Poetry’s Architecture: Reading and Listening in The Woodberry Poetry Room

Turning their attention away from the text on, or in, the page or the screen, some scholars, like Janice Radway and David Morley, focus on the social and material environments in which media consumption takes place. Media ethnographers Faye Ginsberg and Purnima Mankekar suggest that the specific site of media reception – the sitting room or the movie theater, the city or the settlement – cultivates particular consumption practices and defines the ideologies underlying them. Meanwhile, Thomas Doherty writes, film scholars working within the growing field of “exhibition studies” focus not on what’s on the screen, but on the “scene of the screen itself,” including the details of the physical exhibition site. Lynn Spigel has similarly examined the concurrent evolution of an architectural type and a medium – the post-war suburban home and television – and the kinds of spectatorship and values these technologies together engendered.

This focus on the “material text” – common within media studies and increasingly prevalent within literature programs – raises further questions about how that text is constituted and consumed in particular material spaces. And how might this scholarship inform the design of reading, listening, and viewing spaces that facilitate access and fruitful interactions between people, media, and architecture?

In this paper, I will examine Finnish architect Alvar Aalto’s 1949 interior design for the Woodberry Poetry Reading Room at Harvard’s Lamont Library, which recently underwent a controversial renovation. The room, designed for reading and listening to recordings of poetry, is regarded as a “total design,” integrating finishes, furnishings, and lighting conducive to poetry “reception.” How do these design elements cultivate particular practices, and embody certain ideologies, of access and reading? Furthermore, how is the space uniquely suited to the appreciation of poetry?

Sally Maynard (Loughborough University)

Young People’s Reading in 2005

The paper discusses the findings of a survey of what young people in England are reading, and what they say their reading means to them. The study, funded by the Arts Council, was carried out by the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature (Roehampton University) and the results collated and analysed by LISU (Loughborough University).

The survey is concerned with finding out what children like to read rather than with reading ability. Issues covered include:

• how children come into contact with all kinds of reading matter (from comics and magazines to fiction and non-fiction books)
• preferences for favourite books and authors
• satisfaction with the kinds of publications available
• the kinds of people influencing young people’s choice of reading matter
• how young readers select what to read
• where children buy what they read
• the place of reading in relation to other out of school/leisure activities

This is the second in a series of surveys, and as such can provide a 'snapshot' of young people's reading relating to the particular period covered by the survey as well as allowing the identification of trends in juvenile reading habits. The project provides opportunities to look objectively at the effect of the various high-profile, government-funded initiatives (such as the Year of Reading and the establishment of the Literacy Hour) aimed at promoting reading and improving literacy.

The 2005 survey enjoyed the participation of 22 primary and 24 secondary schools. Intriguing and varied conclusions are drawn, including:

• magazines were important as reading material for pleasure and as a source of information to both boys and girls
• reading is clearly one of many activities enjoyed by the children and in some cases is being usurped by the more visual technologies, particularly for the boys

Alistair McCleery (Napier University)

Can Read, Won’t Read: Children’s Reading in 1989 and 2007

A 1989 report provided both a snapshot of the contemporary role of reading in children’s lives and a basis upon which policies could be developed in order to encourage reading. The motivation for this work was both pragmatic and aspirational: a reverse in the decline of the number of readers would result in increased revenues and independence for writers and publishers and a reduced need for subvention; and the study was informed by the view that reading was ‘an enriching experience’. Its focus was not illiteracy but ‘aliteracy’, not an inability to read but an unwillingness to read. It limited the field to reading ‘literature’ in a broad sense rather than reading for education, instruction or information in a narrow one: Stephen King counted, Haynes car manuals did not. The major consequence of this study was that reading for this age-group went to the top of the agenda for educational and cultural policy-makers, writers and publishers. More resources were put into initiatives targeting children. The ‘Harry Potter’ phenomenon – the first book appeared in 1997 – gave hope that the number of children with a reading habit was actually on the increase. Writers and publishers were no longer underestimating children’s ability to deal with sophisticated themes, emotions and ideas. Ten years on a further study of children’s reading habits and practices in Scotland was undertaken to provide a longer-term comparison and this paper presents the preliminary results of this study.

Kate McDonnell (Assistant Project Manager, Get Into Reading, University of Liverpool) and Mary Weston (Project Worker, Get Into Reading, University of Liverpool)

Evaluating community group reading: Feel better with a book? Then prove it …

This paper will focus the problems associated with evaluating two specific groups: Feel Better With A Book, a specialist Get Into Reading group for mental health service users, and GIR work with recovering drug abusers in residential rehab.The paper will explore the challenges faced in observing and recording reading group member outcomes, which included changes in behaviour both within and outside the sessions. It will begin by describing the ethos of the groups, the ‘friend/professional’ role of the facilitator and go on to discuss the various methods employed to capture the reading group experience. I will argue that although individual case histories or ‘stories’ may be our preferred method of recording what is happening when people meet each week to journey into a book together, there are particular difficulties in any type of documentation, including both confidentiality, and a sense that the delicacy of individuals and the shared dynamics of a collaborative and creative reading group session may be damaged by overhandling.

Lynne McKechnie (University of Western Ontario and University of Washington), Paulette Rothbauer (University of Toronto) and Catherine Ross (University of Western Ontario)

Empty shelves: Readers speak of the challenges of finding good books to read

Having access to reading materials is recognized as central to the development and support of individuals as lifelong readers (see, for example, Meek 1982). Yet the child, teen and adult readers who participated in our ongoing studies of readers, often identified finding a good book to read as a significant challenge. While it may be argued that cost impedes book purchasing, the ready availability of free public library services makes this finding somewhat perplexing.

This paper will draw on three data sets: Catherine Ross’s interviews with more than 220 adults who read for pleasure; Paulette Rothbauer’s interviews with over 60 adolescent readers; and Lynne McKechnie’s interview and observation studies of 75 child readers 4 to 12 years old. Preliminary analysis of the data suggests that in addition to physical availability, access has many more dimensions from the perspective of readers. For example, children differentiate between required and freely chosen reading as well as school-sanctioned and out-of-school reading. Young adults report it is easier to borrow books from friends than to negotiate the public library hurdles of borrowing and describe library catalogues as useless for identifying what they want to read. Adults speak of the difficulty of finding new authors and titles especially when confronted with large and overwhelming library collections and book store stocks.

Our paper will deconstruct the concept of “access to reading materials” by exploring its multivariate dimensions as described by readers themselves.

Lynne McKechnie (University of Western Ontario and University of Washington)

“Spiderman is not for babies” (Peter, 4 years): The “boys and reading problem” from the perspective of the boys themselves

As girls continue to outperform boys on standard tests of reading achievement parents, educators and librarians are actively searching for ways to help boys develop a skill seen as essential for success in life. This study explores the “problem” of boys and reading using qualitative methods to capture the perspective of the boys themselves.

Situated within the rubric of reader response theory, this study regarded the boys as being experts in their own reading practices. Sixty Canadian boys, four through fifteen years old participated. The boys’ personal collections of books and other information materials were inventoried. Each boy then participated in a 30 minute qualitative semi-structured interview which explored his reading practices. A grounded theory approach was used to analyze the data to identify emergent themes.

Results indicate boys have personal collections of reading materials which they use. However, many of the collections included materials that are not privileged as “real” reading by libraries and schools. The boys own novels but also nonfiction books, computer magazines, comic books, graphic novels and role playing game manuals. This trend was evident even in the collections of younger boys. On the day of his interview, the most prized item in four-year-old Peter’s collection was his new Spiderman book. Part of the boys and reading problem then may lie in what we count as reading. The results of this study have implications for educators and also for public libraries. Through broadening their understanding of what constitutes “real” reading and developing collections and services that support the real reading interests of boys, children’s librarians are positioned to play a central role in legitimizing the reading practices of boys.

Nickianne Moody (Liverpool John Moores University)

Genre, categorisation and cultural practice: The decision to re-stock romance in four UK bookshops

The romance genre is frequently chosen for academic study because it makes the cultural politics of gendered experience visible. The romance narrative stays current by exploring the renegotiation of personal, cultural and political meanings associated with the attainment and maintenance of sexual monogamy. By the end of the twentieth century however, romance as a marketing term had been virtually effaced in favour of broader categorisations demonstrating an uncertainty about the readership for romance fiction.

As a research term genre often denotes an intersection that occurs between academic analysis, production concerns and audience activity which is vitally relevant to understand the commercial, cultural and social practices of popular fiction. Cultural tension in the 1990s placed greater emphasis on narratives addressing the post-nuptial stage of heterosexual relationships at the same time, economic pressures on publishers encouraged them to seek authors for serial narratives and both developments are better suited to other forms of formula fiction than romance. Therefore romance blended its highly focussed narrative concern on the couple with other styles and imperatives such as comedy, the thriller, fantasy and detective fiction. In the late 1990s, the flexibility of categorisation practiced by Amazon and Borders stood in contrast to decisions made by WH Smith and Waterstones about where to place romance fiction within their shops.

Currently the displacement of romance by traditional retailers is being reversed. Waterstones' overt decision to restock romance is a new approach to marketing the genre which appears to be connected to the perception of a reading career (McRobbie, 1981) for popular female audiences. Moreover, a new policy which groups together 'women's interest supernatural and fantasy fiction' in Forbidden Planet also demonstrates a more reflexive understanding of audience taste and appreciation of sub-genres which are concerned with romance and contemporary sexual identities.

Over 2006 romance as a genre category in Britain has become more accessible in bookshops and publishers and retailers have become prepared to vary the way that it is presented to co-existing groups and cultures of readers. This paper maps the changes that are taking place in how romance is retailed. The case studies reveal a definite change in how readers of genre fiction are perceived in an increasingly competitive market place. From this position the discussion assesses the impact that the new approach to marketing has on the industry and potential readership in Britain.

Vanessa J. Morris (Clarion University of Pennsylvania)

Inner city teens do read: Their lives represented in urban fiction

Philadelphia is the 5th largest city in America, with a population of more than 40% African Americans. Many Philadelphian African Americans live in inner city neighborhoods like North Philadelphia and West Philadelphia. In North Philadelphia, the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood boasts at least 10 schools (pre-K, public and parochial) within a 2-mile radius. The population of Strawberry Mansion boasts 34% under the age of 20. This means that there is a considerable population of children and teenagers living and growing up in Strawberry Mansion generation after generation. With such a large youth population that are school age, it has been important to understand how literacy plays a part in the growth of the children's academic, social and civic lives.

This paper proposes to explore the follow research questions: "How is literacy defined for African American teen youth in Strawberry Mansion?" "What do urban youth read?" "Why do they read what they read?" "How do their reading habits reflect how they view their representation in urban life?"

This paper will trace the adolescent development of teens in inner city Philadelphia, citing the influences of poverty, racism and educational issues. This paper will cite a book club experience that I facilitated as a Young Adult librarian in a neighborhood branch library in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood. In this bookclub we explored urban fiction; the whys of reading it, the impact of reading it, and the approach of teaching critical literacy to the teens to empower their reading of the genre. The presentation will conclude with a synthesis of urban culture with book culture to promote the reality that for urban teens, urban fiction is a representation of who they are and what they observe within their daily experiences in an inner city environment. Therefore, urban fiction is a critical tool in giving its readership space to have voice in how their culture is represented in literature.

Samantha Naidu (Rhodes University, South Africa)

Eroticising the exotic: South Asian women and romance fiction

Recent years have seen an increased popularisation of South Asian culture and the ‘Asian experience’ in the form of global cultural commodities such as movies, television sitcoms, and popular literature. BBC sitcoms such as “Goodness Gracious Me” and the “Kumars at No. 42” have become household media phenomena, whilst movies like “East is East” and “Bend it Like Beckham” have enjoyed international success. The Bollywood cinema industry has played a key role in this popularisation process, extending its market to the USA, UK and South Africa. In the literary arena novels which conform to the genres of popular literature, but with South Asian, usually diasporic content, have been produced, and can be seen as part of this trend. Some of these novels are clearly modeled on the western romance paperbacks of the Mills & Boon or Harlequin variety. Others contain certain elements of the genre but deviate to introduce other aesthetic forms or to address varying historical and social issues, such as diaspora and female identity. My paper examines how the South Asian diasporic romance novel extends and revises the already evolving romance genre. The paper acknowledges how romance has been a persistently popular mode in western literature for centuries, but how in the mid-twentieth century it has evolved into “a concerted programme of market research, mass publication and multi-media advertising” (Rosalind Jones 1985: 198) directed at a female audience. My central argument is that feminist inroads are being made into the genre, and I am arguing that South Asian diasporic women writers are making a considerable contribution to this foray, with intriguing consequences.

Sue Needham (Birmingham Central Library)

Story Lounge project at Birmingham Central Library

Patricia Neville (Mallow College of Further Education, Cork)

Helping self-help books: Moving towards a sociological analysis of self-help books

Self-help books are one of the most prolific and commercially successful book genres of the past thirty years (Smith, 2002). Though originally described as books that outline a particular problem in its leading title which was then followed by its remedy in its sub-title, the self-help genre has also undergone substantial diversification to include inspirational pamphlets, affirmational daily journals, audio books and miniature books (e.g. The Little Book of Hope). According to Bowker’s Books InPrint database there are currently 31,073 books classified as self-help books in print in America with 2,924 new self-help titles published in 2005. It has been recorded by the Association of American Publishers that self-help books generated book sales of over $1.2 billion in the US in 2003. This strong consumptive relationship with self-help books is not an exclusive American phenomenon but can also be found to be on the increase in Britain as well as Japan, China, India to name a few.

Despite the sizeable presence of self-help books in contemporary popular culture, the practice of consuming and reading self-help books has yet to receive the scholarly attention that this phenomenon deserves. This paper will attempt to rectify this academic shortcoming and challenge the intellectual hegemony of the Frankfurt School and its quick dismissal of the claims made by many self-help readers that self-help books are meaningful texts that can help change peoples lives for the better. This research will argue that self-help readers are active readers whose experience of reading these texts reveals the existence of a complex interplay of personal, social, and economic variables. I will attempt to show this by:

1. Introducing and discussing how the combined insights of the interpretative tradition can be applied to counter-balance the functionalism of the critical tradition.
2. Present an overview of the existing research that has been carried out on self-help readers and my own qualitative research into self-help readers and their reader responses.

Jennifer Nolan-Stinson (University of Maryland)

Locating reading: What the placement of books in a reader's home reveals

In order to better understand reading as a cultural practice, we need to study the lived experiences of individual readers. One important but largely ignored area of research involves exploration of how readers organize their books and reading spaces within their homes. My research uses an ethnographic life history approach to study reading practices of self-described "avid readers," which enables me to paint detailed portraits of each reader’s cultural influences, practices, and habits. Understanding the role that reading and books play within a reader's home is proving to be an essential component of my approach. Exploring, through interviews and participant observation, where books are placed, and why, helps reveal not only what type of reader a person is, but also what type of reader a person wishes to be perceived as in relation to prevailing social attitudes towards certain types of books within the cultural worlds that each reader inhabits. The readers with whom I work organize their books and reading spaces differently in ways that reflect their own complex classifications of these books, but how they think the books will be perceived by others is a salient factor for each in determining where they place them. Thus books chosen for display in social spaces, such as living rooms, are only partial indicators of a person’s reading interests and often exclude many books the person most enjoys reading. Furthermore, reading spaces created for the use of others, such as in guest rooms, reveal much about how readers construct and understand other readers and themselves. Examining the role that reading plays within the lived environment of readers adds an important dimension to understanding reading as both a personal and social activity.

Anna Notaro (Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, Dundee)

Storytelling & new media

This paper's theoretical framework is rooted in contemporary debates about what is generally known as the 'digital revolution'. Computer and software development have given birth to a whole new field of digital texts, which are not bound to the book as a medium. These texts can be read from computer screen, or increasingly, from different reading devices, so called e-books. It is my contention that digital textuality opens an infinite field to expand literary expression, especially when it comes to the city (urban metaphors are not surprisingly abundant when describing the Internet). Often digital textuality is seen as an alternative medium for literature, there is, however, literature which uses digital textuality much more effectively. They integrate aspects of digital dynamics as part of their signifying structure and widen the range of literary expression. I am referring to 'digital storytelling' which brings together the ancient art of storytelling and multimedia technology. This essay argues that such a type of narrative has recently known a revival which has taken different shapes: in some cases hypertextual narrative structures bring about an interbreeding of literary genres and visual arts, in others (the ones I am concerned with) the impact of the geographical 'locale' and of a well-established trope 'the city' make them hybrid texts, occupying a new space between printed text and multimedia presentation. The paper will survey a few innovative literary projects, before focusing in particular on the one by Thomas Beller, who uses a virtual map of New York as a navigation device. His web site "Mr. Beller's Neighborhood"  (http://www.mrbellersneighborhood.com/) is based on satellite photographs of Manhattan, the city has been divided into nine sections, and each neighborhood has red dots marking specific locations that are linked to stories by Beller and many others about events connected to each spot. In 2002 a selection of stories, which had first appeared on the web site, was published in a collection entitled 'Before and After: Stories from New York', thus providing a splendid opportunity for readers to compare the two experiences.

Séverine Olivier (Université Libre de Bruxelles - Free University Brussels)

Guilty seduction: Romance readers and publishers

In France, romance readers have always been despised. Even in the today French women’s magazines and newspapers, their portrait, when considered, is not very positive. Although it doesn’t comply with the reality, it contributes to reinforce the prejudices. Why does the French critical community keep on regarding the romance readers as alienated and stupid people in danger? We are personally convinced that it is the fault of romance publishers like Harlequin. Their marketing strategies and the way they provide romance novels explain for the most part the bad opinion of the scholars about romance readers. But do the publishers have a real impact on the readers? Do they actually manipulate them? Do they influence the reading? If they ensure the visibility of the books (coloured and romantic covers), facilitate the reading (simplified translations, cutting of long descriptions), try to create customer loyalty and enlarge their public readers, they cannot control everything. Having to make a profit, they have to respect the readers’ desires. Therefore, how do the French romance readers respond to the publishers and to their marketing strategies? A sociological survey into French-speaking romance readers and the study of a French website on the romantic novels will help to analyse the impact of the publishers on the reading. In the prevailing mass culture, understanding how the readers, the true agents of cultural transformations, respond to the book industries is essential.

Dru Pagliassotti (California Lutheran University)

A better romance: Reading boy’s love in the west

“Boy’s love” is used to refer to male/male homoerotic texts, particularly manga, created by women for women. As received in the West, Japanese BL manga are almost always in tankōbon, or graphic novel, form, whether they’re “scanlated” (scanned and translated by fans) or officially licensed, translated, and published. A survey of 478 Western readers of BL addressed how they consume and understand BL manga and participate in the BL fan community as readers and producers of BL texts.

Western BL readers engage with the texts on a variety of levels. First, they must learn how to read Japanese-origin manga: negotiating panels that run from right-to-left, learning graphical and sound-effect conventions, and understanding cultural references or terms (e.g., senpai/kohei relationships). In addition, although most Western readers classify BL as romance, they differ from Western romance readers in their expectations about sexual violence and happy endings. Like slash readers, they find BL’s male/male romances more enjoyable and less gender-stereotyped than heterosexual romances.

Western BL readers also engage with the text at a subcultural level. Despite the recent boom in BL publishing, most still obtain texts online through fan scanlations, requiring at least minimal complicity in this “underground” endeavor. Many are active in the BL fan community: they talk about BL; create BL stories, images, videos, or translations; play BL games; and support BL in other ways, such as running websites or reviewing BL products. In the United States, BL publishers and readers interact online and at conventions; publishers often self-identify as fans and ask fans for suggestions about which titles to license and translate next. In return, fans encourage deleting licensed titles from scanlation sites and purchasing printed books to encourage BL publishing in their countries. Thus, reading BL manga is an intercultural and popular cultural event in the West.

Sarah Pedersen (The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen)

Now read this: Male and female bloggers’ recommendations for further reading

Anne Peoples (Assistant Chief Librarian, Western Education and Library Board, Northern Ireland)

Divided City: A Cross-Border Development Project

This case study describes the experience of delivering Divided City, a One Book programme, as a major initiative within the framework of a cross-border reader development partnership Inspiring Readers. The project was funded by the Special European Union Partnership Board, an EU fund established to promote peace and reconciliation in Ireland following the Good Friday Agreement.  The two main partners were the Western Education and Library Board (UK) and Donegal County Council Library Service (Ireland).

This paper is based on our experience of delivering an integrated programme in two authorities, in different countries, to communities separated by physical borders and sectarian divisions.  The case study outlines how the One Book programme strand was used to directly address issues of sectarianism, exclusion and cultural diversity and gives an overview of the project delivery.  Drawing on the external evaluation report findings, the case study demonstrates the potential of library based One Book programmes to address sensitive and contentious issues by providing a mass reading activity linked to opportunities for meaningful discussion.

It concludes that reading can support inclusion and diversity and that libraries can move from passive neutrality to dynamic engagement.

Ike Picone (Vrije Universiteit Brussel - Free University Brussels)

Experiencing e-news: profiles of the online newsreader

Since a few decades, the newspaper industry has been in a downturn. The reasons for this are complex but the role of complementary news channels like radio and television and recently the internet and mobile networks can not be denied. Mainly young people prefer sites, blogs and online communities to newspapers when it comes to get informed. Blogging, rating, commenting, sharing and participating in making the news are only but a few features publishers offer their audience on their websites in order to bind them to their brand. However, while these aspects are much hyped as part of the upcoming web 2.0, history teaches us that the needs and uses of the public will play an important part in the success or failure of these applications.

In academic research on media and news audiences we find a wide range of audience profiles like the coach potato, the news enjoyer, the plug-in reader or the lean-forward reader. Through new ways of consuming news concepts like the prosumer, the citizen journalist or the blogger emerged. These various types will read the news differently depending on what they are planning to do with it. This paper wants to look at the factors that motivate people read and use news in new ways.

The case study will be the attitude of the Flemish newspaper audience towards online news services by means of qualitative research of lead users (heavy readers of both new media and newspapers). First we will give an overview of the existing and new academic concepts on newsreader profiles. Secondly, the results of the interviews will be analysed focusing on the questions when and why readers turn to online news consumption. Finally, we will try to link these results to the reader profiles.

Julian Pinder (University of Sydney, Australia)

Online literary communities: A case study of LibraryThing

While, at first glance, LibraryThing (http://www.librarything.com) appears merely to offer a means for readers to catalogue their book collections online, the site in fact demonstrates the potential for the Internet to offer an entirely new culture (or entirely new cultures) of reading. Taking the online personal library cataloguing website LibraryThing as its primary example and focus, this paper examines how the Internet opens up new avenues for the generation and development of multiple, intersecting (global) communities of readers. By cross referencing each user’s collection with those of other users, uniting readers with similar reading interests (based both on their existing libraries and declared interests), suggesting works on the basis of those similar reading interests, and opening up avenues for discussion about those works and those interests, LibraryThing generates a dynamic, communitarian space to explore literature that is distinct from (but overlaps with) the academic and commercial spaces that otherwise dominate the Internet.

In its examination of LibraryThing, this paper explores ‘literary networking’ as an emerging concept, contrasting an ethnographic account of literary networking with a more theoretical approach, one which locates literary networking at the intersection of existing theoretical models generated by hypertext theory, post-structural theory and information technology theory (particularly the larger social bookmarking phenomenon). I will also explore the implications for reading, literature and literary study arising from this literary networking paradigm; specifically, the implications for:

• ‘canon’ formation;
• reading practices; and
• concepts of literary ‘taste’ and influence;

as well as the interface or connectivity with other related reading/literary practices, such as blogging, online book-selling, and academic research and study.

Izabela Potapowicz (Université de Montréal, Québec)

Meeting through the screened text: The mediation of women’s identity in daytime literary shows (USA/France)

This paper will examine the ways that televised literary programs create complex interfaces allowing a mediation between their audiences and the selected texts, while engaging notions of personal and group identity. It will be centered around three day-time programs: the American The Oprah’s Book Club (ABC, CTV, 1995 -), Aujourd’hui Madame: des auteurs face à leurs lectrices (TF1, 1974-81), and Le Club des lectrices (France2, 2006-). All three literary programs are part of daily morning shows; all three explicitly target female audiences and routinely present female readers from various socio-economic backgrounds as role models.

In these programs, reading is portrayed as a noble yet fun activity compatible with daily responsibilities, that not only allows these women to “take time for themselves”, but also to (re)connect to a larger community of readers. My analysis will allow a glimpse at the differences between the North-American and European programs in the last fifty years – both in their intermedial evolution and in the proposed ideal woman (reader, wife, mother, emancipated individual, etc). It will also explore the twofold transfers and mediations present in the programs: the first lying on the level of multiple media interactions with the public, the second on the level of values and roles associated with printed literature and the kinds of “literary friendships” made possible through reading together, thus enabling us to examine some contemporary implications of reading in the United States and in France.

Suzanne Pouliot (Université de Sherbrooke, Québec) and Noëlle Sorin (Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, Québec)

Publishers and young readers in Québec (1970-2005)

Publishers’ discourse concerning books for young readers in Québec has undergone several transformations since the first children’s books were published in Québec during the 1920’s. For example, what began as a highly moralistic discourse had, by the end of the 1960’s, shifted to a broad knowledge-based discourse. Édith Madore, a respected children’s literature scholar, has been illustrating children’s books since 1990 and has observed the rapid expansion of this market. The vast range of titles published by more than thirty different publishing houses in Québec today enables us to analyse the nature of the discourse being transmitted by these cultural mediators who are both editor and publisher (Michon 2002).

In our paper, we analyze what five of these contemporary publishers (Éditions Héritage, Les éditions de la courte échelle, Soulières éditeur, Éditions de l’Isatis, Imagine) have to say about young readers and what they believe their various novels, picture books, tales, and Internet publications have to offer children. We discuss ways in which the contents of books published by these houses have been shaped by reader-response theories (Jauss, 1978; Iser, 1976; Eco, 1985) and by the reading guidelines put forward by the Ministry of Education, Recreation and Sports in its French programs (1979, 1994 et 2001) and its literature guides (1980-1981-1991). Finally, we position the targeted publishing houses on one of the four axes defined by Igance Cau (cultural, economic, cultural-economic and ideological). We propose that they represent what Bourdieu refers to as symbolic capital and we briefly describe the concept of reading that they have conveyed to young readers between the ages of 0 to 16.

James Procter (Newcastle University)

Devolving Diasporas: Reception and migration in central Scotland, 1980-present

Reception has emerged as a loaded concept in twenty-first century Europe, associated with refugees, asylum seekers, Sangatte, Oakenfield: “Shadowy figures roaming the track at the entrance to the Channel Tunnel. Afghans, Iraqis, Chinese and Moroccans washed up on Mediterranean shores to be rounded up in their hundreds into grim reception centres: routine and familiar images of the wretched of the earth knocking desperately at Europe’s door” (Guardian May 24 2002). More recently, Jack Straw has said that “[t]his [the wearing of the veil] is an issue that needs to be discussed because, in our society, we are able to relate particularly to strangers by being able to read their faces and if you can't read people's faces, that does provide some separation.” (my emphasis). Our project consciously evokes this dual sense of reception as on the one hand an issue of diasporic hospitality (e.g. reception centres) and, on the other, an issue of hermeneutics, interpretation, or reading (e.g. the veil as a menacing sign of inscrutability, the illegible, the unreadable). This paper introduces the project, and its exploration of the role of the contemporary reader, and reading acts in the UK, Africa, the Caribbean, Canada and India through an exploration of responses to diasporic literature.

Despite the current interest in diasporic 'texts' (e.g. Small Island) and 'authors' (e.g. Zadie Smith), little is yet known about the actual 'readers' of diasporic literature and of how they make sense of the texts they read. Still less is known about the consumption and production of meaning in relation to these texts beyond the metropolitan centre. The paper will conclude with a consideration of how we hope to ‘devolve’ or move outwards from the established centres of meaning production, whether that is the diasporic author/text, or the city of London.

Julie Rak (University of Alberta)

Reading the Shelves: Genre and Bookselling in Canada

Genre pervades human lives. As people go about their business, interacting with others and trying to get along in the world, they use genres to ease their way, to meet expectations, to save time. People recognize genres, thought not usually the power of genres. – Amy Devitt, Writing Genres

In a society such as ours...there are manifold relations of power that permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse. – Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge

In the beginning, before there is reading, often there is the acquisition of a book, and the contemporary bookstore’s role in getting books to readers. Like reading itself, bookstores have cultures and aim to encourage the production of certain kinds of reading subjects who want to read (and buy). At the heart of this transaction between potential readers and booksellers, I argue, is an understanding of genre as a social production which organizes knowledge in the bookstore and determines how books make their journey from writers, to publishers, to sellers and finally to readers. In this paper, I take Amy Devitt’s contention seriously that genres are a way of “getting along” in the world because they have power contained within them, but I also contend that they are part of practices which form the heart of the Foucauldian power/knowledge nexus within the context of everyday activity. In other words, genres are part of everyday knowledge, but they are also epistemic: they organize the possibilities of certain types of knowledge without calling attention to their own importance, or even to their existence. Although Foucault most often looked at the limits of epistemic knowledge formations in order to critique the redeployment of power within the status quo, Carolyn Miller and other New Rhetorical theorists have pointed out that genres specifically can also be a type of social action that can form a counter-practice to the status quo, depending on how they are deployed (1994). As social action, genre acts in the world because its effects are spatial and temporal. They are part of everyday communicative life and they often provide rules for how to live, how to “know” one’s place socially and how to act inside or outside a system.

I focus on the scene of book selling in Canada as a way to think about genre as social action intimately connected with the ideologies of space and materiality within the context of global and local capitalist systems. In interviews with the staff of ten independent stores across Canada, I have found that the reorganization of generic types within the physical environment of independent stores forms part of a loose set of tactics which independent bookstores use in order to survive, and thrive, in the wake of the arrival of big box bookstores. I will compare these tactics to the ways in which Chapters-Indigo, the largest chain bookstore in Canada, understands generic classification and its relationship to the activities of large publishers.

Archana Rampure (Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada)

The Circulation of Fictions: The Case of Commercial Circulating Libraries in Postcolonial India

Major recent research projects such as the SSHRC-funded _History of the Book in Canada_ and the American Antiquarian Society?s _History of the Book in America_ show that analyzing print culture provides for new understandings of the connections between cultures, economies and educations. But there is still much to learn about how economies of culture operate in places like India, places that are now increasingly important nodes in the global circulation of knowledges and identities. This paper is an overview of my current research, which is an examination of the role of private lending libraries in postcolonial India from Independence (1947) to the present. My investigatation suggests a pivotal role for commercial circulating libraries and the middle-brow books they stock in the formation of a literate, English-speaking elite class in India between 1947 and 2000. This class of Indians, currently engaged in critical debates over the trajectory of the Indian nation-state, are born into literary and cultural realms wherein circulating libraries form a common access point for texts and contexts; it is within these libraries, and through the reading cultures that they produce, that much of contemporary Indian culture comes into being. The middle-brow ?reading cultures? that form around private circulating libraries shed new light on historically important debates over contested notions of national identities, gender roles and class mobility in contemporary India.

Adam Reed (University of St Andrews, Fife)

‘Expanding Henry’: an anthropological approach to contemporary cultures of reading

This paper will focus on my work with a British literary society: the Henry Williamson Society. It aims to present an ethnographic account of a reading culture and more broadly to locate the distinctive contribution social and cultural anthropology can make to the study of literature and literary cultures. This includes an anthropological take on the material culture of books and other literary artefacts such as land [scape]. Members of the Henry Williamson Society talk of what fiction reading does for them. Their experience of literature is connected to their appreciation of the author Henry Williamson as a central and mythic figure. How “Henry” is composed determines the kind of actors readers can be and also explains the capacities assigned to the Williamson artifacts—books and land—that they principally identify. I explore the role of literature as an instrument of social agency and focus on the relationships that Society members draw out around solitary acts of reading and literary society activities, including the way they assign causation within a matrix of relations. Part of my attention will fall on the appeal to ethnography made by scholars of reading cultures working in other disciplines [such as Radway and Long] and how an anthropological approach might connect and/or differ in emphasis.

Fanny Renard (Université Lyon 2, France)

The construction of reading expectations during teenage years

The social variation of the way people appropriate texts proves that there is not one comprehension and appreciation of text which follows from the words. Historians or sociologists have shown that typographic marks, the distribution network or the reader’s life determine the appropriations too (R. Chartier, 1985 ; J. Radway, 1991; R. Hoggart, 1970). However, the practical construction of reading and telling one’s ways of reading has hardly been studied.

That is what we do in our thesis. We analyse the constitution and the realization of the ways of reading. For this research, we met 77 boys and girls from secondary school with different social origins and schoolings. We interviewed them thoroughly about their academic and extra-academic readings, past and present reading relationship, library frequentation habits, and so on. We attended their literature classes and analysed the official instructions.

In this paper, we propose to treat specifically with the academic and extra-academic constitution of “participative” ways of reading. A reader can be captivated by the story and the suspense, not want to know the story before reading, cry or laugh when reading, express empathy with the characters, get informed by the press... We will show how this constitution is realized: firstly, through exercises and school activities in French classes; secondly, through family, friendly or professional relationships, or through affinity to a commercial network of distribution. We will see, for instance, how schoolchildren progressively associate reading expectations of suspense with detective novels or thrillers by memorizing some relative’s advice like: “Read this formidable book, there is a lot of suspense, I’m sure you’ll appreciate!”, “If I tell you the end, I spoil your pleasure”, and so on.

Besides the results, we will show theoretical and methodological viewpoints on which our approach is based.

Chris Richards (London Metropolitan University)

From readers to writers? Rethinking ‘young adult’ fiction

‘Young adult’ fiction, like ‘children’s literature’ is assumed to be a designation of its readers and not, unless exceptionally, of its writers. Unlike ‘chick lit’ or ‘women’s writing’, both of which, though not always and necessarily, designate the shared gender of both readers and writers, ‘young adult’ fiction implies the production of texts for such readers by adults. Difference, in terms of age and status and power, is thus integral to the text-reader relations defining the category. In practice, it may be that ‘young adult’ serves to classify particular texts as ‘not for children’ and thus facilitates the work of selection and mediation by adults – parents, teachers, librarians, and bookstore staff. And meanwhile teenagers, self-positioning as ‘not adult’ and indeed as ‘not child’, may find the fixing of that indeterminacy, as ‘young adult’, unwelcome.

As the category title appears thus to be a means of regulation, rather than designating a unified phenomenon, the age profile of the readership for ‘young adult’ fiction can hardly be settled empirically. But the central assumption that the field is constituted by adult authors producing texts for younger readers can be subjected to some scrutiny. With the expansion of the Internet, there is now a medium in which ‘young adult’ fictions can be written, and circulated, by young adults themselves. If readers can now also be writers in the public domain then ‘young adult’ fiction might be written by, and not only for, young people themselves. This paper explores these issues and addresses the key question: is there now an online reading – and writing – culture produced between young people without adult intermediaries?

Judith Robertson (University of Ottawa)

“I read the way a thief steals, it's a little covert”: A study of literary culture in Newfoundland

This presentation examines the collective reading experiences of female book club readers to determine what regulatory dynamics constitute their meaning making processes. My longitudinal, qualitative study focuses on the cultural dynamics of populist group reading experience, gendered subjectivity, and spatiality in Newfoundland and Labrador women. The goal is to understand how regional gendered identity in female readers located in isolated coastal communities of Canada’s North Atlantic intersects with and disrupts imperialist ideological constructions for its existence. My research participants are zealous lovers of story, ages 40-90, confronting economic devastation and out-migration. Strangely positioned between Europe and postcolonial America, they occupy a contradictory space of migration, invasion, colonization, national belonging, separatist fantasies, nomadism, emigration, and tourism. My inquiry, ranked by the Social Sciences and Humanities Council of Canada in the top five for innovation in the competition for educational research funding in 2004, is a study of literary culture intensely and reflexively mediated by time and place. Positioned as an exile, I am trying to map something both known and unknown to me, something at once human, material, social, historical, psychological, geographical, sea-bound, and aesthetic. The fields of narrative theory, psychoanalysis, cultural studies and feminist post-colonialism inform my analysis of four emergent findings: 1) the book clubs of NL readers function as psychological and metaphorical spaces of transit between experiences/feelings of homelessness and resettlement for the women; 2) landscape provides the punctuation, pauses and commas in the syntax of populist group reading experience in the participant sample; 3) the readers “read in cod-tongue”, out of a void of economic devastation, memory, and feelings that the sea is dead, especially in rural communities; 4) the book club constitutes a feminine space of grace, a communal forum in which dreams of a brave new world can be kept alive.

Gemma Robinson (Stirling University)

Performing diaspora: reflections on a youth theatre adaptation of Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers

In June 2007 a youth theatre group from Stirling’s Macrobert Arts Centre will perform their adaptation of Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers. This performance is part of the larger project on ‘Devolving Diasporas’ to (1) investigate a selection of UK and international reading groups’ responses to books that deal with diaspora and a multicultural UK (Monica Ali’s Brick Lane; Andrea Levy, Small Island; Zadie Smith, White Teeth; and Jackie Kay’s The Adoption Papers) and (2) chart the ‘devolution’ of diasporic literature in Scotland. This paper discusses the ways in which a theatre adaptation enables us to think across the concepts of reading, reception, writing and production that inform the ‘Devolving Diasporas’ project.

In literary analysis and cultural theory ‘diaspora’ has been a useful term to discuss dispersed, dual and multiple senses of home, the fraught terminology of multiculturalism and ethnicity, historical and contemporary forms of migration and immigration, imperially enforced cultural contact, exile and ideas of cultural insiders and outsiders (see Stuart Hall, Robin Cohen). Given these literary theoretical understandings of the term ‘disapora’, my paper’s first aim is to examine the ways in which the actors, production team and audience use the term to describe their responses to The Adoption Papers during the changing stages of reading, writing, production and reception that will make up the performance. The production of The Adoption Papers from initial readings and workshops to final stage adaptation, I argue, provides a case study of the ways that reading ‘diaspora’ becomes a series of changing ‘performative, interactional and collaborative’ activities (Allington and Benwell) within the varied settings of theatre space. Second, I will take the production of The Adoption Papers as an opportunity to understand Suhayl Saadi’s assertion in ‘Infinite Diversity in New Scottish Writing’ (2000): ‘Scotland has actually always been polyglot – but today perhaps it is simply that it is more visibly so’. I will show how the casting, workshopping and directing of a poetic text that deals with the adoption of a girl – born to a white Scottish woman and a Nigerian man – by a white Glaswegian couple enables the Macrobert to ask questions about race, gender and diversity in relation to its productions, audiences and young actors. This paper seeks to describe and explore one instance of how the varied practices of reading can lead to a performance of ‘polyglot’ Scotland.

Paulette Rothbauer (University of Toronto)

21st century print culture and rural young people: Uneasy contexts of reading

This paper will present findings from ongoing research that investigates the role of reading among youth living in a Canadian rural municipality of approximately 10 000 people and with a strong agricultural heritage. Using a framework informed by culturally and socially situated literacy studies, my primary objective is to examine the extent to which rural youth between 15 -19 years of age are engaged with print culture in their everyday lives. Print culture is defined broadly to include digital texts as well as printed and bound texts. The rural setting provides an unique and compelling context for exploring the reading practices of youth as in this municipality they have access to just one public library, one school library in the only secondary school, no full-service bookstores and only very recent access to high speed internet connections. As a researcher situated in the field of library and information studies, I am concerned with the intersection of reading practices of youth and systems of information access (including libraries, bookstores and the internet) that support or deny their investment in print culture. Preliminary findings based on analysis of in-depth, flexibly structured interviews with twenty-five youth suggest that regardless of their self-identification as either readers or non-readers they are engaged with diverse textual materials that range from literary novels to online computer manuals. Data also suggest a tension between engagement and disengagement with print culture that is strongly mediated by the particular rurality of the specific geographical contexts of this study. This paper will report on the ways in which rural young people articulate the meaning of reading in their lives that illustrates a richly mediated reading landscape and undermines perceptions of an impoverished print culture.

Anne Salter (Oglethorpe University, Atlanta) and Judith Brook (Mercer University, Atlanta)

Reading practices among 21st century college students: Are we becoming an aliterate society?

Are we becoming an aliterate society? The demand for recreational reading appears to be on the decline while the demand for films (DVDs, vhs and other formats) is on the rise. Is this an indicator that students of today are selecting viewing over reading? What, if any, is the impact on collection development of undergraduate libraries?

This paper will relay the results of a survey issued to undergraduate liberal arts students and professional students at two major universities in the metro-Atlanta area – Mercer University and Oglethorpe University. Conducted between August and October of 2006, the survey goals were to determine the reading habits of students by obtaining information on reading, use of leisure time and use of new technologies. The results provide interesting data especially as it relates to the concept of “leisure reading.” Specific questions asking participants to list authors and select among literary genres provided insight into types of literature preferred by today’s student.

In order to provide a suitable context for the survey, research was conducted to locate and evaluate information from reading surveys on both a national and international scale. Comparing data from these surveys provides an interesting frame work as well as additional data on reading habits of young adults and adults from a select number of countries including England, Canada, Thailand, China, Australia, and the USA. Additional structure is provided by a brief consideration of the state of the state of the undergraduate college library in the USA today.

Implications from the Oglethorpe/Mercer reading habits survey indicate that viewing is a preferred option over reading. This and other revelations create an array of findings that will be of interest to college librarians and educators concerned with the decline of “reading” and the rise of the aliterate society.

Claire Squires (Oxford Brookes University)

Ghostreaders: Writing and reading the celebrity autobiography

In the 1990s and 2000s, the intensity of celebrity culture has had a forceful impact on the publishing industry. A myriad of celebrity autobiographies and other associated books focusing on high-profile figures including David Beckham, Wayne Rooney and Katie Price (aka Jordan) have been commissioned for large advances and to concerted media attention. These publications rely to a large extent on the writing skills of ghostwriters, who fashion publishable texts out of celebrities’ words and increasingly play a public role in the marketing of these books.

But what is the role of the reader in this burgeoning market? As publishers aim to tap into the mass market that these celebrities attract, how are readers addressed both by the texts and the paratexts of ghostwritten celebrity books? How is the ‘ghostreader’ configured both by the materiality of these books (e.g. by their jackets and surrounding marketing materials) and by the words ‘written’ by the celebrity? And how do ghostreaders – including intermediary ghostreaders such as the media and literary journalists – receive ghostwritten texts?

This paper will explore the contemporary phenomenon of the ghostwritten celebrity autobiography from the perspective of its readers, including its consumers and intermediary readers such as the media, booksellers and publishers. In so doing, the paper will examine the broader question of the nature of the relationship between writers, readers and the various agencies of the contemporary book trade.

Ann Steiner (Lund University, Sweden)

"It's my Reed!" Valuing literature in personally written criticism on the Internet

The proposed paper will investigate personal criticism of literature written on the Internet, and the intention is to shed light on reading, book discussions, and informal reviews. The results presented emanate from a study of literary discussions and reviews on Amazon and various blogs on the web, and focuses on issues of identity, resistance, and community creation. The paper draws from a wider research project focused on the impact of technology on reading, and the relationship between literature and new media.

The reviews written by general readers on websites like Amazon can be described as a kind of private criticism in the public sphere. Readers and technology are involved in a major change in how books are discussed, reviewed, and marketed. The impact modern information society has had on reading has to be further addressed, but I claim that people use technology to spread and discuss books in a way that has induced personal writing about literature and reading. The paper will bring up issues concerning reading, audience communication, and the social position and meaning of new forms of readers’ expressions.

It can be argued that the Amazonian review section gives equal opportunity for people to spread their views on books worldwide based on reading experience rather than on literary criteria. Many readers use review sections to confirm their own experience of a text, and it is also clear that a strong motivation in writing criticism on the web is to connect to other people. The spreading of private views on literature further strengthens the claim that reading is a social act.

Cori Stewart (Queensland University of Technology, Australia)

Faking the Festival: celebrity culture and the International Festival of Authors

Famous for presenting famous authors, and widely recognised as the world’s most prestigious writers’ festival, Toronto’s International festival of Authors illustrates the dominance of celebrity culture in the promotion of literature and the wider production of public culture today. The question addressed in this paper is what forms of public culture are produced/constructed by this festival and to what extent have these been shaped by the processes and practices of celebrity culture?

Writers’ festivals have been traditionally regarded as discrete forms of elite culture independent of media bias and celebrity culture (Starke 2000). This image is falsely perpetuated today as writers’ festivals have become part of the promotional activity designed to serve the literary enterprise. In this paper I will use theories on celebrity culture as a way of exploring this “fakery”.

It is now widely established in academic literature that celebrity culture is the dominant medium for the production of social and everyday life today (Redmond 2006). Celebrity culture has been articulated in academic research in two important and distinct ways; firstly as the logical development of a capitalist and secular society sustained by the perpetual recreation of consumerist desire (Rojek 2001; Marshall 1997; Turner, Bonner & Marshall 2000) and secondly, as a framework where the cultural centrality of fame produces its own inter-textual representations via the products of agents, press officers, gossip columnists, cultural producers and fans (Holmes & Redmond 2006; McKee 2004; Turner 2004). However recent attempts to theorise literary celebrity (Ommundsen 2004, 2005; Moran 2000) have been more concerned with the processes author celebrification rather than examining the ways in which literary celebrity interfaces with the public sphere.

This paper will draw on a recent case study of Toronto’s 2006 International Festival of Authors to examine the writers’ festival in the public sphere and the ways in which literary celebrity have shaped this relationship.

Megan Sweeney (University of Michigan)

‘Keepin’ it real’ with ‘the underground book railroad’: Incarcerated women’s readings of African American urban fiction

Drawing on ethnographic interviews and group discussions with women imprisoned in Ohio, my paper explores incarcerated women’s engagements with African American urban fiction, by authors such as Teri Woods, Chunichi, Vickie Stringer, and Zane. The urban fiction genre is largely forbidden on prison grounds due to its emphases on crime, drugs, violence, and sex. Nonetheless, some women in prison acquire urban fiction through the “Underground Book Railroad,” and they organize their own circulation policies and waiting lists for the highly popular books.

Some incarcerated readers agree with the prison’s prohibition of urban fiction, arguing that the books glamorize an urban gangster lifestyle. Yet imprisoned fans of the genre—who cross racial lines—convey a powerful sense of identification with the characters’ experiences and describe the books as facilitating their own self-discovery. These readers identify mother/daughter relationships, sexuality, violence, addiction, possibilities for change, loyalty, and family responsibility as among the issues that urban fiction helps them to explore. Incarcerated women also value the books’ use of vernacular speech patterns, which help to “keep it real,” as well as the authors’ efforts to engage readers in written or online dialogue about their books and about readers’ own stories. In fact, many imprisoned women use urban fiction books as templates for crafting their own written narratives, which they circulate amongst themselves.

The prison permits books by African American authors such as Eric Jerome Dickey and Carl Weber, which—like urban fiction books—include sex, violence, and drugs. However, these books’ emphases on black middle class and professional life seem to secure their sanctioned place as African American uplift narratives.

Joan Bessman Taylor (University of Iowa)

Defining “discussibility”: Book groups and the elusive good book group book

Fundamental to the practices of book discussion groups is the selection of “good” books on which to focus their attention. But what makes a good book group book? The prevailing idea is that some books are better suited for fostering discussion than others. At the center of selecting books for discussion is this notion of “discussibility”. It pervades popular guides for book groups and the common discourse surrounding them as well as the published research on book group practices. Though it is “something intuitively appreciated by booksellers” (Rehberg Sedo 2004), it has not been explicitly defined beyond its being that quality that makes a book well-suited for discussion. This paper will examine “discussibility” as a primary selection criterion. It will unpack the attempts made thus far to qualify the nature of discussibility and will then turn to the groups in my own study to examine it in action. Based on five years of participant observation in six open-to-the-public book groups in the Midwestern United States, including a mystery group, a science fiction group, an African-American group, a contemporary and nonfiction group, a Great Books group, and a literary fiction group, groups composed of male and female members aged 25-90; the investigation will interrogate the idea that good books and good books for discussion are not necessarily the same.

Lyn Thomas (London Metropolitan University)

Reading and writing the hidden story of class: Annie Ernaux and her class-migrant readers

Drawing on my work on the reception of the controversial French writer, Annie Ernaux, I will discuss the function of her writing for readers who like Ernaux herself are self-declared class migrants. I will argue that Ernaux’s texts legitimate an experience whose complexities are rarely addressed in ‘mainstream’ culture. In these works, the linear structure and predominantly positive trajectory of the traditional ‘rags to riches’ narrative of the fairy-tale or Hollywood film are replaced by detailed dissection of the losses as well as gains inherent in the move from working-class culture of origin to middle-class milieu. The language and themes of Ernaux’s writing of class migration will be discussed, in preparation for an analysis of a small, anonymised selection of readers’ letters. The focus of this analysis will be on readers’ interactions with Ernaux’s texts in the framing of their own narratives.

There will be some discussion of the significance and quality of this reader-writer relationship in a cultural context where the stories which both are trying to tell are often effaced. How is the story of class migration told, read and re-told in a ‘classless’ society? How do ‘old media’ – books, letters – provide a space for sharing the secrets of class?

Molly Abel Travis (Tulane University, New Orleans)

Building a national culture of reading in the “new” South Africa

This paper will focus on the importance of creating a national culture of reading in the process of nation building and will take post-apartheid South Africa as an instructive case. In the wake of the dominance of white South African writers such as the Nobel laureates Nadine Gordimer and J.M. Coetzee, there have been efforts to rethink the curricula of school and university literature programs and to diversify the publishing industry to reflect the ideals of the new constitution. The curricular reforms have aimed at developing individuals who will build and sustain the re-imagined nation. Critics of this reform complain that it has created an insular, conservative, and homogeneous curriculum—a mirror inversion of apartheid’s Christian National Education. Despite a flurry of literacy campaigns, South Africa’s libraries remain seriously under-funded, with books not available in the eleven official languages, which means that it will be difficult to unite around a tradition of national literature. Patrons frequent rural libraries more for their affiliated programs than for books, journals, or newspapers. Many of these libraries are connected to rural garden projects and language classes. Librarians in the KwaZulu Natal province report that Zulu speakers seek instruction in English—despite the fact that the constitution recognizes the linguistic rights of all South Africans and national language policies recommend equal access to reading materials in the mother tongue(s). While libraries reinvent themselves as garden spots and language schools, the South African publishing industry has exploded. Not only are established publishers taking risks, but new publishers and imprints are bringing out unusual voices and genres. In considering the challenge of creating a national culture of reading in the new South Africa, one must take into account not only the centripetal and centrifugal forces mentioned above, but also the lure of global information technologies.

Tony Tremblay (St. Thomas University) and Ellen Rose (University of New Brunswick)

The function of the online little magazine in Canada: When reader becomes user

With the rise of e-books, zines, blogs, Wikipedia, hypertext, and visual mark-up, reading is increasingly practiced as a “light-through” activity, a digital handicraft that has positioned the reader, in media critic Marshall McLuhan’s terms, as a post-modern monastic in an open library of illuminated manuscripts. The importance of McLuhan’s typically colourful metaphor is in the changes it implies in the relationship between reader and text, for in illuminated environments where the text and its embellishments are the light source, the nature of that text changes, as does the role of the reader. In short, text now hails the reader as much as the reader hails the text.

This paper will explore the cultural and political dimensions of the new subject position of the reader within the specific context of Canada’s little magazines. Publications such as Canadian Literature, The Canadian Forum, Delta, and The Antigonish Review were founded decades ago with the subversive intent of democratizing access to literature, ideas, and publication. As modernist alternatives to the largely “established” conservative and Methodist publishing venues of early and mid-century, these small magazines (and the small presses that grew from them) were instrumental in creating what is now recognized as the new wave in Canadian writing in the 1950s. Editors and others involved in producing these small magazines broadly conceived of the reader in polemical terms: as marginal, political, independent, and disadvantaged either by class or geographic circumstance. The first half of this paper will examine how small-magazine editors historically envisioned and represented their readership.

This opening will serve as a prelude to exploring how current editors use new media in the same context, and to asking questions about how this new media extends or reverses historical practice; creates new subject positions relative to issues of access, technological know-how, and privacy; changes the nature and role of the relationship between editor/author and author/reader; and alters the nature of reading as the interface with and characteristics of text changes. What does it mean when the “reader” becomes “user”?

Jill Tyler (University of South Dakota)

“I like you because you like me, and we both like Nick Hornby”: An analysis of the use of public media texts in the performance of class and friendship in adult social networks

A complex intersection of interpersonal and mediated discourses are found in media clubs - small networks of individuals who gather regularly with the explicit purpose of interacting about and interpreting mediated texts, e.g., book clubs. Using the theoretical foundation of Gidden’s structuration theory, this project explores how these groups actively discuss the meaning of the text, and through these shared interpretive strategies, create social structures which serve broader materialistic and political ends. Using participant-observation and qualitative interviewing methods, and building on a tradition of social network research as well as ethnographic audience research, this study captures the naturally occurring performances of identity, friendship, and community that are present in media clubs. The critical discourse analysis focuses on how spontaneous conversation in the club (talk about the book) constitutes, reifies and sometimes even challenges a wider social order (social status, prestige and class).

Individuals in these clubs interact both with the messages of the friendship network and with the messages of the mediated texts. Illustrative of Gidden’s agency, when mediated texts are discussed, argued, negotiated, and interpreted with others, often involving an evaluative move, a social reality is constituted and reproduced (Gidden’s structure) which, in turn, informs and impacts meaning-making on personal and societal levels. These structures emerge in conversation through performances of identity, similarity, and relational connection; through argumentative discourses that model shared dispositions toward ideas and ideologies; and through ritualistic interactions that negotiate and direct meaningful character and action.

Olivier Vanhée (Ecole Normale Supérieure, Lyon, France)

Reading Harry Potter: a personal and collective experience

The wide success of Harry Potter in France testifies both to a process of literary commodification, and to the popularity of literary print culture, especially among children and teenagers. Beyond traditional worries about a decline in traditional literacy, it has accelerated the reconfiguration of the youth literature sector, towards a more “market-oriented” and multi-media approach. Harry Potter involves a subtle play between different chronologies and media: cultural events and marketing campaigns are organized according to a specific temporal logic, and there are complex interactions between the evolution and maturation of the characters, and the evolution of the readership, over several years. This paper will be an attempt to analyse the specificity and the diversity of this reading experience by teenagers and young adults in France. It will draw upon primary research conducted between October 2005 and December 2006, using two main methods. First, a textual analysis of media discourses show how this reading practice is represented, and what cultural meanings and uses are ascribed to it. The analysis of the “ancillary materials” surrounding Harry Potter (especially in the teenagers’ magazines) throws light on the “prefiguration” of the encounter with the novels. Second, biographical and focus group interviews with young readers (about 30 teenagers and young adults, aged from 17 to 22, from diverse social backgrounds, in Lyon and Paris) allow to understand their personal histories as Harry Potter readers. The different appropriations of Harry Potter involve analytical forms of exegesis and emotional attachment to the characters. This plurality of appropriations can be explained by some factors: the differences in the “cultural and media repertoires” of the readers; the embeddedness of Harry Potter both in the dynamics of family relations and history, and in the readers’ personal networks of friends. Thus, this research shows how the “reading careers” of these specific readers, their personal networks and experiences, their informal collective conversations, their uses of Internet, shape their relation with Harry Potter.

Ana Vogrincic (Ljubljana Graduate School of the Humanities, Slovenia / University of Southampton, UK)

Changed discourse on the image of books and reading

Based on the rough overview of the forty years of Le Monde, Le Parisien Libéré, The Times and The Sun between 1960 and 2000 on the one hand and Gerard Genette’s meticulous classification of what he refers to as ‘paratexts’ (Gerard Genette; Seuils (1987); translated as Paratexts, 1997) – those liminal devices and conventions (such as titles, forewords, epigraphs, publishers' jacket copy etc.), both within and outside the book, that form part of the complex mediation between book, author, publisher and reader – on the other, the paper will explore and reflect on the changes in the representation of the book, especially the novel, and reading in the above newspapers (and as well in other media to an extent). The changes will be regarded in terms of the changed importance of certain paratexts (privileging some and deemphasizing the others). The most important and obvious change in the media coverage of fiction in the chosen period seems to be the shift of the focus from the content to the author, a characteristic, materialized in a number of explicit and implicit ways. The changes will also be assessed by commenting on how they are evaluated in some of the many recently proliferated books about books and reading, among others John Sutherland’s How to read a novel, John Mullan’s How novels work and Gabriel Zaid’s So many books.

Val Williamson (Edge Hill University)

“Some of them was pretty chunky, or they seemed it when I was young”: The pleasures of reading remembered … or are they? Undergraduates recollect the process of developing reading preferences

The Media and Narrative Literacy Project began its pilot run in September 2005, with students of Media at Edge Hill University, Lancashire and students of Media and Cultural Studies at Liverpool John Moores University, and will run until 2010. The survey results from questions that arose during the 2001 conference at Reading University, Children’s Fantasy Fiction: Debates for the Twenty-first Century. The project is interested in discovering students’ previous experience of how narrative and genre work, tracing their experience of consuming fiction from childhood to adulthood, with the aim of assisting understanding of how narratives and genres produce pleasure and accrue and retain audiences. The Pilot Phase of the project was begun in 2005, with questionnaires to groups of students in all three undergraduate years, some interviews following questionnaire responses in 2006. A methodology paper was presented at the CLTR conference at Edge Hill University in June 2006 and in full form is accessible at http://medal.unn.ac.uk .

This paper will discuss data generated 2005-2007 on the childhood and teenage reading of undergraduates born circa 1987-8. This age group would have been too young when the The Children’s Reading Choices Survey was conducted among 10-14 year-olds at Nottingham University (1994-1995) and yet too old for the full childhood ‘Harry Potter’ phenomenon. The paper will seek to investigate what this data implies in considering the contemporary meanings and experiences of reading influencing the current generation of media and cultural studies students vocationally focused on the cultural industries (including publishing) for their career.

“My Mum and Dad have always encouraged me like, encouraged me – about books, like Enid Blyton like, the Secret Seven […] I used to read like before I went to bed; my Mum used to read to me, then when I was older I used to read to her when I was like learning to read. Then after a bit I just read to myself in bed. […] I remember if it was a big thick book being quite proud of it like, telling my Mum. Like the Roald Dahl books, I proper loved them; some of them was pretty chunky, or they seemed it when I was young.”

David Wright (The Open University)

Big Read, long tail: Literary taste and list-culture in a time of 'endless choice'

Sociological accounts of literary taste, from a Bourdieusian perspective have emphasised the ways in which the restricted nature of literary production depends upon forms of expert knowledge to manage notions of the literary. Professionals and producers within this restricted field wield particular forms of power in the definition of good and bad literary taste. For Bourdieu agents are distributed across the field of literary production according to their particular orientation to financial or symbolic profits. Whilst such divisions are complex and contested, the ‘reading public’ is largely left out of deliberations over good and bad literature. This paper argues that aspects of contemporary literary production and consumption require a re-working of this role of taste-makers. The rise of television reading events such as Oprah’s Book Club and the BBC’s The Big Read encourage reader participation and engagement with the literary in ways which, rhetorically at least, challenge notions of hierarchy in classifying literary output. The rise of ‘mass niches’ enabled, for example, by Amazon’s expanded catalogue, and the ability of readers and producers to exchange forms of literary value amongst themselves through data-mining and collaborative filtering techniques potentially side-steps ‘traditional’ literary expertise. This paper considers the increasing prominence of the managed voice of the reading audience in developing theoretical accounts of literary value.

For any changes of paper name/presenter details, please email Anouk Lang at a.e.lang@bham.ac.uk.