"Take heed what you read!" Sojourner Truth warned her audience; and Frederick Douglass described the mixed blessing that reading was for him-helping him to attain his freedom, but also heightening his sense of enslavement. Together, these writers signal a strong American awareness of the promises and dangers of reading. While it's often clear that we are, culturally speaking, what we read, it's not always clear how the process of digestion works. A central aim of this course is to give an account of the reciprocal relations between reading, consciousness and action for a wide range of American writers. We will make sense of the ways in which reading is shaped by our social and cultural locations, even as we, through a variety of largely unconscious strategies, use texts to transform ourselves and the world. (We might escape into the world of a romance novel, or find reading to be "a drug," as did Richard Wright. Or we might intentionally read "against the grain" of a book's ostensible purpose.) Beginning with theoretical accounts of reading (psychoanalytic, marxist, poststructuralist), we will trace how a range of American writers forged their literary identities from the books they read and misread. We will then complicate these autobiographical accounts by reading works of "pulp fiction" and by studying how critics, cultural historians, and sociologists have thought about popular reading practices (Harlequin romance, detective fiction, science fiction). We will be especially interested to discover how readers use textual encounters to cross boundaries of race or ethnicity, gender, class and sexual orientation. Finally, we will consider some implications of the new computer technologies for readers and critics: does hypertext give rise to hyperreading? Authors may include Harold Bloom, Roland Barthes, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Richard Rodrigues, Mark Twain, Hermann Melville, Alice Walker, Nicolson Baker, Gertrude Stein.
Major Seminar. Permission of English Department chair required: see information above. Enrollment limited to 15. (Criticism or Post-1900)