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Acquiring Minds: Commodified Knowledge and the Positioning of the Reader in McClure's Magazine, 1893–1903
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
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In a 1900 Atlantic Monthly article, Samuel McChord Crothers mourns the decline of the leisured or, as he puts it, “gentle” reader who enjoys narrative digressions, does not mind occasional dullness, and prefers the personal tone of old-style narrators to the objectivity of the modern “expert.” This reader has given way, Crothers argues, to one obsessed with practicality and impatient with charming irrelevancies, one who parcels out his reading time carefully, going to short stories (rather than lengthier offerings) for “a literary ‘quick lunch.’” Though he acknowledges that “the habit of resorting to the printed page for information is an excellent one,” Crothers admits that it nevertheless violates his ideal terms of readerly engagement. The new-style reader, he laments, “wants something and knows where to get it. Knowledge is a commodity done up in a neat parcel” (655). Crothers's remarks suggest a troubling opposition – the pure realm of literature-as-enjoyment that supposedly used to exist outside of, or above, the marketplace versus the newly ascendant and tainted world of goods, advertisements, and department stores in which knowledge is packaged and sold to a hurried, grasping public. While other highbrow commentators of the era expressed a general concern regarding the decline of intellectualism among American readers, Crothers betrays more specific anxieties about what constitutes an appropriate means of absorbing (and disseminating) knowledge; he fears the intrusion of market values and forms – particularly the value of practicality and the form of the commodity – into the world of ideas.
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