This chapter illuminates how camp conceives reading in affective terms. Camp diminishes the intensity of strong affects, such as shame, anxiety, and rage, to make room for relief, laughter, and even sexual interest. In this way, camp protects queer eroticism from being snuffed out by a wide range of phobic discourses. While scholars often oppose camp to sexual desire, I trace different orientations to eroticism that arise in in lesbian, queer of color, and trans camp. As examples, I turn to three camp touchstones, Djuna Barnes’s Ladies Almanack (1928), Tommy Pico’s Junk (2018), and Torrey Peters’ “CisWorld (2019), which each seduce readers into scenes of pleasure. For these writers, campiness does not deflate queer and trans desires but makes them narratable and available for readers. In doing so, these texts demonstrate how camp dreams of a queerer social order, and it shields these fantasies from the suffocating forces of white supremacy and cis-heteronormativity. Making affective scenes for queer fantasy, I conclude, is a powerful if still under-appreciated force of camp’s poetics and politics.

Chapter 36 reflects on the ways in which Goethe’s meaning and value have evolved. Analysis of Goethe’s legacy and reception demands that we attend to the historical situation of the readers too, and that we remain alert to the role of politics in shaping responses to and uses of his work. The chapter considers Goethe’s afterlife in a variety of contexts, from his prominence in German secondary education between 1871 and 1914 to the mixed feelings of German-Jewish readers in the 1930s. It also analyses Goethe’s own interventions in his reception.

In this chapter, we discuss the way people read, remember and understand discourse, depending on the type of relations that link discourse segments together. We also illustrate the role of connectives and other discourse signals as elements guiding readers’ interpretation. Throughout the chapter, we review empirical evidence from experiments that involve various methodologies such as offline comprehension tasks, self-paced reading, eye-tracking and event related potentials. One of the major findings is that not all relations are processed and remembered in the same way. It seems that causal relations play a special role for creating coherence in discourse, as they are processed more quickly and remembered better. Conversely, because they are highly expected, causal relations benefit less from the presence of connectives compared to discontinuous relations like concession and confirmation. Finally, research shows that in their native language, speakers are able to take advantage of all sorts of connectives for discourse processing, even those restricted to the written mode, and those that are ambiguous.

In Chapter 5, I follow this lead further and demonstrate that one of the most prominent sites where this new aesthetic regime and its colonial history was articulated most forcefully was the nineteenth-century French novel. Discussing Jacques Rancière’s influential work on novels by Balzac and Flaubert and his suggestion of the new idea of literature emerging through the “democratic petrification” of writing, this chapter shows how the context of such a development in France was historically much wider than developments within its national borders. Instead of thinking the historicity of literature through Europe alone, this chapter shows how the literary sovereign shaped the central ideas of textualization and readability through colonial documents, translations, textual representation of the orient, and so on. This textual history is then embedded within larger registers of visuality in contemporary French cultures that extended the colonial paradigm further.

In Chapter 1, I explore in detail – through official and personal papers, published translations, letters exchanged between colonial officials, prefaces and commentaries, and so on – how the Company officials, in close collaboration with their local pandits and munshis, produced a tradition of what I call ethnographic recension that anchored an ethnographic world within the very space of a legal or literary text. Coming between the Renaissance humanists such as Politian, Desiderius Erasmus, and Joseph Scaliger on the one hand and nineteenth-century textual scholars such as Karl Lachmann on the other, these colonial administrators introduced a new model of textual authority by combining philology and ethnology that was the first move to mark the newness of colonial knowledge. This ethnographic world was seen as a guarantor of textual authenticity, but its very inclusion set off the dual career of the literary sovereign – its role in defining what is literary, and its participation in political sovereignty.

provides background material on the nature of human language and how it differs from animal communication, as well as a brief history of reading and how it differs from oral language. The chapter also reviews the methods that are being used to study the mental processes that support reading, including various behavioral tasks (e.g., lexical decision), eye tracking, and brain imaging. The chapter also reviews two influential computer models of reading that have been adapted to Chinese: the Interactive-Activation model of word identification, and the E-Z Reader model of eye-movement control in reading. The chapter closes with previews of the remaining chapters.

Focusing on contemporary life writing of chronic pain, specifically lyric essays, this chapter explores the language of pain, refuting its untranslatability, and suggesting that creative forms and experimental expression are helping to develop language to meet experience. Recent illness narratives are building a common language with which to articulate their physical sensations, with Eula Biss’s ‘The Pain Scale’ (2005) encouraging a community of pain expression, and becoming a generative intertext. While pain sufferers reclaim their experiences, they are also reclaiming and renewing diagnostic vocabulary, for example through ‘subterfuge‘, which requires readers to better engage in attentive listening, with an ethical obligation not to overlook or mishear marginalized voices. Alongside Biss, this chapter explores the work of Amy Berkowitz, Molly McCully Brown, Anne Boyer, Sinéad Gleeson, Sonya Huber, and Lisa Olstein.

In the 1980s, a theoretical turn in African American literary criticism helped institutionalize the study of African American literature by insisting on its formal complexity and distinctiveness. The racial text could no longer be read as reducible to its social context. In that same decade, a materialist line of inquiry sought to reconcile formal and contextual analysis by examining the ways black-authored books were published by major companies and received by the critical establishment. Drawing on methods from book history and print culture studies, a sociology of African American literature developed as the academic field of study took shape around canon-building projects. Two approaches to African American literary sociology emerged out of the 1990s: skepticism about the book’s capacity to represent racial experience, and optimism about the commercial success of diverse authors. Over time, these approaches merged into general studies of the racial text’s shifting status in the literary marketplace. With that expanded focus, the sociology of African American literature today sheds light on the way culture and commerce intersect in the making, selling, and reading of black-authored books.

Chapter 13 addresses the sub-skills needed for successful second language literacy development. The relationship between literacy development and other second language skills, like vocabulary acquisition, are also presented. Learners’ prior experience with first language literacy skills is another factor for teachers to consider as they structure literacy-oriented goals and activities for their courses.

Chapter 2 focuses on how and why target language input is important for language learners. Authors discuss several different types of input and how it has been found to contribute to second language development. Research-backed approaches for integrating more target language into classrooms of all languages, levels, and ages are presented for teachers to implement in their lessons.

Chapter 2 looks at Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu in the context of the Belle Époque as an age characterised by the disintegration of existing hierarchies, norms, and conventions. I start out by considering the novel’s long-lost earliest drafts, Les Soixante-quinze feuillets, to then focus on close readings of a series of encounters between Marcel, Charlus, Albertine, and Andrée. Tact, Proust’s novel suggests, can be interpreted as an egalitarian force, indicating an equilibrium between the people involved. At the same time, it can also be seen as a creator of power imbalance, and a marker of social distinction. This conflict gives rise to a number of questions: Is tact a moral or an amoral category? Where do we draw the line between tact, hypocrisy, and lying? How do we deal with the uncertainty of interpretation as it begins to turn into one of the narrator’s most tantalizing concerns? Drawing on a variety of different theorists of tact (incl. Kant, Schopenhauer, Simmel, Sartre, Gadamer, Hall, Bourdieu, Goffman, Luhmann), I describe Proust’s tact as a paradoxical category that oscillates between autonomy and control, classification and declassification.

This chapter pitches Arnold’s theory of how we should read against his reading practice. It uncovers how secular the practice of literary criticism really is. Arnold’s legacy, the idea of reading as moral formation, will remain confused as long as we neglect practice in favour of theory. Beginning with an overview of Arnold’s approach to reading the Bible in Literature and Dogma (1873), I explore how Arnold’s biblical hermeneutics works in practice, arguing that his preparation of a version of Isaiah for schoolchildren replaces established typological practice with a new method which he calls ‘employing parallels’. It is the genre and apparatus of the Bible ‘version’ which registers and enables his radical position. In Arnold’s method, the intellectus spiritualis is replaced by a secular method of imaginative engagement which has far-reaching consequences for how the reader finds themselves positioned: as a result, a secular intellectus culturae or cultural ‘tact’ comes to replace the traditional method of reading scripture. Throughout I am concerned with reading as a practice which is constitutive of concepts including faith and doubt.

The final chapter turns its attention to considering how fantastic forms facilitate productive exchanges between creators and audiences. It contends that fantasies are made both in communities and for communities – sometimes as gifts, sometimes as challenges, but always with the idea of adding something new to a shared commons that can in its turn be taken up, valued and built upon. The chapter begins by discussing the importance of craft and exchange in Fantasy culture, considering how Fantasy diverges from conflictual models of influence articulated by critics like Harold Bloom and exploring how fantasies such as Jo Walton’s Among Others and Michael Ende’s The Neverending Story express a deep faith in the power of readers and reading. It then explores fan-cultural exchanges, touching on Critical Role, Archive of Our Own, A Very Potter Musical and the practice of modding video games. Finally, the chapter turns to questions of inclusion, discussing works by Patricia A. McKillip and Ursula K. Le Guin, the representation of race in genre fiction, and the changing ways that contemporary communities play Dungeons & Dragons.

Until the 1990s, comic books rarely served anything other than a deeply conflicted, even paradoxical role in American public libraries. With rare exceptions, comic books as actual objects did not exist in libraries, but as emblems, comics appeared repeatedly in the professional and public conversations in which librarians participated. To librarians of the mid-century, comic books served the important role of symbolizing everything that libraries opposed, thereby reinforcing librarians’ sense of their own professional identity. Comics represented first and foremost an ephemeral and inferior product of junk culture that took up the finite amount of time and attention that children were imagined to have to spend on reading, meaning that librarians saw them as something that interfered with real reading of legitimate books. Further, comics represented a threat to the authority of children’s librarians, who had crafted a professional identity based on their knowledge of good literature for children. Because comics were imagined to interfere with children’s interest in such literature and because children could access comics without librarian expertise, librarians saw comics as a significant threat. However, comics themselves presented a much more complicated vision of literature, literacy, and even public libraries.