Reception Theory 2006: The
Uses of
Chair: Cecilia Konchar Farr
English and Women’s
Studies
Jumping off from Elizabeth Long’s recent work on women’s book clubs, this panel invites contributions about how readers outside the Academy employ literature in their everyday lives.
Brandy Foster,
The upcoming publication of Joan Klingel Ray’s Jane Austen for Dummies is yet another
testament to Jane Austen’s enduring appeal to the masses, as well as the way in
which Austen’s name has been appropriated to sell books. Treatments of the author, her novels, and her
readers have been explored in popular fiction from Sally Smith O’Rourke’s The
Man Who Loved Jane Austen to Paula Marantz
Cohen’s modern adaptations of Austen’s novels to Karen Joy Fowler’s The Jane
Austen Book Club. This phenomenon of
Austen spin-offs has created a global reading community devoted to anything
Austen that encompasses both scholars and non-academic readers. This presentation will explore the escapist’s
fascination for Austen’s adult fairytales and the way in which the twenty-first
century reader claims ownership over Austen and her characters. Whereas scholars study Austen and her works
from a critical distance, others seek to claim ownership through the numerous
books that offer sequels or expand Austen’s novels, such as Pamela Aidan’s Darcy
series, or the novels that create a love story for Austen herself. The desire to commodify
Jane Austen has created a multi-million dollar industry based on her name and
supported by women who believe that they too will meet their Mr. Darcy.
Michelle Taylor,
Mtaylor118@aol.com
This paper examines the chick-lit
phenomenon, 19th c. African American women's writing and contemporary African
American women's writing. The chick-lit genre that began with Bridget Jones'
Diary has spawned a great number of sub-genres, including African American
chick-lit or "sistah-lit." While the genre
of "sistah-lit" may initially seem to be
pure entertainment, I argue that these texts are actually also neo-uplift
novels that have their roots in 19th c. black women's uplift novels.
More
specifically, I argue that in the same way that Jane Eyre serves as a
literary antecedent for mainstream chick-lit, Pauline Hopkins's Contending
Forces serves as a literary antecedent for "sistah-lit."
The focus on affirmative female friendships, the articulation of political
desire, as well as the desire for the material and professional markers of
success structure
Mike Chasar,
This
paper will explore how the creative reading practices exercised by motorists
encountering the old Burma-Shave roadside billboard poems came to interfere
with the commercial messages on them and actually contributed to the company’s
demise. From 1925 to 1963, American
highways were the sites of particular literary pleasure for motorists driving
through the nearly ubiquitous Burma-Shave rhymes; at the height of the
campaign, over 7,000 sets of the serialized signs using 600 individual poems were
being maintained in 44 states where they were seen and read by millions. It is
entirely possible that through the 1920s, the Depression, World War II and the
1950s, the Burma-Shave billboard poems were the most public and widely read
verse in
It’s usually assumed that, in a steel cage match, capitalist market forces will corrupt the integrity of artistic production every time—a suspicion reflected in the strongly anti-market stance adopted by many of the twentieth century’s poetic movements which sought positions on the margins of the consumer economy so as to avoid the potential of “selling out” to, or being exploited by, the market. The reading and reception histories of Burma-Shave, however, offer a very significant and popular example to the contrary: a campaign in which the forces of writing, group reading, speed reading, textual materiality and interpretive play within commercial contexts served to reverse or corrupt the market’s intentions and actually contributed to the company’s downfall.
Melanie Brown,
After nearly a decade of national advertising and phenomenal
sales, publisher E. Haldeman-Julius claimed to have
in his files the names and addresses of 500,000 Little Blue Book
customers. Readers bought the
books—volumes that measured 3 ½ x 5 inches, featured newsprint stapled between
blue paperboard covers, and cost a nickel apiece—through the mail, at
drugstores, and in Little Blue Book Shop franchises across the
In the twenty-first century, they emerge from dusty attics, high closet shelves, and forgotten shoeboxes to engage new readers browsing at used bookstores, estate sales, antique stores, and on the Internet. eBay has proven especially conducive to the formation and growth of new Little Blue Book reading communities, encouraging correspondence between buyers and sellers to discuss the traces left by original owners. The most vibrant of the virtual reading communities formed in January 2004, when six regular Little Blue Book buyers on eBay contacted one another via email and formed the Haldeman-Julius Collectors Club. This paper will explore Little Blue Book readers old and new, their book ownership practices, and how their experiences of the series emerged in their everyday lives.