Reading Bodies and Textual Materialities
Résumé
Using examples from colonial America to contemporary US literature while zooming in on the nineteenth century, this chapter asks what we might learn from paying attention to the body as the site where reading takes place, in contrast to a long-standing critical tradition that conceives of reading exclusively as an act of the mind. Emphasizing the bodily economies of reading reveals first the longer history of tactile reading and facilitates the emergence of alternative timelines by shifting the focus on readerly communities largely occluded from more canonical histories of literature and of reading. Second, attending to the reading body helps redescribe reading as a sensory experience, pushing back against a dominant conception of reading as an intellectual performance. Third, accenting the somatics of reading foregrounds the materiality of the literary text and valorizes hapticality as the meeting ground of writerly practice and readerly hermeneutics.