Bodies and Books
Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America
- 240 pages
- English
- PDF
- Available on iOS & Android
Bodies and Books
Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America
About This Book
In nineteenth-century America, Gillian Silverman contends, readingâand particularly book readingâprecipitated intense fantasies of communion. In handling a book, the reader imagined touching and being touched by the people affiliated with that book's narrative worldâan author, a character, a fellow reader. This experience often led to a sense of consubstantiality, a fantasy that the reader, the material book, and the imagined other were momentarily merged. Such a fantasy challenges psychological conceptions of discrete subjectivity along with the very notion of corporeal integrityâthe idea that we are detached, skin-bound, and autonomously functioning entities. It forces us to envision readers not as liberal subjects, pursuing reading as a means toward privacy, interiority, and individuation, but rather as communal beings inseparable from objects in our psychic and phenomenal world.While theorists have long emphasized the way reading can promote a sense of abstract belonging, Bodies and Books emphasizes the intense somatic bonds that nineteenth-century subjects experienced while reading. Silverman bridges the gap between the cognitive and material effects of reading, arguing that the two worked in tandem, enabling readers to feel deep communion with objects (both human and nonhuman) in the external world. Drawing on the letters and diaries of nineteenth-century readers along with literary works by Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Susan Warner, and others, Silverman explores the book as a technology of intimacy and ponders what nineteenth-century readers might be able to teach us two centuries later.
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Contents
- Preface: Reading and the Search for Oneness
- Introduction: The Fantasy of Communion
- Chapter 1 Railroad Reading, Wayward Reading
- Chapter 2 Books and the Dead
- Chapter 3 Textual Sentimentalism: Incest and the Author-Reader Bond in Melvilleâs Pierre
- Chapter 4 Outside the Circle: Embodied Communion in Frederick Douglassâs 1845 Narrative
- Chapter 5 âThe Polishing Attritionâ: Reading, Writing, and Renunciation in the Work of Susan Warner
- Epilogue: No End in Sight
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Acknowledgments