The Discourse of Reading Groups

Integrating Cognitive and Sociocultural Perspectives

David Peplow,Joan Swann,Paola Trimarco,Sara Whiteley

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317914082
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Didattica
• Categoria: Curricula nella didattica

Of interest in their own terms as a significant cultural practice, reading groups also provide a window on the everyday interpretation of literary texts. While reading is often considered a solitary process, reading groups constitute a form of social reading, where interpretations are produced and displayed in discourse. The Discourse of Reading Groups is a study of such joint conceptual activity, and how this is necessarily embedded in interpersonal activity and the production of reader identities. Uniquely in this context it draws on, and seeks to integrate, ideas from both cognitive and social linguistics.

The book will be of interest to scholars in literacy studies as well as cultural and literary studies, the history of reading, applied linguistics and sociolinguistics, digital technologies and educational research.

1 Introduction

Reading Groups and the Study of Literary Reading

1.0 Introduction

Reading, and particularly literary reading, is often thought of as an individual activity: a lone reader engaging with a text. The reader is usually silent. In literary reading they may immerse themselves in the narrative—there is a sense in which such reading takes the individual away from the present, into another world. In this book, however, our focus is rather different. Our interest is in contemporary reading groups (or book clubs or reading clubs—the terms are used interchangeably)—people who come together to talk about a book. Reading is, here, more evidently a joint, collaborative activity, in which people share interpretations and create new ones within their interaction. Reading is anything but silent. And readers’ engagement in particular ‘text-worlds’ is, in various ways, embedded in the here and now of their particular reading context.

The research on which the book is based focuses, in the main, on reading groups as an informal reading practice that has become common particularly in Anglophone contexts: where groups of readers meet regularly, often in members’ houses but also in more public spaces (libraries, bookshops, cafes), on the fringes of institutions (schools, workplaces) and increasingly online. Readers engage mainly with literary texts, broadly defined: these include novels, and occasionally short stories and poetry, by both canonical and contemporary authors. Our own groups’ reading includes texts such as The Pearl by John Steinbeck (1947), Nabokov’s Collected Stories (1965), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005), Simon Armitage’s poem ‘An Accommodation’ (2010), Flight Behaviour by Barbara Kingsolver (2012), Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building (2004), and Retribution by Jillian Hoffman (2003).

As we discuss below, reading activity, particularly in face-to-face groups, combines literary discussion with other topics such as readers’ personal experiences, beliefs and values. In their literary discussion readers often draw on personal experience to identify with characters and events in the book. While reading group texts include those that may be studied by academics, this conflation of the literary and the personal in the reading of texts would be regarded as inappropriate within academic contexts (in literary seminars, etc.) and indeed such reading practices may invite disparagement. The former editor of The Bookseller, Nicholas Clee, has argued that a novel’s worth should not be determined by its ability to encourage reader empathy or the relevance of its themes. He comments,

With the promotion of reading for shared enjoyment and uplift … comes a coarsening of literary discourse.

(Clee 2005)

Views differ, however, even amongst literary scholars—John Sutherland sees reading groups more positively as ‘reclaiming the right to read from pointy-headed academics’ (cited in Charlotte Higgins, ‘Why the book club is more than a fad’, The Guardian, February 2005). We return later to the relationship between academic and more ‘popular’ forms of reading.

Reading groups are of interest to academics in part because of their ubiquity and cultural salience. In her influential book Book Groups: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life, Elizabeth Long (2003) notes that in the US there has been an ‘explosive growth’ in reading group membership since the 1980s (p. 19), and Jenny Hartley (2002), in The Reading Groups Book, comments similarly on an increase in the popularity of groups in Britain. Hartley notes that reading groups are now ‘hard to avoid’ (p. xi). Popular sources support this perception, for instance in 2005 Charlotte Higgins, in her article in The Guardian, claimed that reading group meetings are ‘happening every day in homes, pubs, libraries and workplaces up and down the country […] the book club is now a near-ubiquitous feature of bourgeois life. If you are not in one, you will know someone who is’. Further evidence of the popularity of reading groups comes from their targeting by publishers and the media: the publication of novels with questions for reading groups; publishers’ guidance for reading groups—for example Penguin Book Group Notes,¹ magazines such as newbooks² and online sites such as bookgroup.info.³ Such evidence is necessarily indirect, and actual figures for the number of reading groups are harder to come by. Hartley estimated the number in Britain at up to 50,000 in 2002, but this may be an underestimate because so many groups are informal and unregistered, and so below the radar.

The rise in popularity of reading groups has no doubt been helped by the media attention they receive and by the support of agencies such as, in the UK, The Reading Agency,⁴ The Reader Organisation⁵ and local libraries. Television, newspapers and radio have also appropriated the reading group format. In the US, Oprah Winfrey’s Oprah’s Book Club ran successfully for fifteen years, finishing in 2011 and now running online. In the UK, the Richard & Judy Book Club has run since 2004 and, like Oprah’s Book Club, encourages the public discussion of literary texts. Chanel 4’s TV Book Club and BBC Radio 4’s Bookclub have also proved popular in UK broadcast media while in UK print media, many of the broadsheet newspapers run successful book clubs. Such media initiatives show some differences from the reading groups we focus on in this book. Radio and TV groups, for instance, tend to be hosted by a celebrity with a studio audience and often with the author present. However, these groups contribute to the public profile of shared reading and discussion: the wealth of media attention that book groups receive in the US and the UK reflects a sense shared by many that literary reading ‘naturally’ leads to discussion and that books (good and bad) are worth talking about.

1.1 Academic Interest in Reading Groups and Everyday Literary Reading

As our title suggests, the focus of the present book is on the discourse of reading groups: the talk produced during reading group interaction and how that talk constructs and reflects the social contexts of its production. We see this as academically interesting for a number of reasons:

• As a discussion about a particular text, reading group discourse provides insights into readers’ interpretative activity.
• Reading groups illustrate the role of literary reading in the performance of individual and group relationships, stances and identities.
• As a location of everyday/popular debate, reading group discourse provides insights into the nature of informal argumentation: how ideas are developed sequentially and over time, and their embedding in interpersonal activity.
• Reading group discourse has something in common with institutional discourse (as a form of organised talk centred on a shared object) and so contributes to our understanding of institutional discourse.
• As a form of interaction that takes place in various settings, both face-to-face and online, reading group discourse enables the consideration of the workings of diverse interpretative communities.

We return to these issues in the chapters that follow. First, however, we should note that our own research on reading group discourse has been informed by developments in several related academic fields, and we consider these briefly below. We distinguish three broad areas: literary studies, and studies of historical and contemporary reading practices. These areas have seen increasing attention paid, in recent years, to reading groups as an instance of everyday literary reading. We outline these developments and how they have influenced our own adoption of a discursive approach to literary reading. In building on this earlier work we also seek to combine two orientations to the analysis of reading group discourse, cognitive and sociocultural, that have until recently been seen as incompatible.

1.1.1 Literary Studies: Towards Real Readers and Reading

Recent interest in reading groups within literary studies is reflective of a much longer shift in the literary criticism of the last 70 years, which has seen a general movement away from a focus on the author as meaning-maker, or as the text as meaning-container, and towards recognising the reader as the producer of meaning (e.g. Barthes 1977). This emphasis on the readerly aspect of literary communication became apparent in the ‘reader-response’ criticism and ‘reception theory’ that emerged in the US and Europe between 1960 and 1980, for instance in the work of Culler (1975), Fish (1980) and Iser (1978). These theorists sought to produce readings of literary texts that emphasised the way a text was engaged with by a reader, although the ‘reader’ remained a largely theoretical construct. Fish (1980) argued that textual meaning is entirely constrained by ‘interpretative communities’ of readers rather than by the text itself, but his notion of an ‘interpretative community’ also remained theoretically rather than practically drawn. Reader-response critics were interested in using new theoretical ideas about readers to invigorate methods of literary and textual analysis, and this shift in focus is still visible in literary studies today, particularly in the fields of literary linguistics or stylistics, and the empirical study of literature.

Literary linguistics, henceforth ‘stylistics’, differs from reader response criticism in its interdisciplinary focus, because it uses theories and concepts from linguistics and rhetoric to study the language of literary texts. Stylistics is founded on the principle that ‘the primary interpretative procedures used in the reading of a literary text [are] linguistic procedures’ (Carter 1982: 4) and, therefore, that the close linguistic analysis of a literary text can help to explain how it creates particular meanings and effects when it is read. Since the 1980s, the ‘cognitive turn’ in linguistics has led to new insights about the relationship between human language and the human mind, and in the 1990s the sub-discipline of cognitive stylistics emerged, which places even greater emphasis on describing the interpretations and experiences of readers. Cognitive stylistics (also known as cognitive poetics) is an approach to literary study that combines close linguistic textual analysis with an account of readers’ mental engagement with texts, based on what is known about the mind in cognitive linguistics and related cognitive sciences.

Despite its increasing emphasis on readers and reading, work in stylistics and cognitive stylistics often draws upon a theoretical ‘reader’ construct very similar to that found in reader response criticism and reception theory (see discussion in Allington and Swann 2009; Miall 2005, 2006; Steen and Gavins 2003; Stockwell 2005). In the past fifteen years, however, it has become increasingly common for cognitive stylisticans to conduct some form of ‘extra-textual research’ (Swann and Allington 2009) into the responses of real readers, ranging from informal and anecdotal studies of readers’ views through to formal qualitative and quantitative empirical studies. Popular empirical methods include think-aloud studies and the collection of written protocols (e.g. Alderson and Short 1989; Jeffries 2002; Short and van Peer 1989; Short et al. 2011) and the use of questionnaires (e.g. Bray 2007; Burke 2011; Gibbons 2012). These data collection methods are strongly influenced by developments in the empirical study of literature, another area of literary study that emerged from the aftermath of reader-response criticism and reception theory.

The empirical study of literature explicitly rejects a theoretical ‘reader’ construct, analysing instead the responses of real readers. The tradition arose in the mid-1970s from the combined influence of reader response criticism, the psychology of reading and empirical aesthetics in the cognitive sciences (Schram and Steen 2001: 3). Research is based on ‘testable theories’ with the aim of producing ‘valid and reliable knowledge’ in accordance with scientific principles (Schram and Steen 2001: 2; van Peer et al. 2007). Studies examine the potential effects that particular textual features have on readers, testing and establishing claims made in other areas of literary study, including stylistics. Examples include Fialho (2007), Miall and Kuiken (1994, 2001, 2002) and van Peer’s (1986) work on foregrounding in readers’ experience of poetry, Sotirova’s (2006) testing of readers’ responses to passages of free indirect discourse in Sons and Lovers and van Peer and Pander Maat’s (2001) examination of the influence of narrative perspective on readers’ responses to characters. Despite its focus on the responses of real readers, however, the methods of empirical literary study do not examine instances of real reading. Studies often have low ecological validity because they involve manipulation of texts and reading contexts to control potentially extraneous variables and enable the precise measurement of operationalized features of reading. Hall (2008: 31) argues that as a result these studies, often inhabit a ‘frustratingly parallel research universe’ that is unable to answer central questions about the nature of literary reading in the world beyond the laboratory.

Swann and Allington (2009) distinguish what they term ‘experimental’ studies associated with the empirical study of literature and more ‘naturalistic’ studies that offer greater ecological validity. These latter seek to investigate contextualised reading practices, involving readers engaged in habitual reading environments and behaviours who have read whole texts and are able to interact freely with others (see Table 1.1). Reading group discourse is seen to be of value as a prime example of such naturalistic evidence of reading.

Stockwell (2002: 11; 2005: 144) presents cognitive stylistics as a way for literary study to become more connected to the interests and experiences of ‘natural readers’ beyond the academy, and naturalistic data are increasingly recognised as necessary in the pursuit of this aim. It has become more common for cognitive stylisticians to use data from online and face-to-f...

Indice dei contenuti

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction: Reading Groups and the Study of Literary Reading
• 2 Social Reading and the Cognitive Stylistics of Literary Texts
• 3 Mimetic Reading and Reader Identities
• 4 Co-Reading and the Contextualisation of Response
• 5 Reading Groups and Institutional Discourse
• 6 Reading Online
• 7 Conclusion: Developing an Integrated Analysis of Reading Group Discourse
• Appendix: A Note on the Representation of Reading Group Discourse
• Index