Daniel Allington

Reading groups and the language of literary texts: a case study in social reading

This article analyses discourse arising in reading group discussions as an instance of a real-world literary reading practice; it arises from and reports on the AHRC-funded Discourse of Reading Groups project. This naturalistic, observational approach to literary reading is contrasted with experimental approaches. Excerpts from the total dataset in which the language of literary texts is discussed are here subjected to two forms of analysis: software-assisted qualitative analysis suggests that where participants appear to make reference to their subjective responses to texts, this often has the function of presenting evaluations of those texts in mitigated form; interactional sociolinguistic analysis shows the sequential emergence of ‘language’ as a discussion topic, how discussion of language is co-constructed between participants and how such literary activity is culturally, interactionally and interpersonally contingent. ‘Face’ emerges as a key explanatory concept in both analyses.

Researching literary reading as social practice

This article first discusses ‘the reader’ as generally conceived within literary studies (including stylistics), grounding its claims with an empirical analysis of articles published in Language and Literature from 2004 to 2008. It then surveys the many ways in which real readers have been empirically investigated within cultural studies, the history of reading, and cultural sociology. Lastly, it introduces the remaining papers in this special issue as contributions to the study of language and literature.

“How Come Most People Don't See It?”: Slashing the Lord of the Rings

The now well-established fan tradition of “slash fiction” locates homoerotic undercurrents beneath the surface of popular films, television serials, and books, from Star Trek to Pride and Prejudice. The encoding/decoding model of media production and reception has recently been used to explain how enthusiasts of slash fiction are able to discern subtexts invisible to the majority of readers and viewers, with those enthusiasts’ discussions of texts being cited as evidence; here, it is argued that this mis-characterises complex rhetorical manoeuvres as transparent reports on private comprehension processes. A sample of online fan discourse regarding one particular homoerotic pairing is analysed, it being proposed that reception study as a whole must re-conceptualise the data upon which it most heavily relies; namely, spoken or written reports of encounters with texts. This forms part of an ongoing project employing discursive psychology and the study of argumentation to investigate reading and textual culture.

‘It actually painted a picture of the village and the sea and the bottom of the sea’: Reading groups, cultural legitimacy, and description in narrative (with particular reference to John Steinbeck’s The Pearl)

This article proposes a form of research that integrates reader study with textual analysis. Its purpose is to investigate the social production of literary value, potentially providing cultural sociology with a systematic means by which to study the formal features of texts in relation to their social significance: a means arguably required by (but not necessarily supplied in) the work of Pierre Bourdieu. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of reading group (or ‘book club’) discussions reveals an association between descriptive writing, cultural legitimacy, and a focus on the form, rather than the content, of fictional texts. In order to understand this association, the analysis then turns to two paragraphs from John Steinbeck’s The Pearl (2000 [1946]), which had been read by most of the groups involved and which many group members had referred to as involving ‘description’. It is argued that a long-standing tradition of association between descriptive writing and visual art has served as a resource both for consumers and for producers in distinguishing literature from popular fiction.

Distinction, intentions, and the consumption of fiction: Negotiating cultural legitimacy in a gay reading group

The relationship between the ‘legitimate’ (or highbrow) and the ‘popular’ (or lowbrow) in cultural consumption has been extensively researched and debated in relation to Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘distinction’ and ‘cultural capital’ and Richard Peterson’s concept of ‘omnivorousness’. This paper contributes to that sociological tradition by carrying out qualitative discourse analysis of a gay reading group’s verbal responses to Joe Keenan’s comic novel, My Lucky Star (2006) — a strategy that is acknowledged to be controversial, given the discourse analytic critique of sociology. It is found that members of the reading group studied here exhibit aspects of distinction and omnivorous openness in their arguments over the novel’s merits (or lack thereof), and that perceptions of authorial intention — in particular, Keenan’s non-intention to write a ‘serious’ book — are deeply implicated in this evaluative discourse. Evidence is found not only for a high degree of alignment between the group’s discourse on the novel and written discourse on the same novel in the mass media, but also for the importance of a specifically gay variety of ‘subcultural capital’, to which some group members appeal in order to contest other members’ dismissal of the book as insufficiently ‘serious’ to be worthy of discussion.

First steps towards a rhetorical psychology of literary interpretation

Abstract This paper asks what the familiar conception of literary interpretation as socially situated and rhetorical might mean on the cognitive level. Rejecting the prescriptiveness, individualism, and use of invented examples that theorisations of reading based on so-called “cognitive linguistics” have involved, it attempts to develop Michael Billigs model of thought as argument into a theory of interpretation adequate to the complexities of actual reader discourse within one particular social context (academia). A detailed intertextual analysis is carried out to provide qualitative empirical support for this theory, showing how four critics read Joseph Conrads Heart of Darkness by debating its correct interpretation.

Private experience, textual analysis, and institutional authority: The discursive practice of critical interpretation and its enactment in literary training

Academic literary criticism emphasises both the private experience of reading and the analysis of formal textual features. Since the early 20th century, this double emphasis has been sustained through the production of ‘readings’ or ‘interpretations’ in which claimed responses to literature are accounted for through textual analysis, a practice here theorised in terms drawn from discursive psychology. Conceptualising interpretation as practice renders it investigable through qualitative social research methods. This article thus studies the enactment of critical interpretation within a specific form of literary training, carrying out a turn-by-turn analysis of an undergraduate tutorial on Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Within this classroom context, students use claimed private experiences to challenge a lecturer’s reading of the work, treat those claimed responses (some of which appear homophobic) as unnecessary to account for, and account for responses they reject in non-textual terms. For contrast, a short extract is provided from an established department member’s tutorial on William Wordsworth’s ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey’ (1798). It is argued that the two instructors’ very different levels of institutional authority are reflected in their teaching styles and in the resistance or compliance that their students exhibit towards the discursive practices of literary criticism.

‘Power to the reader’ or ‘degradation of literary taste’? Professional critics and Amazon customers as reviewers of The Inheritance of Loss

The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai (2006) was critically lauded, gaining many positive periodical reviews and winning both the Man Booker Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. However, it has received mixed reviews from customers of the online retail giant, Amazon: an arguable expression of the challenge that digital consumerism presents to literature’s longstanding claim to autonomy from the market. In order to understand the relationship between the book’s professional and customer reviews, a collection comprising both was constructed. Qualitative analysis of these reviews was followed by the use of thematic coding to compare sub-collections divided by means of publication and by geographical location, with social network graphs being used to represent similarities between reviews and graph density being employed as a measure of overall similarity. No distinctions were found between reviews when grouped according to geographical location. However, the novel’s professionally published reviews were found to be a more homogeneous group than its Amazon customer reviews, and to be more likely to recommend the novel and to praise it for its humour and its narrative, while customer reviews were found to be more likely to criticise it for its characters, and less likely to quote it or to discuss its political themes. It is argued that this is because the book was produced to satisfy the expectations of a ‘literary’ rather than a ‘popular’ audience, where professional book reviewers represent the former almost by definition.

Networks of value in electronic music: SoundCloud, London, and the importance of place

While recent debate has often focused on a reified “cultural value” (whether opposed to or aligned with monetary value), this article treats “value” as a verb and investigates the acts of valuing in which people engage. Through ethnographic research in Londons electronic music scene and social network analysis of the SoundCloud audio sharing website (which is dominated by electronic dance music and, to a lesser extent, hip hop), it uncovers substantial patterns of geographical inequality. London is found at the very centre of a network of valuing relationships, in which New York and Los Angeles occupy the next most privileged locations, followed by Berlin, Paris, and Chicago. Cities outside Western Europe and the Anglophone world tend to occupy peripheral positions in the network. This finding suggests that location plays a major role in the circulation of value, even when we might expect that role to have been curtailed by an ostensibly “placeless” medium for the distribution and valuing of music. While there are reasons for the metropolitan emplacedness of dance music – given the importance of the relationship between production, consumption, and live DJing – the privileging of particular cities also mirrors patterns of inequality in the wider cultural economy. That London should appear so supremely privileged reflects both the exporting strength of British creative industries and the imbalanced nature of the UKs cultural economy.

Reading in the age of the internet

Reading has changed with consumer adoption of digital technologies, and its changes are many: from the new ways in which users of such technologies can now access texts to the opportunities those users now have for discussing them online. Given technological developments, changes in behaviour may seem inevitable. However, for researchers investigating reading and interpretation in the internet age, questions remain, as they do with any social activity online, about whether ‘new’ practices are indeed new, and about how they are inflected through mediation on the internet (Herring, 2004). How researchers – and particularly those interested in the interaction of readers with texts and of readers with one another around texts – can uncover, describe, and analyse these changes is an important emerging topic. The articles in this issue make an attempt to offer methods for investigating how the internet and associated technologies affect reading. They look in particular at how readers reproduce, appropriate, and subvert traditional practices for reading and interpreting texts in online environments. The connection between the global and local, as Androutsopoulos (2010) has shown, is dynamic and complex, with local practices and readings by individual readers influencing global practices, and global readings in public forums influencing individual readings. The effects of the connections between readers that the internet facilitates are not homogeneous, but instead manifest themselves in different online locations and forums, through different technologies, and with shifting cultural trends. The internet has offered readers new ways to interact with texts and with other readers, but how these technologies have changed behaviour and what effect these changes have on the practices of reading and interpretation is still largely unknown. At the same time as making a start on the important task of finding out how the internet matters for reading and interpretation, this special issue contributes to several 652781 LAL0010.1177/0963947016652781Language and LiteratureEditorial editorial2016