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Reading Matters: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Reading

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The Cultural Sociology of Reading

Part of the book series: Cultural Sociology ((CULTSOC))

Abstract

Sociologists have studied reading mostly as a product of, or an input to, the social structure. In so doing they have failed to capture why reading matters to people. On the basis of the intensive practices of reading fiction among women in the UK, this chapter begins to develop a cultural sociology of reading by showing how the pleasures of reading fiction support processes of self-understanding, self-care, and ethical reflection. A cultural sociology of reading is necessary because these readers’ experiences of meaning-making disappear when reading is explained within the binaries escapism/confrontation, indoctrination/resistance, which frame much of the current research on reading. The discussion is based on the interpretive analysis of three bodies of data: 60 written responses by women to the UK’s “popular anthropology” project, the Mass Observation Project (M-O), participation in two women’s groups, and in-depth interviews with 13 women readers in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Originally published in the American Journal of Cultural Sociology 2018 (6): 417–454. Reproduced with permission from Springer Nature.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Permission to use the Mass Observation material has been granted by the Trustees of the Mass Observation Archive, University of Sussex.

  2. 2.

    For an analysis of the methodological issues in researching M-O material, see Bloome et al. (1993). For a digital archive with responses to reading materials in Britain between 1450 and 1945, see the Reading Experience Database, RED, managed by the Open University, http://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/index.php.

  3. 3.

    Interviews and group meetings were audio-recorded and professionally transcribed. All material was coded and analyzed as one single data set using Nvivo. Questions and codes are available upon request.

  4. 4.

    Street (1984) and his collaborators carried out interviews with M-O respondents but the focus was on writing practices. See, for example, Bloome et al. (1997).

  5. 5.

    The classification of a variety of different studies into two broad categories inevitably glosses over important theoretical and methodological differences between them. These various works share a stance or a way of looking at the cultural practice of reading that justifies this categorization. Some of the works discussed are not by sociologists but by literary scholars interested in sociological questions. And while the Bourdieusian approach could be seen as a variant of the “social practice” approach, it is considered separately because there is a group of studies that seek specifically to apply and expand Bourdieu’s conceptual apparatus to the practice of reading.

  6. 6.

    See Graff (1979) for the classic critique of this idea and a revised version in Graff (2010).

  7. 7.

    For an influential critique of the hermeneutics of suspicion in literary studies, see Sedgwick (1997).

  8. 8.

    Emotions have been distinguished from feelings (or affects) in that the first involve a subject and the second do not (Ngai 2005: 25–28; Massumi 2002; Clough and Halley 2007). Emotions are the reflexive, linguistic expression of feelings, less motivated, and less motivating to action (Warhol 2003: 14). As in Ngai (2005) the terms “emotion” and “feeling” are used in the present research interchangeably and as a difference of degree rather than kind.

  9. 9.

    See Raia, Chap. 7 in this volume, on the reading of religious pamphlets among Muslims in East Africa.

  10. 10.

    See Michelson, Chap. 16 in this volume, for an analysis of romance reading and social and political issues in the USA.

  11. 11.

    This and the next quote from this participant are written responses to a follow-up question sent over email.

  12. 12.

    Real names have been changed as well as details that may help identify the participants.

  13. 13.

    The company is based in Idaho, USA, but has members in several countries, including Scotland. According to their website, there are “1,570,338 BookCrossers and 11,280,546 books travelling throughout 132 countries” (Bookcrossing n.d.).

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Acknowledgments

Part of this research was funded by the School of Social and Political Science, University of Edinburgh, through its Strategic Research Support Fund. I am grateful to Mary Holmes, Steve Kemp, Jonathan Hearn, Charles Turner, Wendy Griswold, Jeffrey Alexander, and three anonymous reviewers at the American Journal of Cultural Sociology for their comments on earlier versions of this piece.

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    María Angélica Thumala Olave

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Thumala Olave, M.A. (2022). Reading Matters: Toward a Cultural Sociology of Reading. In: Thumala Olave, M.A. (eds) The Cultural Sociology of Reading. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13227-8_2

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