Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America

by Merve Emre

“[Emre’s] intellectual moves . . . are many, subtle, and a pleasure to follow. . . . None of her bad readers could have written this very good book.” —Los Angeles Review of BooksLiterature departments tend to be focused on turning out, “good” readers—attentive to nuance, aware of history, interested in literary texts as self-contained works. But the majority of readers are, to use Merve Emre’s tongue-in-cheek term, “bad” readers. They read fiction and poetry to be moved, distracted, instructed, improved, engaged as citizens. How should we think about those readers, and what should we make of the structures, well outside the academy, that generate them?We should, Emre argues, think of such readers not as non-literary but as paraliterary—thriving outside literary institutions. She traces this phenomenon to the postwar period, when literature played a key role in the rise of American power. At the same time as American universities were producing good readers by the hundreds, many more thousands of bad readers were learning elsewhere to be disciplined public communicators, whether in diplomatic and ambassadorial missions, private and public cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, or global activist groups. As we grapple with literature’s diminished role in the public sphere, Paraliterary suggests a new way to think about literature, its audience, and its potential, one that looks at the civic institutions that have long engaged readers ignored by the academy.“Paraliterary does for . . . reading . . . what The Program Era did for profoundly upend what we thought we knew about how institutions other than the university have shaped our culture and our engagement with it.” —Deborah Nelson, University of Chicago

Genres: Nonfiction, Criticism, Literature, History, Academic, Essays, Book Club

427 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 14, 2017

About the author

Merve Emre is an associate professor of English at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Bookforum, The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, The New Republic, The Baffler, n+1, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, where she is senior humanities editor.

Reviews

[Jerrodm · Rating 2 out of 5]

There were some interesting ideas in this book, but I felt slightly (self!) shanghai'd into reading it. Our book club selected this book (I was the one who nominated it!), only to find out that a) the book is not in fact about "the making of bad readers in post-war America" in the sense that I thought it would be. This book is pretty obviously the dissertation turned publication of its author, Merve Emre, and is a collection of long essays in which she tries to identify ways that the socio-political structures involved in "teaching" readers how to read in the United States in the 20th century (the sub-title suggests the second half of the century but actually the first example is from before WWII).

The lenses she uses are things like the State Department and CIA's connections to the Peace Corps and the way that institution provided ideas for its volunteers on how to read as an American and how to share the results of that reading while they were posted abroad. Other examples include attempts, largely by and through ladies' colleges, to acculturate young American women for journeys abroad through mannered writings like the novels of Henry James in the early 20th century, and the connection between the American Express, writers living abroad and the U.S. government in building a sense of Americanness and access (financial and cultural) in a foreign location.

If this all sounds somewhat arcane, inarticulate, and strung-together, it's because the book reads very much that way. My take is that Emre had a set of somewhat disparate analytical ideas she had researched over the course of her PhD which she then found necessary to combine into one coherent-ish product. And though she tries in the initial chapter to frame each piece as part of a larger structure, it never really came together for me.

On top of that, the writing is really just bad, in that it is an extreme example of how academics hide behind (or become lost in) jargon and tortured grammar and syntax, to the point where even relatively erudite readers can't follow their lines of argumentation. I can select a few sentences completely at random which serve to illustrate the point:

Sight reading reached its apotheosis within a nationalized scientific community preoccupied with gaining knowledge of other peoples through visual technologies and enframing that knowledge through the reproduction and circulation of mass-mediated visual forms.

From Matthiessen's passionate utterances to Plath's sadomasochistic craft to Ashbery's erotic camp to Lerner's drug-induced translation, we can see how fictional texts continually coexisted alongside the instituional rules for how reading these texts ought to make their readers feel. To believe in a more abstract or psychological sense of literary love is to indulge in the same self-deluding high that Lerner's narrator ironizes: a vision of love that exists more powerfully, more perfectly, in another space and time, and thus avoids its material realities. It is a means of smuggling love back into the disciplinary epistemologies of the present--a way of nestling ever closer to the powers that be and never realizing whom, or what, we are still in love with.

Crucial for my purposes is that the textual 'form and face and projection' that the paranoid reader's truth assumes in The Man convincingly mimics for its nonparanoid readers the paraliterary genres produced and circulated by real institutions of liberal internationalism like PTPI, institutions to which Afro-modernist writers like Williams were routinely denied access.

So look - I'm the last person to decry the desire of authors to "write smart", and I fully understand that some subject matters lend themselves less easily to straightforward prose. But our book club is full of very smart, well-read and highly educated people (including two English lit graduate degree holders!), and I think only four of us finished the book.

The writing in this book fails on a sentence-by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, chapter-by-chapter level. Are there some interesting ideas and tidbits in here? Yes, absolutely. But I couldn't recommend this book to anyone except possibly those with a specific academic research interest in the questions Emre attempts to address. And even then, prepare to have to fight the text in order to win the ideas, which I think is always a detriment. It's getting two stars from me because there are some interesting bits, but hard to say it was worth the pain to extract them. I won't be jumping in line to read further work from her.

[Kristin · Rating 4 out of 5]

An engaging discussion of "bad reading" in postwar America as a form of international communication. Captivating argument even if the prose is unnecessarily complicated and jargony.

[Colton · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found this to be fascinating and surprisingly so, mostly because I have been looking for a way to think about why it is that people seem to be reading all the time and thinking about none of it.

Emre's analysis feels similar to Marilynne Robinson's discontent with the way humanities departments kowtowed, in the 20th century, to competing interests, in order to somehow place the university, and other private and public institutions, in a more lucrative or "useful" position.

These places have forgotten the fact that the humanities had great strengths as a practice, strengths that have now been largely abandoned.

I think some criticisms could be made of Emre's monograph, in the way that its canvas was rather too large for its paint, but by the end I was more impressed with the wealth of examples on what it means to be paraliterary. Think of each chapter as weight applied to a total, not so much as a mosaic to be filled in.

This is a very niche book, but if anyone is looking for a starting place in academic thinking about the many problems with the reading and study of literature in the 21st century, or even in the way people read literature at home or with their friends, or at the public library, this is a great place to start.

Though it reads like a thesis turned book at the tail end (or beginning) of one's academic career, it is far and away better than anything I might have done back when I was in school. I'm looking forward to whatever Emre does next, as I'm just as much interested in her style of thinking as in her prose.

[Lily · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read this (available online from my library system) to decide whether to audit Ms. Emre's upcoming lecture series on Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, which was the book choice just a couple of months ago on the Western Canon here on Goodreads. The other reviews here of Paraliterary seem fair to me, but at the moment I am leaning towards registering for her four online sessions on POAL, 'sponsored' by NYRB.

[Allison Brooks Hendon]

I read this for class, and I'll take one for the team and say I had to reread it before I honestly knew what Emre was trying to do. It was super interesting as far as history goes, and it does tell you how emotive reading and reading with feeling came about, I'm just not sure if it added to the conversation of how literature should be analyzed today.

[Elizabeth · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite what I was expecting or looking for but there’s some good stuff in the intro + the Henry James chapter