Literature departments are staffed by, and 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 vast
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 the institutions we take as
central to the literary world. 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.
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