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<h1 id="reading-anxiety-possibility">Reading, Anxiety, Possibility</h1>
<ul class="post-metadata">
<li><time datetime="2018-05-15">15 May 2018</time></li>
<li><a href="/tags/reading/" class="post-tag">reading</a>, </li>
<li><a href="/tags/research/" class="post-tag">research</a>, </li>
<li><a href="/tags/writing/" class="post-tag">writing</a></li>
</ul>
<p>Every so often you come across That Book, the exact thing you need to read, and a lot of the time its something that you might not have run into before and that you certainly had no idea you needed to read, and probably wouldnt have except that more than one person pointed you toward it, and then its so much the thing you needed that you kick yourself for not having found it sooner yourself.</p>
<p>Or maybe thats just me.</p>
<p>Anyhow: Anne Geres <a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/42gsy8ez9780252066047.html"><em>Intimate Practices: Literacy and Cultural Work in U.S. Womens Clubs, 1880-1920</em></a> is this weeks That Book. And Im more than a little bruised from all the self-kicking Ive been doing.</p>
<p>I might be willing to forgive myself, if the title turned up in my previous research, for assuming that it was a history of turn of the century womens clubs, and thus that it didnt have much to tell me about my own current project — but a slightly deeper glance might have given me a hint that there was something I needed here. The book focuses on those clubs reading and writing practices at the heart of their self-formation and their public and private work. Even more, her chapter on “(un)professional reading and writing” makes a compelling argument about the ways that scholars of literature came to professionalize in no small part in opposition to the models of reading and writing embraced by clubwomen. This bit of the narrative of how we got to be the way we are is exactly what Ive been missing, so completely at the heart of the argument Ive been trying to make (about the dominant role that competition plays in todays university structures, and the ways that a more generous engagement with the “common reader” might help promote a recommitment of our institutions to the public good) that Im both overjoyed to have found it and mortified not to have found it sooner.</p>
<p>This is why I wish I had time enough to stop and <a href="https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/3-reading-together/">read all the things</a>.</p>
<p>That <em>Intimate Practices</em> is That Book, if it hadnt already become clear, would have been made glaringly obvious when I ran into one uncanny bit of overlap. In a section that Ive entitled <a href="https://generousthinking.hcommons.org/3-reading-together/why-do-readers-read/#pAifwpirbwigpatoaawwrrtrsofrwRStolotaltrNCapBWsdpvWittawcttumhcachepcvpofgsttpttaiptdndthsoovsRpurbwialmrctcruWsmhapccdephuaccsews">“Why Do Readers Read?”</a>, I note that dismissing pleasure in reading (whether as illicit, or unserious, or whathaveyou) opens space for anxiety to become ones dominant reading affect, and particularly “anxiety about whether were reading the right stuff, or reading for the right reasons, or reading in the right way.” Gere, for her part, describes professionalized scholars of English, claiming for themselves a role as arbiters of taste, as having the effect of “making nonprofessionals fearful they were reading the wrong books or reading them in the wrong ways” (217). Ive scoured my notes, as well as the texts I previously cited around that spot, to be sure that I didnt somehow pick Geres phrasing up at second hand, but Ive found nothing. So Im taking this coincidence as a sign of deep connection, if an unknowing one, and Im working on how I might build on it, what the rest of my argument might still have to learn.</p>
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