Reading materials: Composing literacy practices in and out of school.

Abstract

By considering the contested nature of culture, the instability and sociality of reading, the importance of materiality, and the interconnectedness of reading and writing, my dissertation makes visible the ways readers compose literacy practices in order to place themselves in a social world. Each chapter examines the artifactual traces and concrete practices of readers who are often left out of the sweeping narratives that try to account for the state of literacy today: anonymous readers in a Midwestern public library, Oprah's Book Club readers, student readers in a composition class, and composition teachers as readers of their students' writing. I ultimately argue for the value of grammars of difficulty---place, emotion, use---for readers, teachers, and scholars to better understand and participate in contemporary reading practices. My argument is based on an understanding of reading as an interpretatively open, materially grounded, and socially embedded act. It is informed by composition theory, cultural studies, and print culture studies, insisting on a focus on the local and the particular---not the ideal but the real, not the generally located but the specifically situated---and on an investigation of difference, of what falls outside conventional genres, disciplines, and frameworks. My project understands readers as having agency, as making choices; it responds to critics who fail to recognize reading in unsanctioned places; and it considers ways in which readers use literacy as a tool in ordering (and perhaps disordering) their everyday lives. I make my argument largely by analyzing different groups' responses to Toni Morrison's Paradise . As I look at the specific practices of a particular site, I argue that such practices allow their members to be readers of some texts but not others, to read in a particular way but not another, and to lay claim to some ways of knowing but not others. In addition, I consider the tensions---and, at times, the overlap---of academic and public ways of reading, showing not only how curricular and extracurricular readings are often defined and performed in opposition to assumptions about the other but also how strict differences between schooled and unschooled readings unravel.Ph.D.American literatureAmerican studiesLanguage, Literature and LinguisticsRhetoricSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/132255/2/3057984.pd