Paraliterary by Merve Emre

Author:Merve Emre [Emre, Merve]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-226-47402-1
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-10-10T16:00:00+00:00

SIGHT READING AT HOME

Before I begin to reconstruct the historical discourse of reading photographs, it is worth pausing to consider the institution of the magazine and how, precisely, its genres and forms are thought to communicate. As I suggested at the end of chapter 3, the magazine differs from the other institutions this book has considered—schools, academic departments, corporations, federal bureaucracies—which exist as discursive constellations of norms as well as more easily locatable brick-and-mortar structures. While magazines may issue from institutions of publishing, critics rarely perceive the textual object of the magazine as instituting anything among its readers. Magazine readers appear too diffuse, too different from one another, to prove good human agents for literary-sociological inquiry. In fact, the higher the number of readers, the lower our ability to draw any conclusions without cherry-picking our evidence19—a methodological constraint which may explain why literary historians have chosen to focus on the coterie cultures of “little magazines” instead of what Donal Harris has called the “big magazines” of twentieth-century mass culture.20 Moreover, while the other institutions in this book have expressed explicit interest in staging face-to-face scenes of communication, a magazine only simulates such encounters. Even the most whimsical reader knows that looking at a photograph of a person’s face is not the same thing as interacting with that person. As such, the inclusion of the magazine in this book invariably recalls a question that will prove especially important for this chapter and the two that follow. What salient differences exist between the kinds of reading practices that are instituted through the expansive circulation of texts and the kinds of reading practices naturalized by the centralized literacy teachings that take place in a bounded physical space?

The differences are matters of degree rather than kind. Big magazines, particularly those published with a high degree of punctuality and stylistic standardization, cultivate repetitive practices of reading that resemble the habitual activities of the institutionally socialized literary impersonators, passionate critics, and brand readers we have encountered so far throughout this book. Consider how O’Connor “always made for” the Geographic at her cousin’s house, or how poet Marianne Moore ritualistically “kept [the Geographic] home from the library about a month copying things out of it.”21 Consider also how avid reader and writer Elizabeth Bishop reflects on her quasi-instinctive desire to go to the library to read the magazine’s back issues while drafting her poem “In the Waiting Room,” which depicts a scene of reading the Geographic in a dentist’s office inspired by Bishop’s childhood memories. “It was funny—queer,” she wrote in a letter to Robert Lowell. “I actually went to the Library & got out that no. of the NG—and that title, ‘The Valley of 10,000 Smokes’—was right, and has been haunting me all my life, apparently.”22 Bishop’s haunted state directs us to the magazine’s powerful social phenomenology: the demands it once made for a specific and embodied habit of readerly attendance stirring again after a long period of dormancy. Drawing equally from the formal properties of

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