Mazes

Haywood’s Fantomina drew me into British eighteenth century. The protean Fantomina herself seems to stand in for the instability of the period’s texts and reading experiences--and the  mysterious quality of those experience. Is Fantomina more pleased by the strength of her genius or the prospect of renewed amorous attentions? And to which pleasure is the reader drawn? What did it feel like to read prose in 1724?  How might prose fiction be particularly useful for women to read or to write?  

In the years since, my scholarship has centered on issues of readerly freedom and readerly constraint.  How much freedom do readers have and how might readers benefit from reading within prescribed reading positions, or from externally constructed lenses or filters? What is a modern reader and when and how did she/he emerge? 

I have spent the last few years teaching writing, in a topics-oriented program; my class is designed around problems of media change and media history, broadly construed.  Occasionally, I prompt students to write about and discuss their own reading habits.  There usually is a clear correlation between students who describe themselves as avid readers and students who are accomplished writers--a surprise to no one, I think! What is a surprise, though, is that even among students who admit that they read infrequently, who describe reading as a chore, or mention the many ‘unnecessary details’ of much of their assigned reading, there is a sadness for lost reading habits and a sense that they would be smarter and better thinkers if they had a better foundation built upon the habits of print reading (the habits, not necessarily the print). Their habits and their sense that such habits have larger consequences is, of course, confirmed by recent studies on the nation’s reading habits performed by the NEA.  All of this is to (vaguely) gesture toward the connections between habits of reading and the big educational picture--not to mention the possible roots of our culture’s anti-intellectualism and increasing suspicion about the project of public education--in attitudes about reading.  And all of this is note additionally, of course, that we are in a very eighteenth century sort of moment as we debate and work out these connections and experience the transition away from--or profound changes in--print culture. 

As Danielle above, “The eighteenth century’s privileging of the self and the social over domestic relations provides a provocative point of comparison and contrast for our own transitional moment.”  I have leapt rather quickly into the present (perhaps a reflection of my teaching, which holds me fairly firmly there), but the questions of how the eighteenth century can shed light on this historical moment--and the problems of the mazes that connect past and present--remain key and  I hope we will discuss them more here.