Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America

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.
You might think that any reader is a good reader (publishers certainly do). Merve Emre’s tongue-in-cheek subtitle calls out ?bad” readers?the kind whose approach to literature is naive, superficial, therapeutic, or escapist, at least in the eyes of scholars. They are not properly ?literary” readers?not by the standards of university literature classrooms through most of the postwar era. Rather, bad readers read novels, stories, and poems for more vulgar reasons: to be instructed, improved, moved, even to feel civically engaged. In this book, Emre suggests that we think of bad readers not as non-literary but as ?paraliterary,” forged in institutions that have promoted literacy and writing well outside literature departments throughout the postwar period. Emre examines the rise of paraliterary reading and its role in helping readers acclimate to the rise of American power from the years just before World War II through the Cold War. While university literature departments were turning out good readers by the hundreds, other institutions?diplomatic missions, cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, global activist groups?trained a vastly greater number of bad readers: diplomats, debutantes, tourists, and magazine subscribers. Emre’s book explores a series of fascinating questions about American culture during this era: How did women’s colleges teach students like Mary McCarthy and Jacqueline Kennedy to read novels? What hopes did idealistic Fulbright Scholars like Alfred Kazin and F. O. Matthiessen, enlisted to teach American Studies in Europe, carry with them? How did American Express become such a touchstone, both for the counterculture and family-oriented readers? The result is an invigorating and original look at the cultural life of reading during America’s postwar ascendancy.