In recent centuries increasing numbers of people pick up literature for entertainment, but scholars continue to highlight how fictional writings edify and less often consider its pleasures as worthy of analysis. Especially since the nineteenth century, as novels became pillars of school and then of college curricula, sophisticated cases for what and how it teaches multiply. Studies that do treat leisure as a key category of literary analysis often approach it as an ideological tool and as a market niche, highlighting how literary leisure promotes discipline and utility conducive to the work ethic, or how it displays cultural capital that rely on class exclusivity. The four presenters for this special session, Christina Lupton, Elisah Cohn, Deidre Shauna Lynch, and Amit Yahav, have all published recent studies that ameliorate this scholarly oversight – highlighting varied approaches to literary leisure evident in the testimonies of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English writers and readers. This panel invites these scholars to further expand their interrogations of literary leisure through 15-minutes presentations. Combining their presentations, the panel offers a rich over-view of approaches to leisure in the age of print – an age that profoundly shapes our approaches even as we witness its radical transformation.
In “The Leisure of Theory,” Lupton ties the question of writing – of where and when it happens, of who gets to produce and consume it – to the availability of leisure. She does this by going back to work of the late 1970s by Peter Weiss, John Berger, and Jacques Rancière. Lupton argues that these political projects remain ongoing in ways that show up in the recent domains of life-writing and autofiction, where the struggle for the leisure that self-reflection and creative production requires registers prominently. In tracking this struggle over 50 years, Lupton suggests that the question of leisure once parsed by Rancière and Weiss largely in terms of class has resurfaced more strongly as a question of gender.
In “Lyric Reading: Distractions’ Forms,” Cohn asks how does distraction take shape in narratives of the nineteenth century, when literary reading began to be theorized as a mode of work? She highlights moments in narrative that fail to register according to any instrumental method, declining to extract value as the making of knowledge. Thomas Hardy’s use of prosimetra in his Tess of the D’Urbervilles serves as Cohn’s example. Prosimetra are poetic extracts set into prose, linked to the leisure practice of commonplace bookmaking. The extraction of poetry (often well known) appears to suggest the need to supplement waning narrative energy by drawing on a vital heritage archive. But these undemanding extracts invite distraction: they can be easily skipped over, or become absorbing, even while they tend to thematize and perform unproductive states of altered consciousness.
In “Paperwork and Paper Leisure” Lynch interrogates the double status of penmanship in the early nineteenth century--from one vantage point, the essence of labor in a world more and more defined by bureaucratic paperwork, but also, and increasingly so when print sets the standards for communicational efficiency, an emblem of the resistance of the amateur. Lynch considers Charles Lamb, who wrote for a living as a British East India Company functionary charged with the multiple anonymous and obscure acts of scrivening, but who also authored in his spare-time and, most significantly for this paper, participated actively in the early-nineteenth-century culture of the friendship album. Lamb composed, copied, and recopied on the manuscript pages of his friends’ books, and ultimately published in printed books many pieces of album poetry. These handmade “books” (but, really, autograph manuscripts) were “written” out and written up by a group of friends, who contributed original and transcribed verses, as well as scissored out images. These albums, Lynch argues, serve a non-bookish function in providing a repository for the inscriptions that preserve the traces of their authors’ hands; as such they resonate with Roland Barthes’ characterization of the amateur as figure of resistance who “establishes himself graciously (for nothing) in the signifier.”
In “Reading and Riding” Yahav considers relations between Sidney’s “Apology for Poetry” and later defenses of novels. At the dawn of the age of print, Sidney laments that literature “from almost the highest estimation of learning is fallen to be the laughing-stock of children”; he responds, in the best tradition of poetic defenses, by highlighting didactic efficacies. But Sidney also gropes for a new valuation, emblematized in the analogy between reading and riding that opens his “Apology.” Here literary value relies not on being a conduit of knowledge, but on being a conduit of sympathy; not in cultivating useful skills but in cultivating absorption – like the amateur horseman who may or may not get better at his trot, but admires horses and their lovers to the extent of identification. This way of conceiving literary value resonates with defenses of novels as easy reading. Novels demand light financial and intellectual resources, but lengthy chunks of time; as such, they are well-suited for making bookish but non-intellectual leisure available to a wide range of populations. Yahav considers explicit analogies between reading and riding, as well as adjacent – not directly analogous – representations of the two in Austen’s novels. Establishing relations between ostensibly unrelated riding and reading scenes, she underscores Austen’s defense of leisurely easy reading.
Considered together, these papers interrogate varying values ascribed to literature in recent centuries, underscoring ways in which the academic study of literature might reimagine itself as the study that vital need and pleasure – as the study of leisure.