Organizer: Christian Lupton

Speakers: Leah Price (Rutgers), Ben Davies (Portsmouth), Johanne Gormsen Schmidt (Copenhagen)

This panel explores the role of reading in the later stages of the Covid 19 pandemic. We know from sales figures and reports that novels featured in the Spring of 2020 as things to read in lockdown, and as ways to learn about the history of plague. But as the pandemic has gone on, we see that people remained turned to novels as a way of making sense of a world of reduced movement, contact, and spatial differentiation. While medical and scientific knowledge about the virus have dominated 2021’s news stream since the vaccination rollout, the reading of fictional texts remains constitutive for many of this historical moment.

We are particularly interested here in novel reading as something that has happened outside (and in contrast to) reading within the academy. Two of these papers draw on material collected for Lockdown Reading, a research project that collected material from nearly 1000 novel readers in England and Denmark. Theoretical accounts of non-academic reading have been at the heart of recent disciplinary wars over critical and non-critical reading; but what these interviews show is less an extension of these debates than a very concrete report on what reading looks like if we focus on it as something happening under today’s specific conditions. This approach allows us to speculate more broadly about how the spatial and temporal conditions of a novel’s reception might be considered in understanding what fiction means, and how it resonates in the world.

Price’s paper, Inessential Reading, asks what role reading plays in the growing gap between those Americans privileged enough to be working from home and those whose “essential” work involves the handling of goods, including books. Where earlier epidemics from TB to AIDS cast books as vectors of disease, by summer of 2020 public health campaigns across the rich world were casting the text, on the contrary, as a safe alternative to bodily contact: “Stay Home, Stay Safe, Keep Reading.” After establishing through emerging industry statistics how much time the pandemic ended up carving out for white-collar workers’ pleasure reading, I’ll ask how new fiction, artist’s books and activist projects have attempted to make visible the ethical costs of a system that conditions readers’ safety on the risks taken on by the warehouse workers, truckers and librarians who handle reading material.

Gormsen Schmidt’s paper, Outdoor Reading, looks at the way being outside with books, and through books, has become part of the pandemic reading experience. As habits of reading on the train on the way to work, on the flight to Nicaragua, or on the treadmill in the gym have died away, the physicality of reading has changed. Many have taken a book outside, into spaces that are newly conceived of as a sanctuary away from crowded homes where work is now done. This paper looks at a series of old and recent novels that register this interest in the outdoors thematically, but it draws on new readers’ accounts to suggest that the phenomenology of their reception outside the home has been part of their appeal.

Davies’s paper, Reading About Race, reports on readers outside the US who deliberately expanded their reading of fiction to include mor diverse voices, or invested time in reading about the history of race in America. Doing this just as the possibilities of political and social engagement have been minimal, these readers somewhat counterintuitively suggest that fiction and its consumption can be a form of action, a site of change. Focusing on the reception of a range of fictional texts alongside Claudia Rankine’s Just Us, Davies asks what it means for readers to have encountered Rankine’s argument under conditions of reduced action and heightened contemplation. How has the call for the micropolitics of race been amplified by its being first read in the highly privatized life worlds of 2021?

The panel will consist of a very short introduction by the organizer and three papers, leaving time for discussion about a topic that will be pitched as widely accessible and relevant to all conference participants.