The Ends of Reading

Abstract

Abstract People in the United States today are much less likely to read voluntarily than they were a few decades ago. This article examines findings from three federal government surveys that describe voluntary reading, and attempts to make them useful for literary studies. Literary scholars need to know the rate and magnitude of the decline in voluntary reading for two reasons. First, the annual decline has been relatively constant over the past forty years. Arguments that reading has long been in crisis correctly identify this consistency while ignoring the cumulative effects of persistent decline. The recent history of voluntary reading in the United States is best understood through data precisely because of the numbing effects of crisis rhetoric. Second, the specialized reading practices of literary studies are only legibly specialized in contradistinction to nonspecialized reading practices. As fewer people read voluntarily, this reduces the distinctiveness of literary studies’ methods. Increasingly, the distinction is not between specialized and nonspecialized reading but between reading and not reading. Literary studies has not registered widespread interest in nonspecialized reading, a by-product, perhaps, of an overriding interest in specialized reading. Yet the latter depends, to an extent largely unacknowledged within the profession, on the former.