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Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century. By Molly Abel Travis. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1998. 173 pp. ISBN 0-8093-2146-7. $39.95.
In Reading Cultures: The Construction of Readers in the Twentieth Century, Molly Abel Travis offers a potentially groundbreaking introduction to the study of reading and the critical reception of twentieth-century American literature. In addition to devoting particular attention to the ways in which readers and texts engage in a process of simultaneous appropriation at various cultural moments throughout the twentieth century, Travis theorizes an intriguing new methodology for exploring the manner in which we perceive such concepts as "text" and "reader." Travis's arguments regarding the construction of readers find their origins in poststructuralist epistemologies of readerly selves who function as cultural agents: "I conceive of agency in reading," Travis writes, "as compulsive, reiterative role-playing in which individuals attempt to find themselves by going outside the self, engaging in literary performance in the hope of fully and finally identifying the self through self-determination" (6). Travis conceives of readers, moreover, as socially constructed beings who exist both inside and outside of the text; hence, Travis's postulation of the reading process involves immersion and interactivity on the part of the reader. Drawing upon a variety of performance, psychoanalytic, and feminist theories, Travis delineates various cultures of modernist and postmodernist reading in her volume, addresses the notion of public space and its impact upon reading activities in cyberspace, and investigates the interconnections between cultural production and the teaching of reading. By emphasizing the act of reading in terms of its manifold social and cultural contexts, Travis offers a valuable...