Reading: Attitudes, Interests, Practices
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READING: ATTITUDES, INTERESTS, PRACTICES
INTRODUCTION
The social psychology, or sociology, of reading remains a relatively small part of a vast literature largely concerned with skills acquisition and development. This is curious for two reasons. First, it is obvious that both teachers and researchers do not want merely to facilitate reading ability—they hope to form and maintain reading habits. Second, there are regular laments—as perennial as grumblings over the inadequacies of the younger generation—about low levels of reading, poor attitudes, lack of enthusiasm and so on. Indeed, surveys often suggest a gulf between reading ability and reading practices; in many contemporary societies, the essential problem seems to be aliteracy rather than illiteracy (see later). On both counts, then, questions of what people read, how much they read, and the purposes and effects of their reading surely assume central importance. Attention to the social psychology of reading is even more timely in a post-modern era that has reinterpreted the roles of author and reader. Nell (1988) touched upon the ‘new criticism’ underpinned by a relativism that suggests that the book is essentially created by the reader (Tinker, 1965), that a book is ‘a relationship, an axis of innumerable relationships’ (Borges, 1964, p. 13), that ‘the reader makes literature’ (Fish, 1980, p. 11). The degree to which this criticism has taken hold in academe is indicated by even more modern attempts to reclaim ground for the ‘common reader’, to re-establish the centrality of the aesthetic qualities of (fiction) reading, to cast aside those professional ‘isms’ that have turned reading into a job requiring doctoral qualifications (see Bloom, 2000; Edmundson, 2004).1 Both the ‘professionalisation’ of literature, and arguments against it, have quite a long history. The teaching of English literature, for example, was generally resisted by the academy until the mid-nineteenth century (later still in Oxford and Cambridge)— on the grounds that it was of insufficient depth, but also because of apprehensions about the baleful influence of ‘experts’. On the other hand, as early as 1927, Forster heaved a regretful sigh that ‘the novel tells a story . . . I wish that it was not so’. The story ‘runs like a backbone—or may I say a tape-worm’ supporting other ‘finer growths’ (p. 45). Here we have the disdain for the obvious—and the obviously appealing—that has so distressed the ‘common reader’ ever since; see also the Leavis influence, later.
1
B. V. Street and N. H. Hornberger (eds), Encyclopedia of Language and Education, 2nd Edition, Volume 2: Literacy, 85–93. #2008 Springer Science+Business Media LLC.
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J O H N E D WA R D S
The book itself has also been defended in recent years, in the face of challenges from the electronic media, and arguments for a digitised and book-less chiliasm (see Negroponte, 1995). Thus, for example, Birkerts (1994) defended the more traditional pleasures and values of the text. Of course, words on computer screens, like words in books, a
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