Towards a Better Model of Discourse Ethics: A Response

This special issue of READER grew out of a session organized by Phil Goldstein at the MMLA, in November 2005, focusing on issues raised by Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response, a collection of essays edited by Elizabeth Flynn and myself. I want to thank Phil for organizing the MMLA session, and Temma Berg for proposing and then putting together this issue. Reading Sites is a sequel to Gender and Reading. Its goal is to explore the ways that categories of social difference, in particular, those of race, ethnicity, class and gender, shape the experience of reading. Both collections belong to the school of criticism known as During the intervening years between the two collections, the main tenets of readerresponse criticism have been vindicated-every interpretation, we now agree, is always someone's response to a text. Ironically, today, reader-response criticism also seems rather old-fashioned, left behind by developments-postmodernism, poststructuralism, and postcolonial, cultural, and reception studies-that have transformed the critical landscape. Reading Sites is an attempt to update reader-response criticism. Privileging the self/other element of reader response allowed us to take account of the developments in otherness as a theoretical notion, alongside and in conversation with the critical and pedagogical advances in in light of, and across, social differences. My colleagues in this issue, along with all others who have written on and in the last three decades, confirm the fact that like to read: many have been avid readers; and for at least 200 years, they have been major consumers of books and magazines. I daresay we also agree with Janet Badia and Jennifer Phegley, the editors of the recent collection, Reading Women, that women readers-and our assumptions about them-have been [and continue to be] instrumental in the development of. . .the very foundations of our cultural and Uterary establishments (15). Temma Berg's call for a history of readers and actual touches on a criticism that is often leveled against reader-response criticism-that it is ahistorical, and tends to be Umited to contemporary practices. She offers Sylvia Brathwaite's accounts of in her letters as a way of gaining insight into the practices of in the eighteenth century. Contrary to the stereotype of the sentimental, and therefore susceptible and gullible reader, which was the perennial target of critics and moralists, Berg finds that Sylvia and her contemporaries against the grain [to] look for the extraordinary within the ordinary (6). They turn[ed] to fiction to understand, anticipate and shape their lives (19). Reading alerted them to real life dangers (of rape, seduction, unwelcome pregnancy, bad marriage) and offered them strategies for avoiding these and for orienting their personal narratives toward satisfactory and honorable outcomes. The patterns Berg finds in Sylvia's practice are simliar to those favored by readers like Anne Berggren and the she interviewed, and to the flexible moral realism Jane Greer associates with the working class readers of confessional magazines. Berg's analysis of Brathwaite's accounts of her corroborates Berggren's contention that the positive, life-sustaining practice of reading like a woman has a very long history. Kathryn Scheil's study of the Shakespeare Clubs that proliferated in cities and towns in the United States during the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth highlights the history of women's autodidacticism: she shows how who had limited access to formal education managed, with prodigious effort and creativity, to educate themselves and each other. The choice to read Shakespeare (rather than novels or romances) signifies the desire for real, socially valid and valued knowledge, and for the serious study and the development of intellectual and discursive skills associated with the academic life that was denied to them. …