Social reading: an afterword Christina Lupton At one point in Professing Criticism, John Guillory makes the claim that professional reading is a “communal practice” (2022: 330). Even when reading in private, he suggests, the literary scholar participates through that activity in a disciplinary community. “Lay” or general reading, on the other hand, is described by Guillory as a “largely solitary practice.” At least in modern times, Guillory stresses, beyond the academy “[s]cenes of communal reading are seldom formally organized but rather occur by chance or by virtue of the considerable effort it takes to overcome the condition of solitariness” (ibid.: 332). Guillory’s case should be read in the context of his efforts to shore up and boost our understanding of literary study as an academic discipline. But in the terms of this special issue, the logic of this opposition seems to miss the mark. The essays collected here describe forms of social reading that straddle the zones of professional and non-professional life, giving us book-lovers who gather in parish committees and eighteenth-century households, appear in bestselling fiction and television shows, and admonish themselves to read more over breakfast before going to work. Two of these essays, by Rebeca Araya Acosta and Stephan Karschay, discuss communities that pre-date by some time the emergence of anything like a professional forum for reading or critiquing literature. The communities discussed, of Scottish miners who organize themselves into committee members with different roles in running the local library, and of early readers and critics of Pamela, can be seen as experiments in building groups that hold books at their center, while keeping them on the move. Materially, books are objects to be taken care of at the Westerkirk library, and conceptually, they become things to be judged according to the values of the various groups that Samuel Richardson conjures into being: a rural household, a newly mobile class society, a parish. If we move ahead in time, Guillory’s claim that the socializing lay readers do around books is more haphazard than in the classroom or the academic conference becomes easier to grasp. We might think, for instance, of AAA - Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik Agenda: Advancing Anglophone Studies Band 50 · Heft 1 Gunter Narr Verlag Tübingen DOI 10.24053/ AAA-2025-0007 Christina Lupton 116 Hardy’s Jude, of Jude the Obscure, a largely isolated craftsman who has a book with him at all times, but feels excluded from the institutional world of Latin readers within the college walls. But where does this leave Jude the Obscure itself? As a favorite of adult education classes and book clubs of the kind Jonathan Rose describes in the later part of The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, it has surely generated its own kind of classroom sociality. Alena Heinritz’s account of BookTube is an interesting updating of this early twentieth-century case for non-literary workers reading in groups, for it points to an online community committed to weaving their way between novels as sites of personal improvement and private involvement, and the real-time pleasures of meeting online. The more skeptical account of BookTube might suggest, of course, that it is the market that underlies this modern instance of bookish socialization. BookTubers, like eighteenth-century authors (including Richardson), are often professional content providers, and the high price of admission to the online communities they create is that of becoming a consumer visible in the digital environment to the marketing algorithms shaping our world. But books have always been part of commercial society. And even the forms of professional community Guillory points to also have commercial underpinnings - as ways of accrediting the professional middleclass, or as branches of what Mark McGurl (2009) describes as the “program era” of American literary education. How, we might want to ask, does readers’ sociality overlap with and elude the market? One answer to this might be to point to the kinds of community readers are invited into by novels that understand themselves as objects in the backchannels of literary space and time. This is the case, Gero Bauer suggests, of the reading that is imagined in the novels Cloud Atlas and S., where multimodal relations reflect the world in which fiction circulates as an object of specialist attention. In a different sense, the correspondence that happens between Alice, the novelist, and Eileen, the literary editor, in Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World, Where Are You also suggests the ideal of specialist literary ‘types’ finding and knowing each other through books, without this having much to do with profit. In her essay on Rooney, Heidi Liedke focuses on what she, using Eve Sedgwick, terms the ‘reparative’ aspect of such literary friendship. Here, sociability leads away from the mass commodity form and from the present tense of the marketplace by introducing minority models of connection between past and present, reader and writer. Queer theorists have celebrated this kind of sociality in drawing out the potential of books to awaken the dead and anticipate the not yet born. This possibility of being able to stand, as Elizabeth Freeman (2019) puts it, “beside [each other] in time,” seems to capture some of the most liberatory and anti-capitalist kinds of society that texts enable. Connection across time becomes an important model of minority socialization, introducing the prospect of finding your people through books, even when they are not Social reading: an afterword 117 there in your own society. While neither Liedke nor Bauer argue explicitly for redemption of this kind, they both show how novels can promote relationships as a refuge from the present, a way to imagine minds meeting at the margins of society, even when the book itself sits at its mainstream. This ideal of literary kinship involves a very immersed and potentially recessive reader - a figure at least as devoted to words as Rooney’s Eileen. The other kind of sociality described in several of these essays, though, involves talking about books. This activity depends less on a state of welltuned immersion than on spaces of live interaction. This kind of talking happens, as Alena Heinritz notes, in and around the popular television series Gilmore Girls, where novels serve as props in the small community celebrated in the show, and as a prompt to further reading on the part of its fans. This comes closer to what Leah Price asks after in her What We Talk About When We Talk About Books (2019). Using historical, personal, and sociological terms, Price tracks here the book’s elasticity as an ideologically laden object. Novels are disposable as well as valuable, costly as well as things gifted and loaned; objects inclined towards disposability as well as fetishization. In pointing to the capaciousness of ‘book’ as a concept, Price calls us up on our habit of assuming books as fixed points of reference for a certain mode of reading, or way of life. But she also tunes into the talking that printed objects facilitate, even when books are being read quickly, and badly, and in bits, and as props rather than texts. This gives us a way of thinking about books as things that have been generative of sociality, even, and perhaps especially, when not being read from cover to cover, or with professional depth. As this collection of essays shows, books always have and still do keep us talking to each other. References Freeman, Elizabeth (2019). Beside You in Time: Sense Methods and Queer Sociabilities in the American Nineteenth Century. Durham: Duke University Press. Guillory, John (2022). Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. McGurl, Mark (2009). The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Price, Leah (2019). What We Talk About When We Talk About Books. Basic Books. Rose, Jonathan (2001). The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press. Christina Lupton Universität Pennsylvania