Making U.S. Readers in the Early Twentieth Century

Abstract

“Making U.S. Readers in the Early Twentieth Century” considers how definitions of “reading” and “being a reader” circulated through mass-mediated textual materials associated with three of the period’s increasingly influential institutions: the school, the newspaper, and the library. For a period that thought deeply about the implications of expanding networks of literacy and print, I assemble a formally and disciplinarily diverse archive of materials that represents the breadth of this period’s public thinking on reading. By closely reading standardized silent reading tests, beginning reading primers for illiterate adults, newspaper book reviews, and library publicity materials, I distill the complex set of practices, attitudes, and behaviors—some textual, many not—that signified “being a reader” for different types of subjects. As these materials teach to their varied audiences, “reading” is not merely an internalized, personal practice, but is a highly contingent form of sociality, a way of understanding one’s position in a world that is increasingly organized by print. As I show by paying special attention to invocations of non-reading, the stakes for reading in this period were high, especially as “being a reader” became a mode of modernization, civility, and American citizenship.

As a contribution to the history of reading, “Making U.S. Readers” provides a model for recovering specific meanings attached to reading in the past by looking beyond the inner experiences of individual readers to the larger structures of thought and feeling that gave individual reading practices their social significance. A key insight that stems from this method is the importance of “non-reading” to a history of reading, particularly in times in which “reading” is highly politicized. As a contribution to literary history, this dissertation offers a way of conceiving of literary studies itself as a project of “making readers,” one that can find many of its ideological ancestors in the non-literary projects of the early twentieth century. Rather than set literary reading apart from more obviously instrumental modes of reading, I suggest that we should embrace the instrumentality of our reading practices and ask unambiguously what types of readers we hope “literary reading” can make.