Reconstruction Vol. 11, No. 3

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Highbrow, Lowbrow, No-brow: Women's Reading Practices and the Vitality of New-Format Fiction / K.C. Harrison

This article places current debates concerning the relative merits and dangers of new literary formats in a historical context that illuminates the influence of class and gender biases on assessments of cultural value. Comparing the strength of American women’s reading practices to public outcry over declining literacy and the supposed “death” of the novel, Harrison argues that fiction’s vitality is apparent in the rising popularity of book clubs and audiobooks. These forums and formats remain unheralded by critics and cultural gatekeepers who cherish outdated distinctions between literary and popular reading. Examining the roots of the “brows”—as well as other sources of distinction between high/low, masculine/feminine, and art/entertainment—Harrison claims, will clarify contemporary discussions and allow lovers of literature to appreciate its evolution rather than decry its loss.

<1> Literary technologies such as e-books and internet reading have been at the center of a national spotlight on reading practices. The late twentieth-century outcry over declining American literacy has been replaced in the twenty-first by public debate about the relative merits and dangers of new formats. These arguments reveal anxieties about both the nature of technology and the nature of the literary, and it is instructive to review the history of both discussions in order to excavate their underlying assumptions and concerns. Library shelves are filled with works addressing the ongoing delineation of the literary as well as the transformations wrought by technology from the invention of paper to the printing press, and, more recently, personal computing and the internet. This article identifies gender as a key component of these intertwined debates about reading and technology. I argue that the gender of readers and users of what I am calling literary technologies—while overlooked in recent discussions—shapes their public reception. Building on the work of scholars who cast the division of the “brows” (high, low, and middle) as an elite male response to growing female readership, I consider the role gender plays in assessments of the contemporary literary practices of book clubs and audiobooks. While audiobooks have been largely overlooked in discussions of literary technology, perceptions and uses of audiobooks illuminate important patterns that recur in responses to other burgeoning formats such as e-books [1].

<2> Amidst public alarm at the decline in Americans’ reading practices, women’s reading remains robust in comparison to men’s. Average Americans read only four books in 2006, but among “avid readers,” women read nine, compared to five for men [2]. Women are especially voracious consumers of fiction, representing 80% of fiction sales according to surveys conducted in the U.S., U.K., and Canada [3]. “By this measure,” reads a 2007 National Public Radio piece “Why Women Read More than Men,” citing journalist Lakshmi Chaudhry, “‘chick-lit’ would have to include Hemingway and nearly every other novel.” Chaudhry observes: “Unlike the gods of the literary establishment who remain predominately male—both as writers and critics—their humble readers are overwhelmingly female” [4]. Chaudhry’s comparison of the male “gods” of the literary establishment to their “humble” female readers may seem hyperbolic, but it points to a significant gendered disjunction between lay lovers of literature and an “establishment” comprising critics, academics, and literary pundits. Her inclusion of “Hemingway” in the category of “chick-lit” is only surprising in an environment that delineates clearly between male literary genius and women’s entertainment.

A "Woman's World"?

<3> This disjunction between male cultural expertise and female cultural consumption has been constant in assessments of English and American fiction. Ian Watt’s seminal account The Rise of the Novel locates the genre’s appeal in the economic individualism and Puritan work ethic shared by male audiences and authors. As Nancy Armstrong points out in her oppositional work, Watt fails to consider why the majority of eighteenth-century novels were written by women, and attempts to explain authors like Jane Austen with the bromide of a “feminine sensibility…better equipped to reveal the intricacies of personal relationships” [5]. If we can date the formation of the Western individual to the eighteenth-century novel, Armstrong argues, “the modern individual was first and foremost a woman” [6].

<4> If women are indeed central to the formation of the novel, why do researchers sound surprised when women overtake men as contemporary readers of fiction? A 1989 National Endowment for the Arts study of American reading habits found that “the typical reader of literature in the United States today…is a middle-aged, white woman, living in the Midwestern suburbs” [7]. Compelled to account for these findings in his introduction to the report Who Reads Literature? The Future of the United States as a Nation of Readers, Jonathan Yardley suggests that “the women’s movement may be stimulating female involvement with literature”[8]. While it is undeniable that the women’s movement has inspired many female authors and readers, must it serve as the explanation for this vague (even tentative) “female involvement” with literature? I find Yardley’s heralding of a new “woman’s world” emblematic of a wider cultural amnesia that prevents us from seeing women’s involvement as the constant and necessary feature of fiction that it always has been and continues to be [9].

<5> Such impressions of the novelty of women’s readership and authorship are understandable, considering the modernist gender divide that inaugurates the current form of the myth of men’s cultural superiority. It is provocative for the abovementioned journalist Chaudhry to associate Hemingway with “chick-lit” precisely because he is of the generation of great modernist authors responsible for claiming novel-writing as a serious, masculine endeavor (recall that the novel in English was not a subject for university study until the 1930s). Accounts such as Andreas Huyssen’s After the Great Divide (1986) describe the distinction between high art and mass culture as a gendered phenomenon, a response by threatened masculine elites to the supposed feminization of contemporary culture [10]. Identifying Madame Bovary as “a founding text of modernism,” Huyssen describes Flaubert’s relationship to his heroine as paradigmatic; he at once identifies with and disdains his heroine and her reading practices: “Flaubert fetishized his own imaginary femininity while simultaneously sharing his period’s hostility toward real women, participating in a pattern of the imagination and of behavior all too common in the history of modernism” [11]. Women are regarded as consumers of inferior literature, while man “emerges as writer of genuine, authentic literature—objective, ironic, and in control of his aesthetic means” [12].

Brows and Book Clubs

<6> It is unfortunate that this distinction continues today in the literary importance ascribed or denied to book clubs. While widespread and composed almost exclusively of women, book clubs are rarely discussed in literature departments and journals. Rather, it has fallen to sociologists like Elizabeth Long to retrieve the phenomenon from what she calls “a zone of cultural invisibility” [13]. Following Janice Radway’s pioneering study of women’s reading habits Reading the Romance (1984), Long argues that rather than engaging in passive and receptive activity, reading groups in fact create social identity and sociocultural order [14]. While reception studies like Long’s and Radway’s validate the importance of women’s collective reading as a social practice, they also suggest a foundation from which to conceive of book clubs’ literary significance.

<7> Book clubs have in fact risen in cultural visibility in the last decade as a result of the prominent public success of Oprah’s Book Club (begun in 1996 and ending with the talk show on May 25, 2011), but their literary merits remain controversial. A now-infamous exchange between author Jonathan Franzen and television talk show and book club host Oprah Winfrey demonstrates the writer's anxiety about the contamination of his literary work by the popularity of a mass (female) audience. After Franzen declined to have his novel The Corrections featured on Oprah's Book Club, he was assailed by accusations of elitism and bad manners. Realizing his PR gaffe, Franzen quickly apologized and reneged, but not before Winfrey rescinded her offer [15]. The incident provided a touchstone for critics to weigh in on a major divide between academic and lay reading styles, a divide that recapitulates modernist-era concerns about mass culture and feminization [16].

<8> In defense of the Book Club, English professor Cecilia Konchar Farr emphasizes Oprah’s renewal of the novel’s “talking life,” borrowing a phrase from one of Toni Morrison’s appearances on the show: “Reading is solitary but that’s not its only life. It should have a talking life, a discourse that follows” [17]. The collection of essays on Oprah's Book Club Farr edits with Jaime Harker, The Oprah Affect, plays on the "Oprah Effect" described in Publishers Weekly in terms of an imbalance between "celebrity authority" and "trusting readers" 18]. While the essays in the collection range widely in their evaluations, collectively they, in Farr's words, “articulate and even embrace the vibrant, accessible tradition of American mass cultural, consumerist, social engagement with literature." Contributor Kathleen Rooney (author of Reading With Oprah) defends Oprah's influence of American literacy: “Not only has Winfrey not contributed to any sort of cultural ‘dumbing down,’ she has also actively cultivated a widespread literary ‘smartening up’” [19].

<9> Oprah's Book Club demonstrates the breadth and vibrancy of a culture of reading among a wide swath of American women. But critics have targeted book clubs for encouraging a style which has been described as "literature-as-therapy," referring to "the attitude that takes up a novel in the same spirit as one would a self-help manual or a celebrity’s up-from-under memoir about cocaine addiction…a coarsening, or at least the addition of an external utilitarian goal to a process that insists above all on itself" [20]. In Muse in the Machine: American Fiction and Mass Publicity, Mark Conroy insists on the distinction between this "Oprahphobia" and blatant misogyny by reframing the debate as a question of literary interpretation: literature-as-therapy being "utilitarian" and therefore subject to the sneers of adherents of l'art pour l'art [21]. But as we have seen in Huyssen’s characterization of modernism, misogyny can be seen as part of the founding impulse of the distinction between utilitarian motives and those imagined to be more transcendent or disinterested [22].

<10> The equation of “literature-as-therapy” with the feminine is in fact continuous with a history of misogynist influence in designating authors and readers according to “brows.” And while I argue that the gender of readers has affected critics’ assessments of books and book clubs, the distinction between the uses of literature as “utilitarian” or “entertainment” and vaguely “higher” intellectual pursuits rests on several fallacies, including but not limited to gender bias. The first concerns the distinction between high art and entertainment for the masses, which I address above according to Huyssen’s gendered lens. Not only does the highbrow/lowbrow distinction emerge as a reaction of masculine elites to the purported feminization of culture; it also responds to class fears, as social changes in the early twentieth century—modernization, immigration, and industrialization—threaten the old elite's social power. Lawrence Levine describes this process in his monograph Highbrow/Lowbrow, a work that critically intervened in the culture wars being waged around college syllabi in the late 1980s. Levine exposes how much of what is now considered “high” culture was in fact part of the social life of a broad swath of the American public in the nineteenth-century: Shakespeare, opera, musical performances, and art museums, he argues, were not then restricted to the enjoyment of the elite [23]. While Levine's account of the historical contingency of high culture contributed to the opening of some sectors of the academy to the value of popular culture, the culture wars continue today in a variety of new, as well as familiar, forms (such as the Oprah-Franzen skirmish).

<11> The second fallacy of the “brow” distinction concerns the uses of reading, and the assumption that highbrow readers and writers deconstruct the artist’s craft, while middle or low-brow readers seek entertainment and solace. Middlebrow readership, according to Janice Radway, “would rather be entertained and instructed about certain knowable problems and truths…than be asked to duplicate the artist’s own labor” [24]. Simon Stow in “The Way We Read Now” takes would-be champions of democratic reading Martha Nussbaum and Richard Rorty to task for overstepping their literary authority in dictating the terms of interpretation [25]. Stow holds up Oprah as an example of a more intellectually honest approach to critical conversation, as opposed to disingenuous critical “objectivity”: “Lay readers instinctively seem to understand that, when they are talking about the novels they have read, they are talking about their own moral and political reactions” [26].

<12> In “Beware the Furrow of the Middlebrow: Searching for Paradise on The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Timothy Aubry analyzes a particular episode of Oprah's Book Club that features a critical exchange between readers of the novel Paradise and its author, Toni Morrison. Readers struggled with the novel's difficulty, and Morrison struggled to respond graciously to an audience eager for answers to its ambiguities. Aubry finds that the Paradise episode exemplifies the conflict, for Oprah and Morrison, between populism and pedagogy [27]. He cites Morrison’s characterization of her project in Paradise as “construct[ing], with the help of the reader, new utopian models based on the negotiation between author and reader…this joint venture of collectively envisioning and producing paradise…a difficult, endless task" [28]. While the discomfort of Oprah, Morrison, and book club members during the discussion of Paradise demonstrates the tension between different modes of reading (corresponding to the division of the "brows"), more significantly it demonstrates the importance of the Book Club in modeling a public rapprochement among these modes. Rather than indicating the incommensurability of "high," "low" and "middlebrow," the exchange shows readings of various types to be complementary and adaptable.

<13> It is difficult to prove exactly how much of an influence Oprah Winfrey’s show has had on American readers. What is indisputable is that it capitalizes on and expands an existing audience of women. The Book Club model elicited the adherence of many avid readers by unabashedly fusing the emotional and intellectual appreciation of literature, by taking seriously an audience of committed readers and crediting their interpretations as interesting, if not academic. The reluctance of literary scholars to consider the significance of women’s reading groups partakes of direct and indirect forms of misogyny—indirectly, through the ways that misogyny contributed to the formation of cultural and academic biases such as the “brows,” and more directly through the failure to notice or celebrate growing female readership amidst media panic about the purported “death of the novel.”

Audiobooks as Literature

<14> Concerns about the “death of print” have intensified as television, the Internet, and various forms of digital multimedia entertainment compete for the attention of Americans. Publishers have adapted to the new media environment by promoting e-books downloadable to a variety of e-reader devices such the Kindle (Amazon.com), Nook (Barnes & Noble), Novo (Borders), and iPad. In the flurry of response to the burgeoning market for digital books, the literary technology of the audiobook has remained largely unheralded. While much has been made of the similarities and differences between digital and print text (e.g. screen glare, color, annotation, etc.), attitudes about audiobooks may illuminate more starkly perceptions about the boundaries of the literary [29].

<15> Audio formats have overtaken print among American consumers of fiction. 28% of Americans report listening to audiobooks, while only 7 to 12% report reading regularly [30]. While audiobook publishers report that they once encountered condescension from their print counterparts, the burgeoning popularity of audiobooks, with the vocal support of respected authors like Toni Morrison and Barbara Kingsolver, has lent legitimacy to these formats. No longer only considered an impoverished derivative of so-called serious reading, audiobooks are widely acknowledged to constitute a vibrant site of literary activity. In turn, the promotion of audiobooks in popular forums such as Oprah's Book Club has extended the audience for literary fiction to a wider group of consumers.

<16> The first surge in audiobook popularity occurred in the 1980s after oil crises prompted Americans to purchase Japanese cars, many of which included cassette players as part of their standard equipment [31]. While the automobile remains a primary site of listening for audiences today, downloadable recordings have made audiobooks both more accessible and more adaptable to a variety of settings. From the inception of "talking books" for the blind during the 1930s through today, libraries have been the chief purchasers of books on record, tape and CD [32]. The unwieldiness of and expense of, for example, eight cassettes of As I Lay Dying for sixty-five dollars, prevented individual consumers from investing in those formats. The near ubiquity of .mp3 players today makes audiobooks appeal to a much wider audience, creating a demand for the simultaneous release of new books in audio and print formats. As Jeannie Kim, Vice President of Reagent Books, reports, reflecting a wider trend of audio sales guiding publishers' decisions, "we have to ask ourselves, 'Is this a book that will work well both in print and in audio?'" [33].

<17> The growing popularity of audiobooks has not prevented enthusiasts—professionals and lay listeners alike—from encountering condescension from print adherents. One publisher tells of a particularly haughty colleague who, when solicited for collaboration, replied “our customers are readers,” as if audiobooks were only appropriate for the disabled or illiterate. A 2007 Record article reports that attendees at a book fair “bristled” when asked if they had ever “read an audiobook” and “[replied] coldly ‘No, we prefer to read real books’" [34]. There are several assumptions that fuel these attitudes.

<18> Many assume that audiobooks are abridged, whereas, according to the most recent APA survey, 85% of audiobooks produced are unabridged. Some think of audiobooks as a children’s format, when in fact 87% of audiobook consumers are adults. Others, perhaps having first encountered medical lectures or self-help books on tape, are surprised to hear that fiction titles dominate sales at 69%. In August 2009 I distributed surveys among audiobook listeners in my acquaintance and through university English departments. Of the 43 who responded, many associated the format with "light" or "non-serious" reading: "Generally I pick 'light' stories, knowing that I won't have the same experience as reading a book at home." "I wouldn't listen to any 'serious' literature on audiobook because of this—even if I weren't distracted, I still think it's easy to miss things." "I would speak of a book as having 'read' it, but I wouldn’t assume the same mastery" [35]. Listeners expressed concern about wavering attention spans and other factors that compromise aural comprehension. "Actual books have no 'pace' other than the one you're reading at, but audiobooks have a pace of their own, that I think hinders my comprehension," reports one reader [36]. 

<19> Many survey respondents, however, were quick to defend the merits of audiobook listening, pointing out, "one can be distracted in any circumstance" and "I often listen to books I have read and find that I 'hear' things I didn't 'see.'" While some listeners reported being unable to appreciate literary qualities such as Nabokov's unique sentence structure in the audio format, others could enjoy notoriously complex authors on car trips ("Proust saved our sanity in the last phases of a three-week drive last summer. We hung on every word."). Several respondents in fact specifically credited audiobooks with preserving the literary qualities traditionally associated with print in an increasingly time-pressured and distracted media environment: "The nature of internet reading (shortened bits) has definitely changed my reading habits, and I rarely read for hours at a time anymore. I miss that coziness. Audiobooks let me 'read' good, long books, digest them slowly." Others surveyed echoed this view of recorded books as a bastion of literary attention, saying “Sometimes it’s easier to listen to classics that I might not make it through in print” and “I listen to books that I wouldn’t normally take the time to read” [37].

<20> Sven Birkerts in Gutenberg Elegies defends the literary against the encroachment of television and internet as the “bride of silence and slow time" [38]. If audiobooks allow listeners "to listen to books [they] wouldn't normally take the time to read," then alarmists like Birkerts could view them as either complementary or competitive media, the saving grace or the nail in the coffin of print. Such apocalyptic rhetoric characterizes many discussions of "old" versus "new" media, but as Kathleen Fitzpatrick argues in The Anxiety of Obsolescence, concerns about the "death" of the novel may reveal more about the beliefs of its would-be eulogizers than about the state of the genre's vitality [39]. Fitzpatrick explores protective attitudes toward print, and finds elitism implicit in most critiques of new media (such as Birkirts'). Against forms of media panic Fitzpatrick allies herself with theorists like Joseph Tabbi, who emphasizes the continuity between traditional and emerging reading practice: "what has changed is not the book per se but the way that books can be read now. The end of books is more accurately the end of academic readings that isolate texts from the larger media ecology" [40]. Fitzpatrick argues that technophobia and technophilia alike mask deeper anxieties about changing power relations among cultural producers, and that indeed postmodernism itself arises largely as a reaction by white male elites seeking both to create a new kind of authority to compensate for a failed Marxist vision, evacuating questions of identity in order to appropriate a position of critique from the increasingly public voice of marginalized groups. The discourse announcing the death of the novel has served to police the boundaries of the literary throughout the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first century.

<21> Assessments of audiobooks as a form of literary engagement replay familiar arguments about changing media that emerge with new technologies. The internet and e-books have garnered the lion's share of critical attention on so-called "new media," but attitudes about the audiobook have a great deal to tell us about changing reading habits and evolving ideas of the literary. While the gravitas of a recorded book is in many ways a product of the perceived quality of its textual original, assessments of its quality also arise from the set of attitudes that ascribe or deny cultural value to the act of listening itself. When Charles Dickens, or, for that matter, Toni Morrison, reads aloud, is it literature? What about Candace Bushnell? Is it literature if you listen to Anna Karenina while driving, eating, or vacuuming the carpet? (While some readers express concerns about distractions interfering with aural comprehension, no less an adherent of print than Stanley Fish describes in his reader-response criticism the prevalence of distraction from print.)

<22> Like Oprah’s Book Club, audiobooks have been viewed as a “dumbing down” of the literary, particularly for an audience of domestic women. In fact both have been subject to outdated elitism; audiobooks and women's reading clubs are not destroying reading habits but sustaining them. It is academics that stand to miss out by failing to appreciate the most important sites of literary revival in our time. Literary fiction itself was not included in university curricula until the 1930s, after it had first proved pedagogically useful in the British colonies [41]. Perhaps audiobooks must demonstrate pedagogical applications before achieving widespread academic legitimacy. Studies already show them to be useful in fostering literacy at the elementary grade levels. A recent survey by librarian Teri Lesesne found that audiobooks used in conjunction with print aided elementary school students' reading comprehension and fluency. She cites an analogous study by Mitchell Levine that found a 34% edge in comprehension scores, 65% fluency gain, and 77% more pages read by students using audiobooks versus the control group [42].

<23> For some, the popularity of recorded books accompanies these latter practices as part of a general decline in Americans' literacy and attention span. Surveys have shown, however, that using new media formats is most often concurrent with higher rates of “old” media usage; internet users are more likely to consume print media, and audiobook listeners are more, and not less, likely to read books. Studies prepared for the Electronic Document Systems Foundation in 1997 corroborate this optimistic view of the fate of reading in an electronic age. The report Network, Screen, and Page: The Future of Reading in a Digital Age finds “there is a positive correlation between computer usage and reading, and new technologies are associated with increased use of other media, not decreasing use” [43]. Reassuring readers that “the best available national time-use data suggest that reading occupies a fairly steady niche in the repertoire of Americans’ time-use practices,” the study observes:

Even as more and more Americans go on-line and find themselves looking at a screen rather than a printed page, they will still be reading. If reading patterns hold—that individuals tend to read more as they get older and that computer users read more than non-users—we may indeed expect an overall increase in both aggregate per capita reading time as the huge baby-boom population ages and as more and more people go on- line. (12)

The surveys I conducted reflect this correlation between increased media use and reading. While most users began listening to audiobooks to ease the monotony of a long car trip, they went on to incorporate audiobooks into daily routines. At a time when increasing portions of our days are spent looking at computer screens, the audio format promises relief from eye-strain and the luxury of another human voice [44].

<24> I encountered a wide range of response on the subject of audiobooks in education. While some listeners noted how audiobooks can complement children’s reading skills, there was more ambiguity on the subject of audiobooks in a literature class. The major barrier to audiobooks applications in higher education is the obvious impediment to re-reading and close reading. Literature professors in particular rely on students' ability to re-read, repeat, and annotate texts. While most of my survey respondents provided varieties of "of course" when asked if audiobook listening "counts" as reading, many hedged when asked to specify whether they would allow students to listen to a book, rather than read it, for a literature class. "Certainly if the student were visually impaired" came the common answer, but most agreed that the kind of reading, especially close reading, and re-reading one performs for class cannot be accomplished aurally. This necessity is underscored by audiobook listeners reports, such as "When I read an author like Nabokov, I want to see how he constructs the sentence in order to create the mood or effect he’s looking for. I’m unable to do that without looking at the words."

<25> Would there not be some advantages, however, to shifting the focus of literature classes from the eye to the ear? Many surveys showed variations of the following opinion: "I feel that listening to a well produced audio book can sometimes imprint the story on you more strongly than reading alone." As a literature professor, one may devote a great deal of class time to enabling students' aural sense, especially when reading poetry. Many students already have aural acuity for music and tones of voice, which can aid immeasurably in the tuning of the ear the subtleties of poetic melody and meaning. Particularly as we try to help students develop the critical skills to navigate the current and future media ecology, is it not worthwhile to develop the capacity for close listening as well as close reading?

Conclusion: Breaking with Brows

<26> No one I surveyed described either the audiobook format or particular books as "highbrow," "lowbrow," or "middlebrow." Elitist and anti-elitist sentiments took different forms. Like other forms of prejudice that are no longer publically acknowledged, the discourse of the "brows" now hides itself in other guises. Indeed, Oprah’s Book Club itself has become in some circles a byword for subpar or less-than-literary reading. The subtle assessments of race, gender, class included in these ostensibly literary judgments is not only traceable to individuals, but to the systemic influence of power and privilege on the formation of taste and talent. Hindsight towards the history of the brows easily confirms the misogyny of the past century. Let us attempt clearer sight towards the present, and consider the social formation of our own labels of literariness. Debates concerning so-called “new media” are not free of “old” attitudes. There is often an automatic and unexamined reaction to emerging technologies as anathema to the traditional values of the printed word. For many dedicated readers however audio formats enhance literary life. Literary fiction began as an oft-derided form of popular entertainment; if audiobooks make fiction available to audiences in a wider variety of settings than print, perhaps the rapprochement between art and entertainment should be viewed as a reinvigoration of literature and a welcome relaxation of artificial boundaries such as outdated “brows.”

Endnotes

[1] An exception to this oversight is the recent collection Audiobooks, Literature, and Sound Studies edited by Matthew Rubery (New York: Routledge, 2011).

[2] 2007 Associated Press survey cited in Eric Weiner, “Why Women Read More Than Men,” September 5, 2007 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14175229.

[3] Weiner.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York, Oxford, 1987)7.

[6] Ibid., 8. Armstrong studies the conduct books, educational treatises, and domestic fiction written by and for women and finds that the written representation of the self creates a new ideal of economic and psychological personhood that is specifically gendered.

[7] Jonathan Yardley, forward, Who Reads Literature? The Future of the United States as a Nation of Readers. Originally appeared in The Washington Post Aug 28, 1989. Yardley comments “The perceived image of the ‘literary’ American reader as a bearded male academic in a tweed jacket with leather patches bears only scant connection to reality,” ix.

[8] Ibid.

[9] Ibid. Citing increased opportunities for women in the publishing and promotion of literature—although noting “how large those opportunities will be is questionable at best”--Yardley ends on the triumphal note: “it’s a woman’s world now, and if we are to have in the next generation a literature of any consequence, it will be because women make it so.”

[10] Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986).

[11] Ibid., 45.

[12] bid., 46. This myth of course compounds the practical and economic challenges women writers face with one of subjectivity.

[13] Long, Elizabeth. Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003) ix.

[14] Ibid., xvi.

[15] Oprah apparently forgave Franzen when in September 2010 she chose Franzen’s novel Freedom for the Book Club.

[16] For a humane and balanced description of the debacle and its repercussions, see Laura Miller, “Book Lovers’ Quarrel” Salon.com 26 October 2001. http://www.salon.com/books/feature/2001/10/26/franzen_winfrey

[17] Quoted in Michael Perry, “Resisting Paradise: Toni Morrison, Oprah Winfrey, and the Middlebrow Audience” in The Oprah Affect, 121.

[18] Ibid. 76, 228.

[19] Ibid., 317. This is particularly evident, claims Rooney, in the Book Club’s second incarnation, with Winfrey’s subtle interrogation of what makes a classic and the considerable supplementary pedagogy of the web-based material. Rooney claims Winfrey illustrates Lawrence Levine’s point in Highbrow/Lowbrow that “culture is a process, not a fixed condition; it is the product of unremitting action between the past and the present.” (Levine 249; Rooney 318)

[20] Mark Conroy, Muse in the Machine: American Fiction and Mass Publicity (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2004), 176.

[21] Ibid.

[22] In fact, Conroy's own Muse in the Machine questions the distinction he seems to support in his description of “Oprahphobia”:

…literature, from at least the time of romanticism, was no realm set apart from the commercial arena, but rather a contesting of the ground of the ‘Publick’ that had been seized first by meretricious product without aspirational intent. In a real sense, the so-called art novel is the latecomer, the potboiler the legitimate contender.

The inescapable conclusion is that the field of mass distribution itself formed the conditions for serious prose literature in two contradictory ways: it made novels and prose fiction generally possible—that is, commercially viable—and the run of its products provided something for serious writers to undermine with their own elitist example. (13)

[23] Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988).

[24] Radway, Reading the Romance (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1984) 69.

[25] Simon Stow, "The Way We Read Now," in The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club. Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), 277-293.

[26] Ibid, 284.

[27] Timothy Aubry, “Beware the Furrow of the Middlebrow: Searching for Paradise on The Oprah Winfrey Show,” in The Oprah Affect: Critical Essays on Oprah’s Book Club. Cecilia Konchar Farr and Jaime Harker, eds. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008) 183.

[28] Aubry 168.

[29] E-book publishers are currently at work on integrated technology that would allow readers to alternate between audio and e-reader versions of a book.

[30] Audio Publishers Association 2008 Sales and Consumer Survey, available at http://www.audiopub.org/resources-industry-data.asp. Alan Fram reports in an Associated Press article printed in The Washington Post: “When the Gallup Poll asked in 2005 how many books people had at least started …the typical answer was five. That was down from 10 in 1999, but close to the 1990 response of six. In 2004, a National Endowment for the Arts report titled "Reading at Risk" found only 57 percent of American adults had read a book in 2002, a four percentage point drop in a decade. The study faulted television, movies and the Internet. Who are the 27 percent of people the AP-Ipsos poll found hadn't read a single book this year.” Alan Fram, “One in Four Read No Books Last Year,” The Washington Post, Tuesday, August 21, 2007. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2007/08/21/AR2007082101045.html.

[31] Audio Publishers Association http://www.audiopub.org/resources-industry-data.asp

[32] Libraries continue to enable 40% of the total audiobook consumption, offering rental downloads as well as the traditional books on cassette and CD. In 2006 CDs accounted for 77% of audiobooks sales, followed by digital downloads (14%). Jim Milliot, "New Formats Drove Audio Sales in 2006," Publishers Weekly, 8/24/2007 http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6471696.html

[33] Sarah Nassauer and Stacy Anderson, "Getting an Earful of Printed Words: Downloads, Small Devices Draw a Wider Audience Of Audiobook Listeners" Wall Street Journal September 28, 2006; Page D3. Kim is vice president and publisher at Reagent Press, a company that went from producing about 50% of its books in audio, to 100% in 2006.

[34] Evelyn Shih, "Books go high-tech" The Record. Monday, December 10, 2007

[35] Harrison, K. C. "Audiobooks" Survey. August-September 2009. Survey reports are anonymous and will be cited hereafter as Surveys.

[36] Ibid.

[37] All prior quotes from Surveys.

[38] ven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age. (New York: Ballantine Books, 1995).

[39] Kathleen Fitzpatrick, The Anxiety of Obsolescence: The American Novel in the Age of Television, (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2006).

[40] Joseph Tabbi, "A Review of Books in the Age of their Technological Obsolescence," ebr: The Electronic Book Review 1 (Winter 95/96). Altx.com/ebr/tabbi.ht

[41] Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (New York: Oxford, 1998).

[42] Teri Lesesne, "Audiobooks: How and Why," Powerpoint presentation, Sam Houston State University Department of Library Science, 2009.

[43] Network, Screen, and Page: The Future of Reading in a Digital Age. Prepared by INTETQUEST and the University of Virginia. Torrance, CA: The Electronic Document Systems Foundation, 1997.

[44] Audiobook users are quick to comment on the importance of a good reader.

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