The Reading Kind

Sophie Corser

Trying to think about reading as work, as a form of labour, can make me feel like a massive spoilsport. Like I’m betraying something I hold close, or letting down all the exacting minds that have helped to show just how vital reading is. Tributes to reading keep getting published; several appeared last year, geared towards wide audiences and looking at material culture, gender, racism. Emma Smith’s Portable Magic focuses on books as objects, held in our hands. Helen Taylor’s Why Women Read Fiction explores why women are the primary buyers and readers of fiction in the UK. Elaine Castillo’s How to Read Now argues for a better politics of reading books, TV, film, and history. These books are about what reading is for, and Smith, Taylor, Castillo, and countless others all emphasise, rightly and variously, the transformative power of reading literature. And I don’t disagree! But what if reading is also your job? Or, more likely, part of your job? How do we think about it as work?

I work as a research fellow in literary studies, employed by both a university and a research funding body. And for a while now, I have been hunting down admissions of the reality of reading for work. Or, not reading. These are often mere remarks in far larger pieces of writing, but, luckily, I am trained to notice details. I love a particular aside by anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, known by many for his work on ‘bullshit jobs’. In an article on ‘the bullshitization of academic life’, he thinks through the increased demand for workers in academic management, teaching, or research to carry out tasks they view as ‘pointless’. Graeber lists some of the duties (many related to common academic bugbears like ‘impact’ or the Research Excellence Framework) that get in the way of teaching, ‘or, God forbid, reading a book. (I can’t remember the last time I read a book. I mean, like, a whole book, cover to cover. It basically never happens…)’

Graeber’s grouching is about time. Time that’s filled by the demands of a marketised system of higher education. Time that could be spent reading. Appropriately, in her fantastic Reading and the Making of Time in the Eighteenth Century, Christina Lupton refuses to thank funders in her Acknowledgements section only. Instead, she ends her book by detailing the ways in which specific research funding ‘facilitated absolutely’ the reading work she needed to do. She worries over the increased scarcity of this kind of funding, where reading is the aim, where grants enable ‘terms away from other kinds of work’. Reading, as she repeatedly makes clear, needs and hopes for time.

I have that kind of time. Until the end of August, anyway. At which point, rather than return to the ‘other kinds of work’ Lupton references – i.e., return to the responsibilities of a full lectureship, which funding has temporarily exempted her from – I will likely be unemployed or working outside of higher education. Please, don’t misunderstand me. My current job, a two-year postdoctoral research fellowship, has been an absolute fucking gift. Funding for two years of managing my own time and my own reading. I was lucky to get it, and it’s allowed me to spend time carefully carrying out what’s often felt like a sweeping expansion of how I read and think. People in permanent academic jobs have expressed envy at the time I have for research. As my contract end looms, I’m not always that sympathetic. But of course, temporariness is spreading: even ‘permanent academic job’ feels mostly like a misnomer now, given the extent of recent job cuts in the UK in particular. 

I don’t want to write an account of how shitty it is to be on the academic job market, or how tough it can be for people in academic posts already; great essays on these topics exist. As those essays tend to acknowledge, it’s shitty to be on any job market, and, ultimately, academic jobs aren’t terrible jobs. But as Graeber and Lupton (briefly) make clear in their different ways, reading is a time-consuming activity that’s ostensibly essential to academic employment yet increasingly uncatered for. Whether you’re on an overburdened permanent contract, a strictly fixed-term contract, a crappy combo of the two, or no contract at all, states of employment are relevant to how we think about reading as a form of work.


~



‘At first I thought it was just that you really liked books, just that you were someone who really loved your work.’ This – the opening line of Ali Smith’s short story ‘The ex-wife’ – is so good. I can hear the annoyed double ‘just’, as if the narrator is having a go at me personally. ‘The ex-wife’ is the story of a break-up and its aftermath, told in the second person. It opens with the narrator numbering three damning examples of ‘what it was like for me’, i.e., as we later find out, what it was that led to the split between these two nameless characters. In the first, the narrator is woken in the middle of the night. She goes downstairs to find her partner at the table with a pile of books, looking up the lineage of Katherine Mansfield’s cats. Only, we aren’t told, and likely wouldn’t know, that she’s looking up details of the cats owned by a dead bisexual modernist short story writer. Unless we happened to be the kinds of people who also know the names of Mansfield’s cats, and could therefore parse this sentence: ‘I just need to know whether Wing was actually the original kitten of Charlie Chaplin.’ 

We need a little knowledge, likely gained from prior reading. It’s a very sweet sort of knowledge: long-gone cat names. The narrator’s partner rattles on, mentioning ‘a letter to Woolf somewhere’, ‘a kind of family tree’, a kitten called Athenaeum, and another one whose name she can’t remember. ‘You’re looking up her cats now?’, says the narrator, returning to bed.

Mansfield isn’t named for another two pages, and, even then, only after a further puzzle. The narrator, in her second evidential anecdote, is complaining to her partner about cuts at work, ‘something really important, well, important to me at least’:  

And you’d say, God, you know that’s exactly like in psychology. And I’d say, what in psychology, like manic depression or passive aggression? And you’d say, no, not psychology, I don’t mean psychology, I mean pictures, it’s exactly like in pictures, and I’d say, pictures of what?

In communicating the narrator’s confusion, Smith tests us, her readers. ‘Psychology’ and ‘Pictures’ are the titles of two stories by Mansfield. But the narrator’s references are unmarked in print – as they would be in speech – lacking useful capitalisation to help us as we look at the page. If we can figure it out, we get to enjoy the humour of what is a sort of readerly sight gag used to represent a joke of incomprehension. Otherwise, we sit briefly in the same muddle as the narrator until Mansfield is named soon after and both ‘psychology, I mean pictures’ are clarified as story titles. Confusion doesn’t end here, however, as the narrator still doesn’t see any logic to where the conversation has gone: ‘Yeah, I’d say, but I’m struggling to make the link between you telling me the plot of a short story and Johnston email-bullying me at work.’

After night-time research and conversational mismatches, in her third example our narrator finds her partner crying over photographs of Mansfield’s belongings – and dubs Mansfield ‘your ex-wife’. In the first two offered pieces of evidence, the narrator appears to feel deprived of something: a good night’s sleep, a responsive and understanding girlfriend. In the last, she just seems wildly pissed off. ‘And what if your ex-wife doesn’t want people looking at her private stuff? I don’t know that I’d want the general public to be reading my letters or looking at my private writings, even if they did have research grant money to do it…’. 

Reading for work. That’s what the narrator’s (now) ex does. And this reading for work isn’t presented, at least at first, in the warmest light. A biographical, author-focused mode of critical reading and academic research is made out to be parasitic, opportunistic: even, (the narrator asks) ‘a bit necro, no?’. This intense interest in an author’s life and writing has further effects, too, all shown as connected. The narrator’s ex is passionate about her reading, about her work; as a result, she gets research funding, and presumably makes a living from her reading; she cries over it, cares deeply for it; she lets it take over her own life and interfere with her relationship; it interrupts sleep, makes her a bad listener, contributes to the relationship’s end. Reading work bleeds into her life.     

Smith’s narrator isn’t like her ex, of course. She is ‘not very interested in books, or words’. Her work problems are about reports, and meetings, and having to fire colleagues. But then: not long after the break-up, and about a quarter of the way into Smith’s story, Mansfield’s ghost accosts the narrator in a park. She quotes herself extensively, laughs contagiously, throws her arms in the air, has bright and lively eyes. Mansfield haunts and charms the narrator, who talks about her ex (‘one night it was even the genealogy of your cats, for God’s sake’) and then goes on for the rest of ‘The ex-wife’ to read all of Mansfield’s stories, carry out her own research, and write it up in an email to her ex-lover. 

The results of this unsent research are creative and affectionate and collated into an email with a long-gone kitten’s name as the subject: ‘WING’. The narrator lists her findings: 1) Mansfield might have been born in the sky, in flight, in a hot-air balloon, 2) films of Mansfield’s acting work as an extra might have been melted down in the 1920s to make a kind of weather-resistant coating used on aeroplane wings, and 3) there is now a Boeing 737 used by Qantas named ‘The Katherine Mansfield’.

This email, gathering and thematising research, is a record of caring – of loving. The narrator starts this work because she perhaps still has feelings for her ex, yes, and wants to understand her better. But she also cares now, by the end of Smith’s story, about Mansfield and her texts – and maybe it’s possible that by reading further, deeper, more wildly, she is acting on that care. 

While reading provides Smith’s narrator with a kind of rescue, however, I can’t help but see something far more damaging in what reading does for the narrator’s ex. What it does for the researcher on a grant, reading for work in the middle of the night. Somewhere, within this otherwise gorgeous and strange short story, I find a nasty but familiar little set of myths about – as Smith’s opening line goes – really liking books and really loving your work. If you love your work enough, you will succeed! ‘Passion’, particularly if it precludes resting, will be rewarded! To be an effective, successful, and, most of all, financed researcher of literature, you must love and prioritise work over everything else!


~

Towards the end of her study Hooked: Art and Attachment, which asks how and why we care about any and all forms of art, Rita Felski briefly – and uncharacteristically – describes attachments to critical methods, approaches, and theories as ‘another form of love’. Far from replacing a love of literature, she suggests, theory and criticism might provide an additional site for ‘intense cathexis and emotional investment’.

Felski is best known for complaining usefully about the dominance of theory-bound, ‘suspicious’ modes of critical reading, referred to by her and her set as ‘critique’. Across several books, including The Limits of Critique, Felski has invited alternatives to critique, substitutes for those particular ways of reading that look only to ‘interrogate, unmask, expose, subvert, unravel, demystify, destabilize, take issue, and take umbrage’. Her writing is compelling, though I don’t always recognise the cold picture she paints of theory-driven reading (I think some literary theory is tender, soft).

In keeping with her broader project, in Hooked Felski carefully locates the existence of what I’d call beloved theory or theory as love in the past: in a magical time before, as she claims, theory became ‘obligatory’. It’s strange to see her acknowledge even a past potential for emotional investment in certain kinds of theory, when we’re much more used to her defining theory-informed critique as miserably detached, and emphasising attachment, identification, or enchantment as reading responses that might help us fight our way clear of approaches indebted to precisely such gloomy and suspicious theoretical modes.

Perhaps that’s part of why it’s really stuck in my mind. By acceding to theory as once ‘another form of love’, I think Felski slips up: she allows for the possibility of thinking about all sorts of critical reading as something to love, or as love. She’s not alone in representing criticism in this way. But critical reading, surely, is also work

As someone who has happily cried while reading theory (Eve Sedgwick, I love you), I get it. It’s fun and easy to mythologise reading in all its forms, and I spend a lot of my current work hours looking for beautiful ideas about what readers do (when they have the time). Michel de Certeau’s description of how ‘to read is to be elsewhere… to create dark corners into which no one can see’. Minrose Gwin on reading as ‘space travel’, enabling ‘deeply serious fluctuations of identity’. Nora Ephron teasing, ‘I’ve just surfaced from spending several days in a state of rapture – with a book.’ (With a book!)

I also seek out warm and fuzzy accounts of critical reading, and critical approaches that not only allow for but rely on, even thrive on, a sort of excess of emotion or attachment or subjectivity. Queer literary theory and criticism is heaven for this – cf. my hot tears over Sedgwick – and it’s queer lit crit that Felski draws on most heavily in her own mixed attempts to unravel perceived norms of critical reading (as many have pointed out before me). Sedgwick’s famous and impeccably titled essay, ‘Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You’, gets almost mandatory reference in discussions of critical efforts to change critical reading; the ‘reparative reading’ that Sedgwick encourages in her essay finds its energy in contingency, plurality, and hope. 


~

I’ve been talking about reading work from two different angles, perhaps. One is when we read for work, the time we spend on something that might officially or nominally be part of a job. The other is closer to how we read for work, the kind of reading some of us do in particular contexts, the critical methods and habits of the work we do to read and think – and what those proclivities communicate or take for granted. Both of these angles presume – or imagine – a ‘we’ to whom this is all relevant, a ‘we’ invested in the idea that there is value to academic forms of reading, and/or value to reading literature. 

That there is some relationship between the when and how is obvious to me – and it feels all the more obvious as all the more critical reading is undertaken by people who aren’t being paid for it. Who don’t always presume to be paid for it. Who might be uncomfortable with the idea of needing to be paid for it, of giving it fiscal worth. The professor working in the evening, the part-time lecturer reading on her day off, the hourly paid tutor trying to keep up. Or the person who has left higher education employment entirely, but spends the odd Saturday on a research project. What I’m not sure of, though, is how well I’m communicating this link between when and how – how clear I can make something that is fundamentally murky.

I tried recently to figure this out by writing an academic article. ‘Is reading work?’, I pleaded. ‘Or rather, when is reading work?’ I didn’t settle on much clarity. For any reader whose job involves books, the activity of reading shimmers across ‘work’ and ‘rest’. But many of us try to make distinctions, bundling up some of our reading as for pleasure. And literary critics draw lines, too, trying to determine ‘professional’ from so-called ‘lay’ reading. 

If we treat ‘professional’ i.e. critical reading as work, just as I have done in earlier paragraphs here, then we place immense pressure on what divides reading as leisure from reading as labour. A commonly offered difference – one is for fun and one is for money! – crumbles so easily and obviously, if we’ve ever liked our work or done it without pay. 

If ‘professional’ reading is critical, then ‘lay’ reading is allegedly ‘uncritical’. As Michael Warner sums up, ‘forms of uncritical reading – identification, self-forgetfulness, reverie, sentimentality, enthusiasm, literalism, aversion, distraction’ tend to be used to define what instead does count as critical reading. But these divisions collapse too: not least because, as Warner and several others have noticed, supposed qualities of ‘lay’ reading, of reading for fun, for pleasure, for leisure, keep getting co-opted by critics as better modes of critical reading. 

Felski is an obvious example of this sort of reframing. Versions of identification, reverie, and enthusiasm are integral to the improved kinds of reading engagement she hopes for (and, again, show the legacy of queer lit crit in her work). But it’s not that hard to think of other, clearer ways in which these ostensibly ‘uncritical’ qualities fail to determine what’s work and what’s not. 

Here’s Mia You, imagining a couple of readers:

They don’t just like a book; they enjoy it. This might mean they dislike it, they are perplexed by it, they savour each word, they skim through a long chapter, they read it aloud to their mother, they give it as a gift to a lover, they translate it to another language, they compose music inspired by it, they discuss it with others in a class, they write an 8000-word article about it, they read an 8000-word article about it, or they can’t find the right words to describe their reaction to it but they find themselves continuing to think about it. 

You is focused on showing enjoyment as far more complex than ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’, but in doing so she’s also more broadly breaking down attempts to categorise our engagement with texts. This list isn’t a progression, it doesn’t move smoothly from an ‘uncritical’ encounter towards a critical reading: it’s a lovely muddle of liking, disliking, partial reading, engaged reading, reading further, thinking more, responding by making art, sharing with others, losing the right words, or finding a new language. We can, and often do, combine several of these responses.

You’s recent article ‘An exercise in analysis as enjoyment’, goes beyond scholarship like Felski’s in trying to shift the habits and forms of literary criticism. The second half of her article consists of a lengthy reproduced Zoom chat transcript of a group of students listening and responding with You to an experimental recording of a Gertrude Stein play. I’ve rarely seen criticism that’s so fun. You uses this to prove her point (thinking with Stein) that enjoyment is a kind of understanding, by showing us a messy, communal act of reception. Her final joke, I think, is that it is in no way necessary for us to read the full transcript in order to comprehend her argument: we can skim, enjoy, understand.

You acknowledges that, often, ‘Enjoyment is also laborious, even if it is labour taken on willingly and voluntarily.’ Even Felski notes the ‘labor of interpretation’ in Hooked, the extensive time it requires, and how this is part of what fuels our attachments to art. But I’m worrying still. If losing oneself in a book can be of use for work, then where do I go when I want some rest?


~

I’m feeling like a bit of a dampener again. I care about reading, and so, increasingly (and as evidenced by what I’ve been referencing here) I’ve read more and more about the care, love, and attachment of readers. I’ve tried earnestly to allow the strict parameters of my own academic writing to slacken a little, to better express my feelings of doubt or confusion or absorption when reading. To worry less about how that might in turn be read in terms of the REF or by a hiring committee. I am invested in the attempts of other critical readers to do the same. But there must be a way to emphasise all that is positive, partial, and strange about reading without undermining the work that it can require. 

Maybe there isn’t a way. As Nicole Shukin candidly puts it, ‘an aestheticized image of reading as subversive pleasure continues to obscure its recognition as labour’. Shukin holds that to ‘challenge a bourgeois image of reading as pleasure, escape from reality, or leisure’ is to ‘bring reading pleasure into focus as hidden labour, increasingly necessary to the realization of capital’. There’s little that’s gentle or positive in Shukin’s practical treatment of reading work. She refers to her struggles to ever get enough reading done in a new tenure-track job, notes the ‘privilege’ of having that job, and is hyper-aware of ‘the far more grueling forms of material labour’ others do to make her job possible.

Read one way, Smith’s story ‘The ex-wife’ is about a love of literature, a love of reading, the multitude of ways in which reading can inform and enrich and repair our lives. Read this way, the story doesn’t query the worth of reading all of Mansfield’s stories or looking up her cats’ names. Read another way, it’s an effective source for showing how an idea of ‘loving literature’ can cover up – can enable – a total lack of division between work and rest. 

Smith’s opening line, ‘At first I thought it was just that you really liked books, just that you were someone who really loved your work’, is left hanging, open. There’s never a specific answer given to confirm what ‘it’ actually ‘just’ was, if ‘it’ wasn’t ‘just that you really liked books’. Is it that the narrator hadn’t understood the appeal of Mansfield? Or is it that she hadn’t grasped the extent of her partner’s unhealthy obsession with work? Or is it that her partner feels she has to allow her reading work to both be perceived as loved and take up all her time and attention?

Reading as work suggests there are demands to be fulfilled, pressures and expectations and job requirements, disciplinary norms to be understood, training available, specialisms to be developed, CVs to be populated. We learn how to frame reading as work, and we learn how to elide that work. Shukin pinpoints the genesis of her own reading struggles, miserably, at graduate school: ‘Needless to say, graduate studies trained me into my current situation […] enabling, I now realize, a fetishization of reading labour.’ A literature PhD is supposedly where someone should learn how to prescribe their own reading, how to create a reading list, how to read and write critically, and how to fit that work healthily into a life. But while PhD programmes require final proof that you’ve understood how to dissect a field and read your way into an original contribution to knowledge, many candidates end a PhD having absorbed atrocious attitudes to work itself. Including the idea that it should overwhelm our lives if we care enough and want to do well. 

A PhD horror story shared on Twitter caught my eye recently. Someone wrote about their heinous thesis adviser, who claimed to have worked so hard during their own PhD that they’d even managed to submit a chapter – on time! – right after their mother had died. The adviser had then used this personal tale to berate their student for ‘not working hard enough’. I know why this ‘caught my eye’. My own mother died three years into my PhD. I stopped working. I also stopped reading: my copy of Hilary Mantel’s A Place of Greater Safety remains half-read, and a still-folded page corner marks a time when work couldn’t have mattered any less and when even reading Mantel ‘for pleasure’ felt impossible. A Place of Greater Safety was too hard, Mantel’s detail was too much, and I couldn’t handle the ever-present threat that accompanies reading her historical novels: waiting for this or that character to die and knowing how it will happen.

Another Mantel novel got abandoned again during the first lockdown in 2020; The Mirror and the Light is still waiting for me, with all its attractive heft. And that’s a further category of reading anecdote I watch out for: stopped reading. Lupton, for example, confesses to not reading books for a time in 2016 and 2017, in response to the intensity of world news. It’s a rare and reassuring admission to find in the middle of an academic study. Things get in the way.

And yet. The strength of reading’s representation as a subversive pleasure is evident everywhere, begging for attention. For each collected instance of stopped or interrupted reading, I’ve got another example lined up of reading as skiving, reading as slacking off. What Shukin describes as ‘a bourgeois image of reading as pleasure, escape from reality’ is everywhere – and (I feel like I’m letting her down) I find myself hugging it to me. I’ve always liked the characters in Jilly Cooper’s books who read novels as a way of avoiding other work or responsibilities. There’s a great and weird story in Clare Sestanovich’s Objects of Desire, in which a woman is meant to have spent years writing about a famous author’s archive – but has instead been ‘doing nothing but reading his letters over and over again’. In a review of Castillo’s How to Read Now, Kathy Chow admits to enjoying ‘a crash course in contemporary American reading culture’ rather than revising for ‘grad-school exams’ in religious studies. And in Literature After Feminism, Felski tells the story of a weekend conference – at which she slyly read a book instead of listening to any papers. 

Reading presented in this way remains so attractive, so pleasing, and so recognisable. I used to skip days at art college, as an ungrateful and privileged teenager, to lie on my bed in halls and read Jane Austen. I probably love the skiving readers in Jilly Cooper because I’ve spent so much time reading Cooper specifically as a way of skiving. When an old flatmate told me last year that he liked to spend early mornings reading before going into the office, I knew I’d never be able to trust myself to do the same. I’d be too tempted to keep reading. To keep reading the wrong thing, neglecting my reading work. Book A is for my fun, Book B is for my job. I’d expose the fragility of the silly structures I build to try to determine in advance whether my reading will provide me with rest, or further my research; help me get to sleep, or enable me to build an argument; give my brain a break from job applications, or develop my suitability as a job candidate. 


I’m tired. And I’m not sure I particularly like how I’ve begun to read Smith’s ‘The ex-wife’ in these last few pages. Even provisionally reducing it to a story about someone whose ex had a crap work/life balance feels stingy and in bad faith. I think maybe it’s much more about reading as connection, reading for an absent other. Critical reading is reading with a chorus – this essay is stacked with other voices – but all reading is connective. I don’t feel about authors the way Smith’s narrator’s ex does – I’d even argue that the image of Mansfield’s ghost, mooching around a park and insisting on being listened to, is an excellent and affectionate joke at the expense of researchers who do treat authors as saints or oracles. But there’s plenty else in the ex’s story to recognise in myself. I’ve excitedly brought up a bit of a book in conversation, only to fail totally in explaining how it’s relevant. I’ve been a bad listener, with a head full of something I’ve been reading. And I’ve got an old copy of The Letters of Katherine Mansfield on my bookshelf. On page 227, in a letter to Virginia Woolf from April 1919, there’s a diagram of a cat family tree listing Athenaeum and April as the kittens of Charles Chaplin. ‘The second kitten, April, was born during the night, a snug, compact little girl.’


Sophie Corser is a writer and researcher. She is currently working on two book projects: an academic monograph exploring representations of women reading in contemporary women’s writing, and a collection of essays about connective reading, grief, and queerness. Her first book, The Reader’s Joyce: ‘Ulysses’, Authorship, and the Authority of the Reader, was published by Edinburgh University Press in 2022. Sophie’s research and writing have been funded by the Irish Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust, and in 2023, she was awarded a Madeleine L’Engle Travel Research Fellowship from Smith College Libraries Special Collections. This funded a Spring visit to Northampton, MA, to spend a week with three decades of Alison Bechdel’s archived fan mail and develop work on communal methods of reception.