Locating the Goods in Contemporary Literary Culture: Between the Book and the Archive

Abstract

In his essay “First Steps Toward a History of Reading,” Robert Darnton argues that we should focus on depictions of reading if we want to uncover what people thought took place when they read in a given period. This article identifies the goods of contemporary fiction by tracing the new mise-en-scène used to depict reading on websites and in recent literary bestsellers. Immersion is still celebrated as the basis for reading pleasure, but it has been relocated in the arc between the book and the archive. Readers are lost between the pages of the book as a material or virtual object, but in another imagined space readers find themselves in infinite libraries, which are infinitely personalizable. The appeal of list-making and the ways in which the curation of a personal library becomes an exuberant form of self-expression indicate a fundamental redefinition of what reading means in contemporary digital cultures.