{"id":1370,"date":"2018-11-25T12:42:59","date_gmt":"2018-11-25T12:42:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/?p=1370"},"modified":"2025-09-21T18:32:10","modified_gmt":"2025-09-21T22:32:10","slug":"jonathan-rose-readers-liberation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/2018\/11\/25\/jonathan-rose-readers-liberation\/","title":{"rendered":"Jonathan Rose, Readers\u2019 Liberation<\/em>"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Jonathan Rose, Readers\u2019 Liberation<\/em><\/h1>\n\n
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Jesse Cordes Selbin<\/a><\/div>\n\n
in <\/span>Book review<\/a><\/div><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n
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Jonathan Rose. Readers\u2019 Liberation<\/a><\/em>. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. viii, 208 p. ISBN 9780198723554. US$20.95.<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Jonathan Rose has long excelled at finding an audience among the ordinary readers whose history he has spent a career tracing, and Readers\u2019 Liberation<\/em> should prove no exception. Engaging, accessible, and polemical, it is a perfect fit for Oxford\u2019s Literary Agenda series and is likely to attract those drawn to his earlier works, from The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes<\/em> (2001) to The Literary Churchill<\/em> (2014). Written for and about \u201cthe general reader,\u201d Readers\u2019 Liberation<\/em> argues that \u201creading can be and has been the most fundamental expression of human freedom, even in repressive societies.\u201d Rose\u2019s is a history of reading \u201cbuilt from the ground up\u201d and is finely attentive to the diverse modes of engagement adopted by ordinary readers across time and place (vii). <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\nAmong academics, too, and especially scholars of reading, this\nmonograph deserves a wide reception. Its impressive and convincing\nspan across historical eras and cultural contexts enables a\ncomparative perspective beyond the scope of most histories of\nreading, which generally confine their focus to a particular culture,\nera, or demographic. And Rose makes a vital case for regarding\nreaders as more than the passive products of ideological doctrines\ndisseminated, elicited, or enforced through literature. This\nexhaustive and richly detailed history reveals even actively\ndisenfranchised historical subjects\u2014dissenters and dissidents,\nslaves, women, the incarcerated\u2014as actors possessed of keen\nimagination and intellect. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Readers\u2019 Liberation<\/em>\u2019s eight chapters address author-reader relations, resistant student reading, middlebrow genres and aspirations, marginalized readers, prison readers, media savvy and skepticism, \u201cfayned\u201d (fake) news, and the contemporary American educational system. These are unmistakably relevant issues, but Rose\u2019s account also detects them at earlier moments of apparent crisis. This longer perspective generates a welcome sense of optimism: reading once promoted the intellectual independence and healthy skepticism necessary for education and liberation, Rose shows, and so it might again today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Yet Rose does not\nignore the threats to creative and critical thinking that still face\nordinary readers. His final chapter, \u201cDeath to Gradgrind,\u201d\ntargets the flattened, instrumental reading practices that dominate\nK-12 education in the age of Common Core and proposes a vision for\nliterary education that is indisputably superior, if rather utopian\nin the age of Betsy DeVos (188-89). Surprisingly absent here is any\ndiscussion of the 2015 PMLA<\/em> roundtable on \u201cLearning to\nRead,\u201d which debated the flaws (and conceivable merits) of Common\nCore theory and practice across a series of nuanced, wide-ranging\nessays that might have both bolstered and challenged the program Rose\nproposes.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The history of lay\nreading is long and unwieldy; Rose\u2019s book is short and taut.\nOccasionally this results in a reductive treatment of opposing\narguments. He provocatively contends that liberated readers today are\nmore likely to thrive outside universities than within them, but\nmuddies that contention with flippant, and occasionally uncharitable,\ndiscussions of thorny issues like identity politics, trigger\nwarnings, and free speech. At other points, his arguments\noversimplify diverse schools of thought, as in blanket references to\ngroups like \u201cthe feminists\u201d (145 and passim) or the charge that\n\u201cPostcolonial critics tend to treat the transmission of Western\nliterature to the rest of the world as a form of cultural\nimperialism, but it\u2019s not quite that simple\u201d (31). Although\ngently hedged by the word \u201ctend,\u201d this characterization still\nsidelines much recent scholarship that openly disavows such a\nperspective as simplistic and insufficient. \n<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, Readers\u2019 Liberation<\/em> is an important and lively contribution to an emerging scholarship on the idiosyncrasies and inventiveness of common readers across time, and it provides an often beautiful defense of the power of free reading to open minds, cultivate ethical commitments, and plant seeds of resistance. At a time of intense pessimism about the ability of mass culture to expand rather than limit capacities for critical thought, Rose has unearthed a usable history in which we might locate models for a better future.    <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jesse Cordes Selbin
University of California, Berkeley <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n


<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jonathan Rose has long excelled at finding an audience among the ordinary readers whose history he has spent a career tracing, and Readers\u2019 Liberation should prove no exception. Engaging, accessible, and polemical, it is a perfect fit for Oxford\u2019s Literary Agenda series and is likely to attract those drawn to his earlier works, from The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) to The Literary Churchill (2014). Written for and about \u201cthe general reader,\u201d Readers\u2019 Liberation argues that \u201creading can be and has been the most fundamental expression of human freedom, even in repressive societies.\u201d Rose\u2019s is a history of reading \u201cbuilt from the ground up\u201d and is finely attentive to the diverse modes of engagement adopted by ordinary readers across time and place (vii). \u261b \u261e<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1455,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"wp-custom-template-post-template-reviews","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1888],"tags":[1904,1954],"class_list":["post-1370","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-book-review","tag-authorship","tag-reading-readership"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1370"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5705,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1370\/revisions\/5705"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1455"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1370"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1370"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sharpweb.org\/sharpnews\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1370"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}