In Le Plaisir du texte, Barthes reflects on myriad forms of textual and readerly pleasure: from finding Proust in Stendhal (intertextuality) to reading the same text with a different rhythm and arrangement (tmesis) to beloved reading rituals (Proust’s narrator in his iris-scented bathroom). Readers, writers, and characters can all experience and inspire the pleasure of the text, or the text of pleasure. Barthes’s comments on “writing out loud,” revery, and “the sumptuous rank of the signifier” speak to the interactive and collaborative nature of meaning-making and the pleasure associated with that process.

The notion of “pleasure” is of course a complex and subjective one. Barthes distinguishes between the text of pleasure and text of delight or jouissance, where the former is articulable and the latter is not. For centuries, philosophers have contemplated the ways in which pleasure interacts with aesthetics, culture, pain, erotica and the body. Pleasure may be altruistic or sadomasochistic; frivolous or profound; familiar or foreign; intellectual or sensual. This panel adopts a comprehensive understanding of pleasure and invites papers exploring portrayals of reading for pleasure as well as those formulating methods and motivations for reading for pleasure.

Centering the pleasure of reading seems particularly urgent today as humans’ interactions with texts (broadly defined) are increasingly mediated by artificial intelligence, foreclosing the potential for innovative interpretations, imagination, and free-thinking. Even before the rise of AI, scholars encouraged more emotional and intimate engagements with art and literature. Elizabeth S. Anker and Rita Felski provide a concise review of such approaches in their “Introduction” to Critique and Postcritique (Duke U P, 2017). This includes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s warning against paranoid reading, Felski’s work on The Limits of Critique, largely informed by Paul Ricœur’s hermeneutics of suspicion, as well as other more playful methods like those detailed in Doris Sommer’s The Work of Art in the World. Anker and Felski summarize the message conveyed in the latter thus: “Social change … is unlikely to be brought about by political sermonizing or the jaundiced rhetoric of high theory. Rather, a more productive path lies in yoking political involvement to the forms of value, play, and pleasure cultivated by an aesthetic education.” (20) Indeed, as literary scholars and teachers, it seems incumbent upon us to lean into the pleasure of the text, particularly as it stimulates pleasure in thinking, learning and doing. 

Papers topics may include but are not limited to the following: the literary depiction of reading and its relation to pleasure; public perceptions of literature as pleasure, historically or today; the reading experience; new forms of reading; textual interactions; textual preferences; pleasant effects of reading.