Reading for Pleasure
Description
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.
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Mary Mussman researches queer and trans literary histories of 19th–20th c. Britain and France. Their first book project, Intimate Reading: Literary Experience and the Emergence of Queer Sexuality, draws on linguistic anthropology and pragmatic philosophy to trace how Victorian and modernist literature turned certain forms of subjective experience into sociocultural indexes of queer life.
Mary holds a PhD in Comp Lit from UC Berkeley. They lecture in the writing program at Columbia University.
Speaker Bio
Adeline Soldin is Associate Professor of French and Francophone Studies at Dickinson College. Her scholarship looks at textual, sexual and social transgressions in France’s long 19th-Century. Her monograph, Proust's Snobs, Inverts, and Jews: Performing and Subverting Identity in la Recherche was published in 2025 with Bloomsbury Academic. She has also published in peer-reviewed journals including French Studies, MLN, L'Esprit Créateur, and the The French Review.
Speaker Bio
David Faflik is Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island. A specialist in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, he is the author, most recently, of The Literary Gift in Early America (2025).
Research
Nineteenth-century American literature and culture, urban studies, global American Studies, History of the Book, Society and Sport
Education
Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
M.A., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
B.A., University of Texas at Austin
Speaker Bio
Qi Yang earned her MA in Comparative Literature at University College London and will begin her PhD at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, in December. Her research employs post-critical and affect theory, on post-2000s neoliberal cinema to examine liminal affect as a site where neoliberal hegemony is reconfigured. She has published on Chinese grassroots literature (Novel Monthly) and audience laughter in Thunderstorm, with research presented at AAS-in-Asia and BACS.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Josh Sutcliffe is a first-year PhD student in Comparative Literature at Indiana University studying British and German Romanticism, continental philosophy, and literary theory. His research interests include theories of interpretation and criticism, the role of historical thinking in literary criticism, phenomenology, deconstruction, and William Blake.
Speaker Bio
Marion Velain holds a Master’s degree in Anglo-American Studies from the Université de Lille and a Master’s degree in French and Francophone Studies from Indiana University. She is currently a PhD candidate in Literary Studies at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her dissertation explores the figure of the young adult fan in YA fiction, with a focus on how this reader imagines and inhabits narrative worlds.
Speaker Bio
Amaury Leopoldo Sosa works on early modern life writing, difference and identity, subjectivity, vigilance, and the Inquisition. He is currently working on a project tentatively titled, “Auto/Biographical Imperatives" which examines 16th- and 17th-century I/Eye-texts, surveillance, and empire.