BOOK REVIEW Theories of Reading: Books, Bodies, and Bibliomania, Karin Littau. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2006. Pp. xi+194. Asa university teacher, I would propose that we can never have too m: books on theories of reading since the epistemological and politic choices involved in how we read would seem to slip out of view for each new generation of students. This is a wheel that needs to be constantly reinvented, and Littau’s book, published some twenty years after the last mass interrogation of “readers” and their “responses” (e.g., Jane Tomp- kins, ReaderResponse Criticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980]; Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an Aesthetics of Reception (Brigh- ton: Harvester, 1982]), will constitute a welcome supplementary text for today’s literary theory courses. Indeed, possibly this book's chief claim to quality lies in the depth and breadth of its theoretical /critical overview (chaps. 5 and 6 especially); these sections reveal that Littau has not only researched the archives of reader-response criticism exhaustively but thought long and hard about what each author represents in terms of the values associated with reading. Theories of Reading will thus prove an Waluable resource for all students new to the field of reader/reception theory, as well as for supervisors keen for their graduate students to reflect little more critically on their own textual practice. There is much more to Littau’s study than its usefulness as a textbook, however. The chapters on “The Role of Affect in Literary Criticism” and “The Reader in Theory,” mentioned above, are but stages in a story that begins in the monastery and ends with the Internet and oscillates between one model of the book asa physical object (that engages a flesh and blood reader and trades in sensation and affect) and another that sees it as a vessel of meaning (positing an abstract reader interested only (© 2010 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact _joumnalpernissions@pressuchicago.edu, El2 MODERN PHILOLOGY in sense making and cognition). The spur to Littau’s thesis is, indeed, the concern that more recent theories and practices of reading—with a few notable exceptions—have veered away from its emotional impact and focused, instead, upon the interpretative act. She sums up her pro ect thus: “The overarching story I tell is one which highlights what con- temporary literary theories of reading have systematically marginalized, excluded or ignored: the body of the reader” (11). Alongside this debate, Theories of Reading (as its subtitle indicates) offers a historical purview of “bibliomania,” bringing together the memo- rable indictments of well-known literary figures (for example, Coleridge's concern for “the mischief of unconnected and promiscuous reading” [quoted on 44]) with some insightful observations on how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fears about the body- and brain-rotting conse- quences of “reading fever” (39-42) are echoed in today’s concerns re- garding an uncontrolled immersion in hyperspace. Rather than simply invoking history to put these latest fears into perspective, however, Littau—following Marshall McLuhan (The Medium Is the Message (New York: Bantam, 1967])—embraces the notion that, as far as the experi- ence of reading is concerned, the medium is the message, and the mate- riality of the reading process does impact upon the reader's mind—and body—in intimate and variable ways. She observes, “It is precisely for this reason that I have treated print, cinematograph and computer as objects of medical, neuropathological and neurophysiological enquiry, and have considered how each medium—perceptually and not symboli- cally—manipulates its user” (59). Aside from a familiar, but well-crafted, account of the early days of novel reading as a newly private, and sensu- ously indulgent, activity (chap. 4), Littau also writes persuasively about the ways in which twentieth-century hypertext has retrospectively brought to life the complex materiality of prenovelistic literature such as Shake- speare’s plays: these are texts that have always existed in multiple versions, that “mean” differently in different performances, and in which both author and reader are plural, shifting entities. Reading text via hypertext also grants the reader radical new agency visduis textual pro- duction: “Not only would this reader engage with the texts in a noninear fashion via the practice of comparative intertextual reading, but the reader would also become an editor him- or herself, insofar as the technology enables readers to assemble or rather ‘version’ their own, customized edition” (34). What is understood by reading for the fevered (stereotypically female) eighteenth-century novel reader and the hypertext compositor is, however, such a different practice that it raises the question of what exactly is being compared with what in Littau’s story. While the book is therefore a lively configuration of all the things we may understand byBook Review E3 reading, I nevertheless had moments of wishing that the central hy- pothesis—that is, to what extent the affective dimension of reading h: been ousted by the cognitive—would be explored within, rather than across, the different categories of readers. In particular, I felt that L needed to acknowledge the qualitative difference between recreational and professional readers earlier in the book (itis finally dealt with, up- front, in the context of feminist criticism in chap. 7) and to make clear that the turn toward objectivity and sense making that she illustrates first and foremost, a tendency in academic scholarship and not evi dence of a widespread trend. A finer distinction might also have been made between reading per se and “writing about reading,” which—for all professionals (journalists as well as academics) —has always been as much about showing off one’s critical acuity as elucidating the text. In this highly competitive commercial realm, it is not surprising that sense making, which lends itself easily to point scoring, should displace a more emotional and embodied textual response. This last point introduces what I felt to be another lacuna in Littau’s story—its failure to acknowledge the crucial distinction within literary and cultural theory between authors whose object of inquiry is the lit erary text in question and those for whom the literary text is merely drawn upon in the investigation of a free-standing theme, issue, or con- cer: for example, the social construction of gender; our understand- ing of wauma, death, and mourning: or the changing nature of “home and belonging” in the contemporary world (to name but a few topical concerns). This distinction seems to me to be of great importance in understanding the distinction, say, between the Yale school that Littau discusses in chapter 6 and their successors—for example, Judith Butler (e-g., Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Rout- ledge, 1993]) and Eve Sedgwick (e.g., Tendencies London: Routledge, 1994])—whose interest is not in the explication /destabilization of that text per se but rather the extent to which a notionally “perverse” read- ing of a classic text might shed light upon the discursive operation of gender and sexuality. My feeling, therefore, is that this otherwise excellent history of read- ing would have benefited from making the purpose of reading more visi ble throughout and acknowledging, in particular, that even within pro- fessionally designated groups—textual critics, literary critics, theorists— the “use” to which the reading is being put may vary. And this point relates, in turn, to Littau’s survey of feminist reading practices in the clos ing chapter. Once again, this is an informed and enlightening discussion as far as it goes but did not, I feel, go quite far enough in explaining why feminists should have mobilized “affect” in their readings in such a proae- tive way. In recent times, especially, such overtly emotional engagementsEa MODERN PHILOLOGY with texts have been less to do with restoring “the body” to the reading process for the benefit of the reader herself but, rather, with providing a means of exploring topical issues—for example, the articulation of memory and trauma—in a selfreflexively strategic way (see, e.g., Mar- ianne Hirsch, “Pictures of a Displaced Childhood,” in Confessions of the Gritics, ed. Avram Veeser (London: Routledge, 1996], 139). These lacu- nae aside, Theories of Reading remains a rich, thoughtful, and impeccably researched study that combines scholarship, historiography, and theo- retical reflection in an impressive, and wholly engaging, way. Lynne Pearce Lancaster University