... precipitously, critics are quick to instrumentalize literature to make more ambitious claims for its political utility. The supporters of world literature insist on “ the good world literature can do ” because of “the view it gives its readers on [foreign] worlds they would find hard to see without a local...

... in the act of reading, in what way have the possibilities opened up by literature not left the world intact, if indeed this transformation is at all possible once the reader has put the book down? Copyright © 2015 by Duke University Press 2015 Jean-Paul Sartre engaged literature Hannah Arendt...

... representation; it is also the shift in representative status that social media make possible. The essay traces the historical shift from the literary protagonist with whom readers identify to the cinematic celebrity to the socially manufactured subjectivity available to everyone on various social media...

.... Martin Eden further expresses London's belief in the capacity of literature to encourage readers to more fully inhabit their own corporeality. Works Cited Acampora Ralph R. Corporal Compassion: Animal Ethics and Philosophy of Body . Pittsburgh : U of Pittsburgh P , 2006 . Armbruster...

...Meegan Kennedy Literary critics' work on the sensation novel has often focused on these novels' purported ability to create affect—specifically suspense, shock, and fear—in their readers. This critical emphasis on how novels reproduce affect in the reader overlooks how they record affect...

...Christopher Weinberger Much recent ethical criticism theorizes novels as becoming ethically effective through readers’ oscillation between immersion in mimetic worlds and subsequent reflection on that experience. Murakami Haruki, however, presents readers with irreducibly fictional realities...

...Alicia Williams Abstract Whence the “dear reader”—and to where? This essay proposes that George Eliot's reformulation of nineteenth-century conventions for addressing reading audiences documents a response to the emergence of Britain's first mass reading public. Eliot inherits a propensity...

... reader, a being contradictorily characterized in Eliot's day and ours as both dilettantish and overinvested, both distracted from and passionately identified with the fiction she absorbs. Although conducted in a different theoretical vocabulary, today's critical discourse on reading resonates...

...Janina Levin Abstract Readers traditionally associate heroism with risk and confidence in one's abilities. Yet within the realist tradition, Henry James creates a portrait of an unconfident heroine. The Golden Bowl 's Maggie Verver demonstrates she has the ability to become an effective actor...

... readers a lesson about the dangers of interpreting desire according to the rules of realistic writing. Instead of issuing a late warning about the dangers of romance reading, Lennox issues an early warning about the possibility that novel reading might coarsen sensibilities by reducing desire...

...Matthew Sussman For many readers, “stupidity” in Henry James signifies mental slowness, poor taste, or even moral delinquency. However, James also conceived of stupidity as a positive virtue because it promises to deliver the individual from the “ordeal of consciousness” associated...

...Dean Franco This essay argues that metaphors are not objects that simply appear in literature but are phenomena, contingent on a reader's anticipation and affirmation. This dialectical relation, between the metaphors consciously and unconsciously patterned in texts and the receptivity of readers...

... invested in an ideological interpretation of the end of the Cold War as a victory for the West. The complex narrative demands that the reader embrace history's lost causes and not just the victor's truth. However, the text's complexity involves risks. There is a danger that the novel's expansive...

... the relationship between texts and the world the novel represents. Sterne continually exposes the ontological instability of both texts and readers in a networked commercial environment; just as Yorick is affectively led astray by accidental encounters with people and things, readers are also exposed to narrative...

... aestheticized, in fact participates in this tact at the same time that it presents readers and critics with a choice about how much they will say or consider themselves to know about the “facts” of the text they read. Thus, James's late style poses ethical problems to readers while representing such problems...

... and also some of the most central aspects of our relationship with narratives whose outcomes we care intensely about even though our caring cannot affect those outcomes. Fictional characters are especially immune to the exercise of a reader's or audience's will, so Newcomb's problem is particularly...

...Kate Flint In this response piece, I consider the variety of ways in which reading may be said to work upon a reader, and I bring out the importance of the idea of affect in this respect. I note that affect is frequently conceived of in a positive light, and my argument shifts to ask what happens...

...Aarthi Vadde This short piece argues that the demands of reading globally should change how we approach conversations about the ethical reading of minoritarian literature. Rather than assume a stable relationship between the imagined reader as subject and the text as object, we should consider how...

... to our environments and inspire reader engagement with environmental concerns. Powers's effort to move beyond anthropocentrism, which is motivated by positive intentions to impact reader interest in environmental issues, is stymied by the inevitability of the human perspectives and interests that attend...