From Princeton to paradise: Women\u27s reading in academic and popular culture

This is a study of the relationship between popular women\u27s culture and academic feminist criticism and thus between two very different and yet mutually dependent constructions of “women\u27s reading.” In looking at a variety of indicators of contemporary women\u27s reading practice in and out of the academy—from examples of successful women\u27s fiction in a range of categories, to the reading groups and reading guides that are geared primarily toward women, to the vogue for autobiographical criticism among female and feminist academics—I explore the tension between academic or critical reading and “reading for pleasure” and demonstrate that while efforts on both sides to distinguish the scholarly from the popular have made for some interesting and high-profile debates, they have also woven themselves more subtly into the very fabric of contemporary reading culture. My dissertation treats contemporary women\u27s reading as a collection of practices that variously support and cut across one another, and defines “women\u27s culture” itself as something that is produced, marketed, consumed and re-circulated on the literary field through a host of different mechanisms, not least of which is the contemporary novel, boosted by a “pro-novel” discourse that casts novel-reading as itself a form of consciousness-raising. Ultimately, I suggest that reading serves as one of the primary vehicles of “women\u27s culture” today, helping to sustain a fantasy of collectivity even while strict notions of individual identification and personal growth govern popular reading itself