The Ends of Reading

New analyses of US government survey data reveal that people in the US are far less likely to read for pleasure than they were a few decades ago. And the decline in reading for pleasure may be accelerating among children. This matters for literary studies because reading for pleasure is an unacknowledged prerequisite for the discipline. For literary studies, the most significant implication of the decline in reading for pleasure is that the discipline’s privileged texts and specialized reading practices cannot be understood by most people as justifiably privileged or specialized because most people do not have recent experiences of reading for pleasure against which to compare what and how literary studies reads.