The Ends of Reading

Introduction

I began the research I’m sharing with you today while writing about neither the sociology of reading nor the crises of the humanities, but from small discoveries in two big datasets. When I first found these datasets, I assumed that they must already be widely known. (And perhaps they are to some of the people in this room.) But, in general, that turned out not to be the case. I want to bring these surveys to the attention of literary studies in particular, and scholars in general, for reasons that I hope will be both obvious and persuasive.

Let’s start with three numbers:

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I’ll explain each of these momentarily. But they make two important points obvious: As points 1 and 2 suggest, over the past thirty years, the odds of people in the US reading literature or anything else for pleasure have gone down by almost half. And as the third point makes clear, that relative decline is being subtracted from leisure reading rates that weren’t very high to begin with.

Census numbers

The US Census Bureau has been collecting statistics about reading for pleasure since 1982 in two surveys from which I calculated these numbers: the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts and the American Time Use Survey. I compiled historical data about pleasure reading from both surveys in one place for the first time, pulling some figures out of old government reports, and others from data newly published in June, and performed new analyses.

My most basic point is that it is bad that the humanities generally and literary studies particularly are broadly unaware of these figures. Literary studies has been vigorously arguing about how to read over the past few decades: surface vs. depth, close vs. distant, critical vs. postcritical, etc. The significance of those distinctions all follow from an unstated presumption about the continuity of reading. Literary studies should concern itself more than it presently does with whether and to what extent people read. If one of the core activities of literary studies is to cultivate and improve reading, our ability to do that well depends upon an understanding of the present state of reading.

I have some ideas about why literary studies has ignored or repressed this information, but we can talk about that during the Q&A.

The Current Population Survey (CPS)

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In order to talk about the reading surveys, we first need to talk about the Current Population Survey.

CPS measures labor force participation rates. You are almost certainly familiar with its most famous statistic, which is the unemployment rate.

The CPS “is a monthly sample survey of 60,000 eligible households.”“Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey Overview,” in U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/cps/cps_over.htm, 2020.

It uses a probability sample to estimate state and national population characteristics, weighting for factors including race, gender, and education.“Sampling,” Government in Current Population Survey (CPS), https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/cps/technical-documentation/methodology/sampling.html, 2022.

Eligible survey respondents are 16 or older and neither in the military nor institutionalized.

While the main purpose of CPS is to gather data about the labor force, it also fields a number of supplemental surveys. The first survey we’ll be looking at comes from one such supplement, and the second selects its respondents from the CPS pool of households.“30-Day Notice for the ‘2022 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts’,” in Federal Register, https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/09/14/2021-19775/30-day-notice-for-the-2022-survey-of-public-participation-in-the-arts, 2021; “American Time Use Survey News Release - 2023 A01 Results,” in Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.htm, 2024.

The Survey of Public Participation in the Arts

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The research division of the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) fields and analyzes the SPPA.Alice Goldfarb Marquis and Joan Shelley Rubin, “National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities,” in The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Cultural and Intellectual History (Oxford University Press, 2013); Sunil Iyengar, “Aligning Arts Research with Practitioner Needs: Beyond Generalizations,” in The Oxford Handbook of Arts and Cultural Management, ed. Yuha Jung, Neville Vakharia, and Marilena Vecco (Oxford University Press, 2022), https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197621615.013.46.

Its work has been used as ammunition in both the reading wars and canon wars.For a compelling review of the reading wars, see Adrian Johns, The Science of Reading: Information, Media, and Mind in Modern America (The University of Chicago Press, 2023), 323-375. On the NEA, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the canon wars, see Henry Louis Gates, Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars (Oxford University Press, 1992), 87-105.

To the extent that scholars know about the SPPA, it is almost certainly by way of the NEA’s reports. The best known of these is the 2004 Reading at Risk, which showed broad declines in reading.Reading at Risk: A Survey of Literary Reading in America, Research no. 46 (National Endowment for the Arts, 2004).

More recent reports on the SPPA have drawn less controversy. Unfortunately, less controversy has also meant less attention. That has been a mistake.

The American Time Use Survey

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The American Time Use Survey, to which we now turn, gives us more detailed information about the extent of reading not over the previous year, but over the previous day.

The ATUS has been conducted annually since 2003, except in 2020 due to the pandemic.“Impact of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) Pandemic on the American Time Use Survey for 2020,” in U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, https://web.archive.org/web/20221208074206/https://www.bls.gov/tus/notices/covid19.htm, 2022.

It began in the wake of a bill that called for a survey to calculate the monetary value of unpaid work like homemaking.“Information for Respondents,” in American Time Use Survey Respondents, https://www.bls.gov/respondents/tus/history.htm, 2015.

The ATUS’s reading statistics differ from those of the SPPA in two key ways, one advantageous and the other disadvantageous for my purposes. The advantageous difference is that the ATUS is more precise than the SPPA, recording the number of minutes respondents read yesterday. Remember that the SPPA asked respondents whether they had read in the preceding year.

The disadvantageous difference is that, unlike the SPPA, the ATUS makes no distinction between literary forms.However, unlike the SPPA, the ATUS excludes the reading of religious texts from its general category of reading for personal interest. This has been true for every ATUS since 2007. Differences Between the 2003 to 2022 Lexicons (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023), 18

That said, the reading measured by the ATUS includes nonprofessional literary reading as a subset of all reading it reports.

“Reading class” vs. “reading culture”

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The sociologist of reading Wendy Griswold draws a distinction between what she terms a reading class and a reading culture. All societies with writing have reading classes, but few societies have ever had what Griswold calls reading cultures. The reading class is defined by its professional and nonprofessional reading, as well as its elite socioeconomic status. A reading culture, by contrast, “is a society where reading is expected, valued, and common.”Wendy Griswold, Regionalism and the Reading Class (University of Chicago Press, 2008), 37.

In Griswold’s terms, these declining odds suggest the erosion of the US reading culture, which Griswold argues peaked from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

If there is any truth in Griswold’s distinction, disciplines like literary studies, which that formed during the US’s reading culture, may need to reconceptualize themselves as a reading class without a reading culture.On the formation of professional literary studies in the nineteenth century, see, e.g., Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848-1932, Oxford English Monographs (Clarendon Press ; Oxford University Press, 1983); Kermit Vanderbilt, American Literature and the Academy: The Roots, Growth, and Maturity of a Profession (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1986); David R. Shumway, Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline, American Culture, v. 11 (University of Minnesota Press, 1994); Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Twentieth anniversary ed (University of Chicago Press, 2007); Elizabeth Renker, The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture 154 (Cambridge University Press, 2007); Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India, 25th anniversary edition (Columbia University Press, 2015); John Guillory, Professing Criticism: Essays on the Organization of Literary Study (University of Chicago Press, 2022).

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Griswold has argued that,

“professional members of the reading class are evangelists, fighting at the front line of culture to convert people to reading. Examples include teachers, professors, writers, editors, publishers, journalists, and…librarians.”Wendy Griswold and Hannah Wohl, “Evangelists of Culture: One Book Programs and the Agents Who Define Literature, Shape Tastes, and Reproduce Regionalism,” Poetics 50 (June 2015): 97, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2015.03.001.

Yet, in my experience, there is little discussion within literary studies as to whether the field recruits people to the “reading culture,” or preaches to the converted of the “reading class.” This is not discussed in part because, without knowledge of these statistics, it might be hard to see the difference.

Conclusion

I think that these numbers are profoundly difficult for professional readers to internalize. Our colleagues, friends, and family are unusually likely to be among the 16% of the population who read for personal interest yesterday.

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What, if anything, is to be done? I will not suggest that literary studies could or should set itself the task of making reading more popular. In the first place, that’s almost certainly a losing battle. Moreover, it’s a battle that few people in literature departments would want to fight on those terms.

I have no cure, but I do have one suggestion: We know that educational attainment continues to be the best predictor of reading even as reading declines. What we do not know is whether majoring in a field that emphasizes reading is associated with more reading for pleasure than what would be expected based on graduates’ educational attainment alone. As Griswold suggested, reading class professionals work to “convert” new members to the reading class. If that idea seems at all objectionable, consider the opposite proposition: What professor of literature would hope that her students, as a result of taking her courses, would read less?

We should research the differential impact that reading intensive majors have on reading for pleasure. We may assume that it is obvious that students of literature would do more reading for pleasure than students who do not study literature. But this is presumptuous. A null hypothesis would be that literary studies has no impact on reading for pleasure beyond what is explained by educational attainment. If literary studies knew its impact on reading, we might be able to evade what John Guillory has termed the overestimation of aim.Guillory, Professing Criticism, 5–9.

If we read to encourage and sustain others in their reading, we should want to know if we are succeeding.

Thank you.

Works cited