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198 College & Research Libraries 

be used to generate theory from digitized 
text collections by permitting the analy­
sis and interpretation of texts along the­
matic lines. This kind of research has been 
done, of course, for decades with much 
expenditure of time and effort, but Day’s 
examples show a new approach that au­
tomates some of the work and presum­
ably frees the researcher for more analy­
sis and interpretation. One cannot help 
but wonder if something like this has ap­
plications in areas such as citation and 
citation context analysis, which hitherto 
have been served mostly by quantitative 
methods. If so, one could study citations 
as discursive practices, just as one stud­
ies the larger texts and contexts in which 
they are embedded. Examples such as 
these show that this volume has the po­
tential to stimulate some very promising 
research indeed.—Michael F. Winter, Uni­
versity of California-Davis. 

Travis, Molly Abel. Reading Cultures: The 
Construction of Readers in the Twentieth 
Century. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Il­
linois Univ. Pr., 1998. 173p. $39.95, alk. 
paper (ISBN 0-8093-2146-7). LC 97­
10063. 

Reading Cultures explores the expectations 
that readers bring to books and the ways 
that critics, scholars, teachers, and the 
texts themselves work to “construct” 
readers in different times and places. It 
analyzes reactions to and interactions 
with different kinds of literary works. The 
particular contribution that Molly Abel 
Travis (associate professor of English at 
Tulane University) hopes to bring to the 
field of reader response theory is to ex­
amine reading communities or cultures 
as defined by race, gender, class, and age. 
To oversimplify a bit, she wants to syn­
thesize the rhetorical study of texts and 
readers with newer concerns of feminism, 
cultural studies, postcolonialism, queer 
studies, and so on. No small task. 

The implied reader of this book about 
readers is an English professor or gradu­
ate student. Because I am neither, I found 
the book heavy going. It would be easy 
to declare it unreadable: laden with ref-

March 1999 

erences to other people’s theories (no 
doubt the residue of a dissertation) and 
brimming with the specialized vocabu­
lary of critical theory (“metaplagiarism” 
was a new term for me). But this would 
be cowardly. As others have argued, lit­
erary studies—like all academic disci­
plines—is entitled to its own jargon, 
theory, and intellectual rigor. So I will 
soldier on and try to translate the main 
points of the book into ordinary English. 

Travis works her way through the 
twentieth century in five chapters, each a 
foray into a different field of readerly 
complexity. “Two Cultures of Reading in 
the Modernist Period” begins with an 
analysis of “the cultural effort invested 
in rendering Joyce’s Ulysses readable.” 
The author makes excellent use of pri­
mary sources and quotations to tell this 
essentially comic tale. Readers were per­
plexed and angered by Ulysses. Perhaps 
many still are. Joyce knowingly dis­
mantled and parodied all the comfortable 
conventions of nineteenth-century narra­
tive, refusing to compromise for 
readability’s sake. Promoters of high art 
labored to persuade the American public 
of the novel’s order, harmony, and mas­
tery. Travis reproduces a two-page spread 
that appeared in the Saturday Review of Lit­
erature in 1934 entitled “How to Enjoy 
James Joyce’s Great Novel Ulysses,” with 
a plan of Dublin, list of characters, and 
detailed synopsis. The chapter continues 
with some rather desultory discussion of 
Virginia Woolf’s terror of a devouring 
middlebrow culture, touching on such 
institutions as the Book of the Month 
Club, Reader’s Digest, and the Saturday 
Review itself. 

The next two chapters deal respec­
tively with gender and racial differences 
in texts, readers, and interpretation. “Sex­
ing the Text: Postmodern Reading, Femi­
nist Theory, and Ironic Agency” compares 
works by Vladimir Nabokov and Italo 
Calvino (who implicitly assume a mas­
culine reader) with works by the avant­
garde feminist writers Kathy Acker (a 
punk writer) and Angela Carter (“who 
wants her readers to engage interactively 



 
 

Book Reviews 199 

in the postmodern ideological critique”). 
Travis notes the emergence of the “resis­
tant” reader, who engages with texts 
rather than immersing herself in them. 
Reading in the postmodern age has be­
come an ironic act. “Beloved and Middle 
Passage: Race, Narrative, and the Critic’s 
Essentialism” contrasts novels by Toni 
Morrison and Charles Johnson. Most in­
teresting here is the explanation of how 
Morrison builds on and overturns the 
conventions of the traditional slave nar­
rative, creating a genuine sense of the 
“other” that readers can neither wholly 
identify with nor wholly reject. Johnson, 
on the other hand, attempts to transcend 
race and in doing so negates the existence 
of the “other.” Both chapters are marred, 
in my view, by an undercurrent of anx­
ious moralizing not uncharacteristic of 
academic writing today. 

The chapter “Reading (in) Cyberspace: 
Cybernetic Aesthetics, Hypertext, and the 
Virtual Public Space” will be more acces­
sible to most librarians. There is less 
theory and more straightforward descrip­
tion of the experience of reading 
hypertext narratives. How many of us 
have actually read any of these? Travis 
gamely traversed William Gibson’s 
Neuromancer, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, 
Carolyn Guyer ’s Quibbling, and Stuart 
Moulthorp’s Victory Garden. Despite her 
predisposition in favor of interactivity 
and agency in a hypertext environment, 
she found these books somewhat disap­
pointing. There was not enough surprise 
or adventure. They created a dreamy 
world without resolution and were in 
danger of “fetishizing” form. Some of 
these early hypertext fictions, curiously 
enough, originated as commentaries or 
recreations of postmodernist novels by 
writers such as Thomas Pynchon. 

The final chapter, “Cultural Production 
and the Teaching of Reading,” is very ten­
tative. Here Travis espouses the 
“pedagogic turn evident in recent liter­
ary theory and criticism.” She is seeking 
ways to reform the traditional classroom 
hierarchy, in which the teacher is the “au­
thor” and students are passive “readers.” 

She also wants to create a truly 
multicultural educational experience. Al­
though she admits, with characteristic 
candor, that computers in the classroom 
have mostly proved a failure, she projects 
a vision of a pedagogy of multicultural 
“performance” through computer net­
works. Even this chapter, thankfully, has 
patches of interesting material, such as the 
comparison of college campuses to shop­
ping malls and theme parks. 

Clearly, this is not an essential book for 
librarians to read. However, there is a re­
curring theme that I found relevant. Ev­
ery profound change in publishing or 
readership has given rise to a reaction of 
fear. Too many readers with too much 
freedom, it is feared, will lead to excess, 
promiscuity, and anarchy in reading. 
Worse, people will spend too much time 
in an imaginary world. They will lose 
touch with reality and be unable to dis­
tinguish truth from falsehood. These 
same fears arose with each expansion of 
printing, literacy, mass media, film, tele­
vision, and now the Internet. Perhaps we 
should step back and reflect historically 
on our present concerns about readers (es­
pecially students) surfing on the Web, our 
worry about information overload, super­
ficiality, and loss of standards. I suspect 
we would be less afraid.—Jean Alexander, 
Carnegie Mellon University. 

Untold Stories: Civil Liberties, Libraries, and 
Black Librarianship. Ed. John Mark 
Tucker. Champaign, Ill.: University of 
Illinois Graduate School of Library and 
Information Science, 1998. 210p. $27 
(ISBN 0-87845-104-8). LC 98-196951. 

Untold Stories is a major contribution to 
the study of African-American librarian-
ship and the struggle to provide library 
and information services to African-
American communities. The book is the 
result of a Library History Round Table 
program presented at the 1994 ALA Con­
ference in Miami Beach, Florida. The es­
says—by fifteen different writers, some 
black and some white—describe nearly 
two hundred years of effort; chronicling 
the struggle for liberty and literacy for