“OH! IT IS ONLY A NOVEL!”
“OH! IT IS ONLY A NOVEL!”

Summary/Abstract: My paper analyses some of the uses to which the Enlightenment imperative of self-betterment has been put in time, the various interpretations it has been given, and the socio-cultural mechanisms that have made it possible for that project to remain a desideratum. It does so by focusing on fiction reading as instantiated in three texts incorporating divergent period codes: Northanger Abbey, The Remains of the Day, and the latter’s cinematographic adaptation. I submit that the Enlightenment ideal of mass education that has resulted in mass reproduction of texts across media has also conditioned the redefinition of the activity of reading so as to accommodate both the readiest access to the ‘story’ and the most sophisticated, theory-informed interpretation. I explore several avatars of the reading/production dialectics in order to see whether at the beginning of the twenty first century they herald a crisis of reading, education, or the printed text. Ultimately, I ask whether the current crisis of values is not in fact the controlled outcome of a carefully engineered project of modernity ensuring its own perpetuation. Informed by Thomas Docherty’s celebration of civic, “dyseconomic” reading in an essay, “On Reading,” my paper does not reach any clear-cut conclusions with regard to the issues that it broaches. Rather, it dwells in the indeterminacy between texts, raising questions concerning the activity of reading itself, its subtle motivations, and the various ways in which it is conducted. In other words, my article purports to remain a reading of the civic type described by Docherty, rather than become economic – i.e. a reading that promises to yield answers.

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