Anna Karenina Reads on the Train: Readerly Subjectivity and the Poetics of the Novel

Abstract

What does it mean to be a reader of a novel? he famous scene of Anna Karenina reading on the train takes up this question. Whereas Tolstoy's scene is traditionally viewed as yet another example of the pleasures and dangers of novel reading, from empathic identiication to romantic self-aestheticization, I argue that the scene investigates the phenomenology of novel reading, the nature of readerly subjectivity, and the poetics of the classic realist novel—all in ways that depart from other canonical literary depictions of novel reading. Bringing together the poetics of the realist novel with complex issues of selfknowledge and deliberation, the scene reveals a new form of readerly subjectivity that entails the imagined nonexistence of the empirical reader. Drawing on Bakhtin, Kierkegaard, Sartre, and others, I show the implications of this form of readerly subjectivity for not only an original interpretation of Tolstoy's much-read scene but also our understanding of novel reading.