Conclusion: From Aesthetics to Reading Practices

Abstract

The reinterpretations and revaluations of Frankenstein, Huckleberry Finn, Native Son, Light in August, Jazz, and Paretsky’s fiction show the increased influence and importance of modern reading practices including the humanist opposition to science’s domination since the 1960s, the emergence of black studies and black feminism, and the growing sophistication of female readers and the new academic status of popular genres. My argument has been that this account of reading practices overcomes the opposition of aesthetics and socio-historical study. As I suggested in the introduction, since the 1990s some criticism has treated reading as an ethical or pleasurable form of close textual analysis and on that basis rejected the poststructuralist theories and cultural movements of the 1970s and 1980s, Other recent criticism also rejects those theories and movements but defends aesthetic norms in order to restore the autonomy of literature and its centrality in education and social life. Still other recent criticism repudiates aesthetic ideals in order to show that reading reveals the personality or social context of the reader.