Reading work with Claire-Louise Bennett and Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Abstract

ABSTRACT Varied acts of reading play formative roles across a diverse range of contemporary Irish women’s writing. In this article I ask perhaps a strange question: is reading work? Or rather, when is reading work? In order to explore this, I look at representations of reading in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19 (2021) and Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s A Ghost in the Throat (2020). By considering how represented reading has an impact on form in these hybrid texts of autofiction and memoir, I engage with and query recent attempts within postcritique to reconceptualise critical reading. In this article I first establish the centrality of reading in both Checkout and Ghost, before detailing how these texts use form to show what reading can do. From here, I examine the ways in which Checkout and Ghost engage with the relationships between reading and temporality. This leads me to focus on notions of “lay” and “professional” reading. Bennett and Ní Ghríofa, I argue, expose the fragility of divisions between “lay/professional” or “uncritical/critical” reading and readers – in part through their representations of the figure of the woman reader. Finally, this article addresses our own academic reading work (and, very briefly, its relationship to financial remuneration).