Dalsis_A Feeling for Books

Travis Dalsis

Eastern Michigan University

Dr. Douglas Baker

5 January 2012

A Response to “A Feeling for Books”

Radway offers a delicious understanding of her ambivalent experience as a “middle-brow” reader and an intellectual.  Her work examines the feelings she experienced from early childhood and the struggle to transform herself and become a member of a different social climate—and the discomfort and confusion that she experienced when trying to hold on to a past pleasure of reading books.  Radway shows the layers of complexity that surfaces when one discusses what reading literature is and the socio-cultural assumptions attached to literature when it’s branded.

            A common theme in Radway’s work is the underlying motivation and her feelings about what she read.  Her doctoral studies also examined the popularity of romance novels.  She interviewed individuals and discussed the books selected by Book-of-the-Month club to examine the literary body being called “middle brow” literature.  In her research she uncovered the complexities and enthusiasm within the texts read and sold.  Overall, her article challenges the notion that certain readership is serious while others are not.  Claims about literature are not necessarily true—Radway uncovered this truth.  Feeling while reading is a powerful relationship and there is something to be said about it.  When we feel a certain way about what we read, there’s a reason.  Sorting out the whys and so whats is worthy of our time.

            One goal of mine is to examine about how I feel when reading certain pieces of literature.  I can remember from taking a Young Adult Literature class reading twelve novels.  One novel in particular, Where the Red Fern Grows, evoked much emotion.  Laying on the couch of the coffee house while sipping a mug of coffee and reading this text, I remember crying my eyes out.  Why?  The parts that I was reading were sad.  What was it that created such emotional reactions in the texts?  All I can remember was the when the main character decided he wanted two coon hounds (beagles).  He worked so hard to earn the money to get them and he walked through the country to the nearest store to pick them up.  I’ve lost the immediate details of the text, but I still feel the twinge in my heart when recalling this scene.  Perhaps because, as Radway explains there is a human condition in my own life that connects deeply with the text.  Radway challenges us to explore those feelings and the hidden mysteries behind them.