What We Talk about When We Talk about Reading: Remembering Patsy Schweickart

Patsy Schweickart was always ahead of the curve. Her groundbreaking collection, Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts and Contexts (1986), combined feminist theory with emergent perspectives on reading as a social practice. Within Gender and Reading, Patsy’s influential essay, “Reading Ourselves: Toward a Feminist Theory of Reading,” specified multiple ways that reading is shaped by cultural positioning. Engaging the question of how feminist theory can illuminate both texts and reading practices, she linked the marginalization of gender in literary study to other kinds of erasure. In a tour-de-force, Patsy provides a rich close reading of an ellipsis—four dots—that made her wonder just what “had been deleted” from an MLA address in which Wayne Booth (then president of the organization) celebrates the transformative power of books and reading.1 Citing a passage from Malcolm X’s Autobiography, Booth draws an analogy between Malcolm X’s experience and his own. As Patsy shows, however, Booth’s deletion—a reference to “the leader of the notorious Black Muslims”—disrupts the benign “story of reading” Booth tries to tell via the passage he cites.2Schweickart and Flynn’s excellent collection Reading Sites: Social Difference and Reader Response (2004) analyzes numerous modes of elision and otherness that inform both the reading and writing of literature. Moving from exclusion to inclusion, Patsy sought to formulate a model of reading that would be reflective, capacious, and ethical. When I was working on my monograph “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and the Reading Revolution (2011), I struggled to account for the ways that Uncle Tom’s Cabin became a very different book over time. Pondering what the novel meant to Black and white readers (men, women, and children) before and after the Civil War, I recalled Patsy’s useful and balanced emphasis on reading as “the willingness to be susceptible to another subjectivity.”3 Patsy often reflected on reading as an encounter with “other subjectivities,” but she carefully distinguished her model of susceptibility from facile claims about reading as “intimacy, immediacy, and identification.”4 In her view susceptibility must be combined with both “creative thinking” and acknowledgement of otherness.5 Her hope was that a more nuanced understanding of the reading process would provide a “framework for figuring out how people can understand each other across race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation and other categories of social difference.”6Recent work on reading and reception has partially fulfilled that hope, but I want to end this short tribute to Patsy by touching on a comment in the introduction to Reading Sites that anticipates the difficult road still ahead. Previewing an essay about pedagogy by AnaLouise Keating, Schweickart and Flynn highlight Keating’s concern about the potential dangers of “recent trends in exposing and analyzing ‘whiteness’ as a racial category.” In a prescient critique of dogmatism, they affirm Keating’s emphasis on the need to address racism in ways that will not “trigger white backlash” and “reinforce the belief in permanent racial categories.”7 Twenty years later, that backlash is worrisomely clear and present.Patsy Schweickart was a humane, generative critical theorist, writer, teacher, and editor, as well as a warm, constructive presence in the Reception Study Society. I will miss her, but the fields of reading and reception studies will continue to gain from the thoughtful corpus she has left us.