“Bad readers were not born; they were made,” wrote Merve Emre in her first book Paraliterary. She starts the discussion by citing Vladimir Nabokov’s “Good Readers and Good Writers” who, as a teacher, was frustrated with American readers’ aesthetic. But as Emre shows, the emergence of “bad readers” in the US was not so far off from institutions that promoted literacy cultivation as part of their political and international conscription. VOA, diplomatic and ambassadorial missions, private and public cultural exchange programs, multinational corporations, international magazines, and global activist groups—all of these social spaces are exemplary for “how people trained to read under their auspices began to imagine that reading literature might, quite literally, change the world.” These people thought and imagined “how literature would emotionally move and ethically instruct the nation’s political adversaries, how it would transform readers into living, breathing representatives of the culture that produced them.” They were paraliterary readers.

As a genre, a reading practice, and an institutional domain, the term paraliterary, as Emre argues, offers a general framework on the “delegitimated attitudes toward reading literature thrived in institutions oriented to international communication.” Moreover, it gives coherence to Emre’s examination of a series of personal, public, and institutional activities that contributed to the development of the literary sphere outside universities and academic space. Rather than treating literature as a subject of truthful criticism, these practices treated literature based on its usefulness (i.e., what can literature do to [insert any cultural, political, and sentimental aims]?)  

Working in the intersection of literary criticism, history of literature, and theory of international communication, Emre offers a compelling examination of “how people learn to do things with literary texts.” She presents six modes of paraliterary practices of conscripted readers that helped to stabilize textual logics of which representational politics of the nation became “the most important discursive strategy for claiming American literature’s international public value.” Reading as imitation, reading as feeling, brand reading, sight reading, reading like a bureaucrat, reading like a revolutionary—these were practices that allow literary texts to be learned as a medium of truth-value communication in the international sphere.

Emre’s focus on the early twentieth century through the 1970s fit her purpose because those decades witnessed the US diplomatic (and imperialist) project to teach international citizens about US culture. But Emre does not exercise an explicit critique on US militaristic or ideological manifestations. Rather, she reveals operating practices done by readers, writers, critics, agents, publishers, radio and tv broadcasters, politicians, diplomats, and other public personalities. “How to read American literature?” As the question required literary readers to think about literary devices, the same question allured paraliterary readers to imagine what image and representation of the US conjured from literature.  The strength of this analytical angle is close attention to the role of literature in the international public sphere grounded in the formation of reading habits.

The book gives me so much to think about reading practice, the transnational movement of literature, and the institutional elements of reading. The US case is even more compelling as an example of how “cultural imperialism” worked through the network of receptions and creations of reading habits. I read Paraliterary as part of my exercise in thinking about reading practice as constitutive to the emergence and development of ideas or concepts. What makes literature (or ideas or concepts) “global” is not only the movement of people and materials but also the widespread experiments and practices of reading, writing, and responding.