Mode of Address

Shows how competing ideas about the reader in US literature and literary theory of the late 1960s and '70s reconfigured both reading practices and our understanding of the novel as art.

Despite claims that theory is a relic of a previous era of literary study, theory's fundamental assumptions persist in the belief that we as readers take an active role in the production of the meaning of the work of art. To make this case, Mode of Address returns to the 1960s and '70s to reevaluate competing attitudes about the reader in some ambitious novels and influential literary theory of the era. Examining figures such as Christine Brooke-Rose, Joan Didion, William H. Gass, John Hawkes, and Ishmael Reed alongside postmodern standard-bearers such as John Barth, Don DeLillo, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon, Davis Smith-Brecheisen reveals how efforts to refuse or appeal to the reader revised and extended the modernist artwork's pursuit of autonomy. Exploring the era's conflicting positions about the reader, Smith-Brecheisen demonstrates that the epistemological aims of theory and the demands of literature are not as neatly aligned as many have maintained. Looking at recent works by authors such as Ben Lerner and Rachel Cusk, Smith-Brecheisen further demonstrates that this tension continues to shape contemporary reading practices and our understanding of the novel as art.