I wonder if Radway's dilemma--the gap between her reading preferences and the stuff, i.e. the canonical literary works, she expects herself to read and enjoy--is still as intense and wide-spread today.
I imagine it is, and this despite decades of attack on canonical literature. I sense it in my own life: Although I went on the job market, many years ago, as a scholar of modernism, I had not read the most modernist of all novels, James Joyce's Ulysses. Over the years I would try, again and again, but always gave up after the first few pages. The task of making it through this allusive stream of consciousness novel (500 pages at least) was too daunting.
It was only three or four years ago, that I decided to embark on the novel, but not on my own: with two friends, one of them a retired literature professor, the other a very curious reader. We had a great time. We read parts of the novel aloud, we admitted to our complete ignorance and befuddlement, we free associated, and, thanks to the one friend who had read, even studied, the novel before, learned a lot about it. I began to genuinely like it, but more than that, I enjoyed the experience of reading it. Truth be told, I also felt like I passed an academic test long overdue (Now I didn't need to pretend I had read the novel...)!
Still, I would never choose Ulysses as bedtime reading or, necessarily, holiday reading--unless I'd have a couple of friends to read it with.
This makes me wonder if the gap is not only about the kind of texts we read--on our own and as students or scholars of English Literature--but also about how we read them...I'll do some more thinking about this...
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