One segment in Kaestle’s History of Literacy and the History of Readers blindsided me as if I was a quarterback with no defensive ends: “there is not one reading public but several” (Kaestle 43). My first thought that traversed my mind was that I never fathomed that there could be a peculiar set of people that pertain to a certain area of reading. The connection between history of reading and history of readers seemed to simply correlate to literacy, yet Kaestle indulges further into the almost surgical specifics of readers history. As a reader, I admire and respect the stick-to-itiveness to increasing depth, but I don’t believe we’ll ever be able to achieve his goal of defining reading publics. As Kaestle alludes to, there is no means of determining who reads what. Even with statistics of best sellers and highly grossing books, you’ll never be able to observe what people read that aren’t selling as well. Additionally, there is no means of determining if a person ever reads the novel that they purchase, or if the book is simply a placeholder for dust. Furthermore, there is no way to determine what age, ethnicity, social group, etc. that a person pertains to that purchases a piece of literature. I don’t believe there will ever be a system put into fruition that can defeat all of the aforementioned. Like most things, ambiguity reigns supreme.
Works Cited
Kaestle, Carl F. “The History of Literacy and the History of Readers.” Review of Research in Education, vol. 12, 1985, pp. 11–53. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1167145.
I agree that we might not ever be able to truly tally who is reading what, but I do believe that there are ways to differentiate between different groups reading different genres. For example, there are those who focus on reading for fun, those who read for a practical purpose (texting friends or reading a news article), and those who are forced to read (due to work or school). Then you could maybe even separate those people down into smaller groups based on what they’re reading with that purpose. In fact, I feel like that is the main dilemma behind your post: trying to figure out a person’s purpose when reading or ignoring a piece of literature. Since the person’s intent is unclear, then even attempting to decide who reads what becomes confusing.