Charles Chesnutt's Reconstruction

This panel examines the culture and practices of re-reading in the United States in the nineteenth century. Re-reading was a habitual feature of American literary culture, as readers commonly revisited not only religious texts... [ view full abstract ]

This panel examines the culture and practices of re-reading in the United States in the nineteenth century. Re-reading was a habitual feature of American literary culture, as readers commonly revisited not only religious texts such as the Bible and hymns but also personal correspondence and verse; educators instructed schoolchildren in the virtues of attentive re-reading, teaching them to study and copy exemplary passages in an effort to develop literary skill. In spite of the centrality of re-reading to nineteenth-century American literary culture, it has received little scholarly attention, as critics have often focused on such twentieth-century literary values as novelty and innovation rather than seek to understand the nineteenth-century predilection for literary familiarity. The little scholarship we have on the subject is governed by the modern presumption that re-reading is a habit of the unsophisticated. The influential work of Rolf Engelsing illustrates the impact of such a presumption: Engelsing argued that pre-modern literacy in Europe was characterized by intensive re-reading, in which readers repeatedly returned throughout life to a small canon of select texts.  Applying Engelsing's model to the American context, David Hall argued that the practice of intensive reading fell out of favor in the early nineteenth century, when it was replaced by extensive, wide reading, enabled by the new ready accessibility of abundant reading materials—such as cheap newspapers and novels—that were designed to be read once, discarded, and replaced by an infinite supply of similar texts. This historical narrative presents re-reading as the product of scarcity, cultural immaturity, and intellectual narrowness, with extensive reading, by contrast, associated with cosmopolitanism and abundance. 

This panel is designed to invite more nuanced historical and theoretical attention to the changing climate of re-reading in American literary history. As the scholars on this panel will illustrate, re-reading did not cease in the mid-century, as critics have suggested, nor was it solely the reading mode of scarcity and immaturity. In an effort to dislodge these views, our panel poses several essential under-examined questions: How does the reading experience change when the text is already familiar?  How does the common nineteenth-century practice of re-reading require us to develop new interpretive methodologies and aesthetic categories? Our panelists offer four case studies of 19^th-century re-reading, examining how this practice afforded authors a lens through which to understand their own work against or alongside cultural discourses of material scarcity and abundance. In addition, the panel will reflect on our own scholarly reading habits: what value does the common academic practice of re-reading hold for us today?

Our panelists will address these questions by glossing four specific contexts of nineteenth-century American re-reading.  We will demonstrate the diverse styles and theoretical implications of re-reading as well as the overlooked nature of this common practice. Tess Chakkalakal will examine the journals of late-century African American writer Charles Chesnutt, in which he detailed his reading and copied noteworthy passages, rendering these excerpts readily available for re-reading. By attending to Chesnutt’s commonplace books, Chakkalakal examines how Chesnutt employed the pedagogical techniques of what then was known as “colored teaching,” which served as the foundation for public education in the southern United States following the Civil War and which strongly promoted practices of careful re-reading.