All the Feels: Adventures on the Bookternet

• In Event: Mediating Affect Onscreen and Online

Abstract

In this presentation, I will discuss online discourse and activism among the denizens of the “bookternet,” a loose term pulling together bookish conversations from Twitter, Goodreads, Instagram and TikTok; this is where, by 2022, “BookTok” became what the New York Times called a “best seller machine” These networks have developed a “fannish” identity around the “reader,” complete with collective readathons, bookish fan conventions, and merchandise, similar to other fannish activities that bring creators and audiences together in participatory forums. In these spaces, both authors and readers discuss individual books, literary scandals, and the state of literature and publishing. The conversations are riven by conflict, often pitting the artistic choices of authors against the demands of readers who assert themselves in populist terms. Even as these debates may replicate what is seen in any form of media fandom, they also include more elevated notions connected to more traditional values of literary consumption: reading as a form of self-improvement and moral education as discussed in the work of Janice Radway, Lauren Berlant, and Jodi Melamed. Readers' discussions of the authority of their own emotional responses to books are central to online debates about what qualities make a book “good” or “bad," lending themselves to rejections of standards of professional reviewing and academic criticism as “snobby” and “elitest.” At the same time, readers and writers in these networks champion ideas of reading as a tool of moral improvement. This combination of moral education and the populist politics of media fandom has, in some ways, replicated familiar conflicts within cultural studies around highbrow, lowbrow culture, and the role of ideology in popular entertainment, even as some react by advocating a return to pure aestheticism and affective response. While the online community of readers and authors today is now increasingly mobilized in defense of diverse books and artistic freedom against conservative book-bans from libraries and schools, their internal controversies around the purpose of literature and the value of reading cause frequent eruptions of scandal and controversy. These ruptures indicate the inevitable tensions in any coalition of creators and consumers, even when the same beloved objects are at stake.

Biographical Information

Rebecca Hill is professor of American Studies at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, GA. Her research interests include social movement history, intersections between popular culture and politics, prisons, policing, racial formation and gender studies. She received her PhD in American Studies with a minor in Feminist Studies from the University of Minnesota in 2000, and her B.A. from Wesleyan University with honors in history in 1991. Her publications include Men, Mobs and Law: Anti-Lynching and Labor Defense in U.S. Radical History (Duke University Press, 2009) and Teaching American Studies: The State of the Classroom as State of the Field with Elizabeth Duclos-Orsello and Joseph Entin (University Press of Kansas, 2021). She has published articles in the New Left Review; American Studies, Labor: Studies in Working Class History of the Americas; Labour/Le Travail, and American Quarterly. She is currently working on new books on anti-fascism in U.S. politics and culture from the 1920s to the present, and political conflict in geek culture.

Author

• Rebecca Hill, Kennesaw State University