Reconceptualizing 'Reading for Pleasure': a New Materialist approach

Andrie Savva

A multifaceted notion, Reading for Pleasure, highlights readers’ agency, their desire to read, the delight gained through this experience, and a related pedagogy that fertilizes such volitional stance. The journey that emerges under the Reading for Pleasure umbrella highlights various aspects of the reading experience, such as set and setting, approach and activities, reading community, readers’ engagement. The discourse of Reading for Pleasure is most often developed through the sociocultural lens (Chambers, 2011; Cremin et al., 2014; Kucirkova & Cremin, 2020). Recent accounts, though, discussing digital reading (Hollett & Ehret, 2017), makerspace literacies (Lemieux & Rowsell, 2020; Sheridan et al., 2020), and craftivist post-digital approaches (Rowsell & Shillitoe, 2019) consider new materialist relational approaches. For the purposes of this poster, I employ a new materialist approach to reconceptualize Reading for Pleasure. I posit that a relational materialist approach shifts from conventional approaches, such as literature circles, authors’ visits, and book-talks, and opens up possibilities for entwining the reading and the Artistic process and the socially engaged practice. Drawing on new materialist and posthumanist frameworks, I employ Karen Barad’s (2007) agential realism and attend to the entanglement and intra-action of a reading-Artistic event in its ongoing articulation and explore its relational character. I draw on Jane Bennett’s (2001) notion of enchantment to explore the affective flows generated between children, myself, artworks, materials (studio-based and natural), and environment. The entanglement is performed as a complex web of relations where the ongoing engagement is never fixed, rather unstable and perplexed. The artworks and the materials are considered as collaborators; thus, I employ Jane Bennett’s (2010) thing power to attend to the vitality of things to affect and to be affected. Materials and artworks also engage our senses and trigger personal and cultural associations. As such, I draw on haptics (Marks, 2002) to explore the multisensory experience and bodily relationship with the image that extends the limits of visuality beyond the optical. I also draw on Barbara Bolt’s (2010) notion of methexis to explore the material performativity of the Artistic, creative process as a ritual practice. Methexis suggests an embodied theory of the Artistic practice, considering conceptual and material bodily processes as intertwined. It highlights a performance that produces rather than represents. In synthesizing a Reading for Pleasure event, the reading and the Artistic process are ritual practices of equal importance interlaced in a performative production of the work of art, of the poem. Through this presentation, I aim to explicate the implications of a new materialist approach to argue that Reading for Pleasure as an affective event intensifies when transforming traditional approaches to include the reading and the Artistic process as creative and performative practice and the social engagement in responding to matters of concern and care. The focus is on children’s engagement with multimodal artworks; what is most often conceptualized as printed wordless picturebooks and their Artistic creations with various materials. In choosing the vignettes, I utilize Maggie MacLure’s (2010, 2013) notion of data that glow, where glow “seems to invoke something abstract or intangible that exceeds propositional meaning, but also has a decidedly embodied aspect” (2013, p. 661). I zoom on a group of children’ s collaborative choice of artwork. Similarly, I zoom on the emergent reading and Artistic engagement with various materials of choice, where matters of interest triggered during the reading process are further explored. The abstract Artistic creations are approached as “traces of multiple practices of engagements” (Barad, 2007, p. 53). I finally zoom towards a socially engaged practice where relevant matters of concern and care that emerged in the process might be further explored. In so doing, I approach this poster as a rhizome (Deleuze & Guattari, 2013), where vignettes of material-discursive intra-actions, theory, and media emerge as open-ended practices and highlight complexity and richness devoid of hierarchical order.