A collective book approaches, from an openly conservative perspective, contemporary reading practices. Modified by a new technological and educational situation, the relationship with the text is changing, and ways of reading today reveal not only new forms of appropriation but also a different role for prescribers.
Describing and understanding reading practices in our time remains a laborious exercise as these practices mesh with plural and articulated contexts. Between the effects of a generalized increase in educational training and the historical and technological transformations of knowledge which continue to modify access and diffusion, ways of reading are modified by the structural changes of a society but work in turn society by developing unique forms of appropriation, specific to times and situations. Immersing yourself in contemporary reading means not only questioning the reasons why we read or not reading, but also the “ way of doing things “. How do we deal with texts, at a time when everything is accessible on the web andAmazon offers, with success and happiness for the general public, an editorial offer soon to be extended to the daily and specialized press ? What are the logics that push us to develop increasingly subjective relationships with the text? ? In our utilitarian, exploratory, recreational readings on screen, does the text simply provide us with collapsing informational data or is it, this tabbed, multi-functionality text, capable in another way , by other means, to pull us towards greater autonomy and capacity for reflection ?
The question is posed by Olivier Bessard-Banquy to publishers and reading specialists (François Gèze, François Laurent, Nicole Robine, Olivier Donnat, Bernard Lahire, Martine Poulain), then submitted to the test of five studies (the readership of France Leisure by Bernadette Seibel, the weight of gendered representations in the strategies of booksellers by Joanna Thibout-Calais, the testimony of a bookseller in the age of Google by Jean-Pierre Ohl, reading on readers by Hervé Bienvault and the characteristics of digital literature by Alexandre Gefen). These exchanges with publishers and sociologists as well as the scientific articles make it possible to discuss the explicitly conservative thesis of the collection which considers that the new forms of reading, readership and publication have renounced any humanist and literary ambition. Thus suspected of high treason of belles lettres, the world of books is subjected to a close interrogation intended to prove that current publications are, for the most part, a commercial subculture, with a style trashwithout requirements in content and language. However, beyond this conviction, the author gives himself the means to collect nuanced, argued, detailed points of view which make this work a rich synthesis for all those interested in contemporary trends in reading and readers: the book can be usefully read by prescribers (teachers, librarians and booksellers) and publishing managers, students in the humanities and social sciences, future teachers and trainers of young people and adults.
School democratization and decline of scholarly reading
The book is easy to understand, although the theme covered is not. Explaining a paradox that is often complicated to understand, we are presented with the dialectical relationship between, on the one hand, educational massification and generalized diffusion of the hierarchy of cultural values. via school and, on the other, weakening of the recognition of this same hierarchy in the trajectories of social mobility and downgrading. While the 1980s and 1990s saw the most public resources invested in reading (prices, popularization, circulation, multiplication and modernization of libraries) and the democratization of schools reached ambitious levels, the readership did not seem to follow suit. same pace, at least if we look at the declared number of books read. Everything happens as if, made accessible by the massive schooling of new generations, the relationship with the text had become banal and, at the same time, had lost its distinctive power. Not only did the distinctive value emanating from literary competence weaken as academic competence replaced the humanities (Greek and Latin) with mathematics and technology, but new equally literary and aesthetic skills have emerged in an uninhibited and singular relationship with writing, highlighting a conversational, phonetic, intimate style. Digital literature, which feeds on phenomena as much criticized as fragmentary, diagonal and circular writing and reading, shows the limits of an ancient order of literate knowledge.
The entire social and educational organization of XIXe And XXe centuries was built on an emancipatory vision of knowledge, on a fixed and elitist social division of the work of writing and on the idea, criticized so many times by Roger Chartier, of the immutability and universality of ways of writing. ‘use the written word and the text: to the men of the literate elites creation, invention and literary production ; to women, the transmission and dissemination of simplified knowledge to the educated masses. This illusion is itself a form of power: the production and transmission of tastes as well as the perpetuation of the scarcity of literate knowledge are rooted in the social domination between men and women, readers and laymen, clerics and manuals, adults and young people.
Individualized reading practices
It is in this debate that the question of the legitimacy (in its infancy, criticized, militant) of new reading practices arises where we begin to better know invisible readers, ashamed of their reading (novels Harlequinsentimental literature « happy ending “, comics erotica, detectives and thrillers, dragon and vampire literature read by adults). These unknown audiences are not new ; they reveal themselves a little more with the help of blogs, reader panels, reading workshops, thematic exchange meetings, library reading sessions. Booksellers and libraries are no longer a place of advice, book professionals having to abandon their role of guide to invent a place for themselves in cultural mediation: ensuring that everyone can find, among the 60,000 titles published in France by year, a text that is adapted to it. Without necessarily setting the objective of improving the mind, deepening or reflecting, the paths and logics of appropriation of texts have become plural thanks to the passage of all through school and the possibility of asking personal preferences as legitimate. The individual has become a subject and, in fact, this mutation results in an increased capacity of this subject to express his desires, to practice activities without hiding, what we call individualization of practices.
If the figure of the gentleman XVIe is neglected, it is not only because of its humanist posture towards knowledge ; it is also that his knowledge was universal, sedimented and incorporated like a second skin. Today, readings, nourished by images and multimedia features, lend themselves more to a game with knowledge, in an awareness of uncertainty and not of stability, of creation and not of repetition, of invention and not commentary and exegesis. In an astonishing premonition of the future of the contemporary text, Roland Barthes wrote that cognitive dissonances open onto the enigmatic alliance of the text and the body where irritation and hypersensitivity express the subjectivity of a profoundly subversive being. The irony, the dissonance, the discontinuity, the singularity of the experiences circulating and gradually enriched on blogs prove that all literature is not marketing ; that, even in the extreme liberal era, the internet can offer interstices where fragments of autonomous thought are possible, although they do not correspond to the conventional properties of the literary text. The struggle for recognition is one of the challenges of domination and, if a reversal of the hierarchies of cultural domination is at work, is it not logical that yesterday’s elites denounce the amateurism of the news recruits ? Is it not in the order of things that the phonetic language of SMSyoung and transversal to social circles, generates the disgust of those who were admired for their mastery of speaking well ?
The advanced individualization of tastes is disturbing, while the school has done everything to establish the subject as a thinking individual. In a completely original way, the members of France Leisure and the female public of bookstores strongly recall the emergence of profiles of readers – especially female readers – who are not very literate and who free themselves from social judgment and bend the offer of collections to their sentimental taste, their autodidactic concern and their educational role among children. We then see that this readership “ AVERAGE ” Or “ weak » with modest cultural capital, an economic budget sensitive to crises, is fully socialized to editorial strategies and acculturated to authors, stylized formats and combined supports. New forms of reading, unpredictable, random, volatile (purchasers of books in supermarkets, in media houses, on Amazon), but also hyperspecialized and feverish (juvenile and adult practices of the comicsmanga, science fiction) and focused on exchange and sociability (adult, active forty-year-old readers, mothers, combining aesthetic taste for colors and typographic forms with content and the choice of an author) echo to new literary practices where a freer relationship to the text is expressed, and therefore closer to what people experience, both at the relational and psychological level (family, professional, friendly, romantic sphere).
At the end of this immersion in contemporary reading, we know that its definition must take into account three complementary levels: intimate act, social issue of (weak) distinction and symbolic appropriation of contents and forms, supports and ways of doing things. . Because if reading means entering into resonance with oneself, whatever the goal of the practice, this relationship also remains a social relationship in that it includes or excludes, completes or places in opposition, supports whose value is not is not identical depending on the era. Today the antagonistic perception of print and screen, of which Martine Poulain underlines both the complementarity and the extreme heterodoxy in relation to the routines and habits of readersreflects the tensions generated by technological revolutions (computer, digital) in the same way as the tensions between nobility and bourgeoisie, literate culture and popular culture had previously expressed upheavals in social values and shared beliefs. Pierre Bourdieu also recalled the unstable dimension of the hierarchies of cultural values: it is the rarity of a good at a time that creates its value as well as the strict control of its social distribution. Without this control, the market and the good find themselves profoundly modified by the entry of new players, which is precisely what the school dissemination of literary works has done. Cultural goods always have a differential value (social, sexual, generational) in the social space but this value changes according to their social uses: the contemporary individual rarely conforms to prescriptions and prefers to place market channels and educational and literary institutions in competition. , cultural. No doubt because, for a long time, these institutions, and first and foremost the school, excluded popular, gregarious, oral and festive forms of reading in order to lock them up, discipline them and purify them.