ABSTRACT
At the same time that literary theorists assert the sociopolitical nature of generic boundaries or the literary canon, and question the evaluative authority of ‘literary professionals’ (Fish, 1980; Ohmann, 1983; Smith, 1983; Tompkins, 1985), thousands of women and men in local book clubs across America use their readership to mark a boundary between themselves and their neighbors, and the elite among such reading groups proudly distinguish themselves from groups who ‘only read trash’. Similarly, while cultural theorists doubt the very possibility of literary representation, and trace the emergence of a decentered, fragmented postmodern self (Jameson, 1984; Lyotard, 1984; Derrida, 1976), reading group members assume novels fail unless they realistically represent the world, and respond to the characters in the text almost as if they were real people.
