The initial results tended to confirm our worst stereotypes. Photograph: Loomis Dean/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Image Finally, we conducted a statistical test to find out which books were more likely to be on one group of readers’ shelves than the other.Īlbert Camus smoking a cigarette on the balcony outside his publishing firm’s office. This gave us just under 3,000 books that appeared on a minimum of 100 readers’ bookshelves (out of several hundred thousand books overall). We only focused on books labeled “fiction” or “literature” because we wanted to test our belief in Jakobson’s idea of the literary convention. Next, we catalogued all of the books that appeared on our “conservative reader” bookshelves and labeled them as “conservative”, and vice versa. If you liked a book from the left group (meaning you rated it three stars or higher) then you were labeled a “liberal reader”, and if you liked a book from the right group, you were labeled a “conservative reader”. These are books that are unabashedly written to divide people’s sentiments on the left and right. We began by identifying readers’ political affiliation by seeing if they had positively rated one or more books from a hand-curated list of highly partisan writing – titles like James Carville’s It’s the Middle Class, Stupid! or Paul Krugman’s End This Depression Now! on the left and Glenn Beck’s Cowards, Ann Coulter’s Demonic, or Pat Buchanan’s Suicide of a Superpower on the right, to name a few of the 200 titles we used. It represents a vibrant literary convention. Currently, the website has 55 million users who have posted reviews, annotations, or discussions of over 10m books. Goodreads is a website owned by Amazon where users can list books they have read or would like to read, post reviews, and carry out discussions. To answer this question, we decided to study readers’ behavior through the website. Over time, we’ve maintained a belief that Jakobson’s idea of “literary conventions” still exists, at least in the classroom.īut what about in the wider world? Conventional wisdom, supported by a spate of recent studies, tells us that literature and books are precisely the things that divide conservatives and liberals: conservatives are “ illiterate” while liberals are “ well read”. We see it time and again in our classrooms, when two students who hold divergent political beliefs find a way to debate a difficult topic such as racism through a discussion of Toni Morrison’s Beloved or the Holocaust through a reading of WG Sebald’s The Emigrants. Photograph: Caroll Taveras (commissioned)Īs professors of literature, we are constantly reminded of the ways that literature can provide material where readers engage in meaningful debate about tough ideas. Toni Morrison: a book like Beloved enables readers with differing political beliefs to debate a subject like slavery.
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