This document discusses print culture and reading communities. It begins with an exercise asking the reader to visualize their ideal reading experience. It then shows several images depicting reading throughout history. It discusses Benedict Anderson's concept of imagined communities, where members of a nation feel connected despite not knowing each other. The document outlines social roles of reading such as consuming, sharing, producing and performing. It provides background on Oprah's book club and its impact. Finally, it poses implications for fans and corporations and invites discussion.

1. Print Culture and
Reading Communities
Jenae Cohn
jdcohn@ucdavis.edu

2. An Exercise to Begin
• Take 5 minutes to write down (or draw!) what your ideal reading experience
looks and feels like.
• Where are you?
• What are you reading? How are you reading it?
• What do you smell? Hear? Touch? Feel? Taste?

3. Fig. 1 (left):
“St. Jerome
in his
Study,” 1492
Fig. 2
(right):
“Brother
Gregorio of
Vicenza,”
1547

4. Fig. 3 (at
right):
“Girl
Reading,”
Auguste
Renoir,
1891
Fig. 4 (at
left):
“A Young
Girl
Reading,”
Alfred
Stevens,
1856

5. Fig. 5 (at left): “Girl Reading,” Jennifer Ryan, 2014
Fig. 6 (at right): “Self Portrait,” Paperback Castles, 2015

6. Imagined Communities
• Anderson (1987): A nation is an “imagined political community… It is
imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know
most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the
minds of each lives the image of their communion” (p. 6).
• “… it is imagined as a community, because, regardless of the actual
inequality and exploitation that may prevail in each [nation], the nation is
always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship” (p. 7).

7. Social Valences of Reading
• Consuming
• Sharing
• Producing
• Performing

8. Oprah first began the book club
in 1996.
She “re-booted” it in 2012 after a one-
year hiatus.

13. Implications
Fans Corporations

14. Discussion and Questions?