View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of Tennessee, Knoxville: Trace University of Tennessee, Knoxville Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange Doctoral Dissertations Graduate School 5-2014 The eopleP Who Do ‘This’ in Common: Book Clubs as ‘Everyday Activists’ Julie E. Tyler University of Tennessee - Knoxville, [email protected] Recommended Citation Tyler, Julie E., "The eP ople Who Do ‘This’ in Common: Book Clubs as ‘Everyday Activists’. " PhD diss., University of Tennessee, 2014. https://trace.tennessee.edu/utk_graddiss/2778 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. It has been accepted for inclusion in Doctoral Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Trace: Tennessee Research and Creative Exchange. For more information, please contact [email protected]. To the Graduate Council: I am submitting herewith a dissertation written by Julie E. Tyler entitled "The eP ople Who Do ‘This’ in Common: Book Clubs as ‘Everyday Activists’." I have examined the final electronic copy of this dissertation for form and content and recommend that it be accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, with a major in English. Amy J. Elias, Major Professor We have read this dissertation and recommend its acceptance: Kirsten Benson, Janet Atwill, Stergios Botzakis Accepted for the Council: Dixie L. Thompson Vice Provost and Dean of the Graduate School (Original signatures are on file with official student records.) The People Who Do ‘This’ in Common: Book Clubs as ‘Everyday Activists’ A Dissertation Presented for the Doctor of Philosophy Degree The University of Tennessee, Knoxville Julie E. Tyler May 2014 ii Copyright © 2014 by Julie Elizabeth Tyler All rights reserved iii To the trifecta. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I thank my dissertation committee and other faculty at UT for their encouragement at all phases of this project. The contributions from each committee member—Amy Elias, Kirsten Benson, Janet Atwill, and Stergios Botzakis—made this project a stronger interdisciplinary undertaking. In particular, I thank Amy Elias and Kirsten Benson for co-directing this project and for their genuine investment in my success and well-being. I thank my parents and sisters for the love, prayers, and support throughout my time in this doctoral program, making sure that I was doin’ alright, in the wonderful way that families do. I thank my best friends, Whitney Jones, Deidre Garriott, and Sarah Welsh for their beauty and brains, unfailing love and good humor, and for their professional collaborations and spiritual support. My friends at KnoxLife church, Janie and Turner Howard: thank you for cheering for me on as I “finish the race.” My fellow dancers in the SalsaKnox and EvoZouk communities : thank you for the great moves and tunes. Lastly, I thank the members of the Books-N-Wine club who generously offered their time to participate in this project and who welcomed me socially into their close-knit community. With their fascinating and authoritative knowledge on book clubs and the experiences of reading, this project has a promising future. v ABSTRACT This study of the Books-N-Wine club in Knoxville, Tennessee participates in a growing body of research on reading communities. Since the 1980s, researchers have investigated book clubs as social-intellectual phenomena whose history dates back to eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Intersecting with the development of the public sphere and even fueling concrete social movements, book clubs comprise a “shadow tradition of literature.” Current research suggests that contemporary clubs continue to advance this “shadow tradition” and have the potential to teach and transform their constituencies. Several areas remain unexplored in research on book clubs, including the ways in which particular categories of clubs are identified and described, the ways in which clubs operate in specific contexts, and the research methods that yield the most useful data. To produce new knowledge on book clubs, this study is framed by theories from multiple disciplines as well as popular publications on book clubs, and investigates one club in Knoxville through observations of meetings and interviews with individual members. Findings suggest that Books-N-Wine is a situated, contextualized practice, exhibiting significant participation, on the part of its members, in other spheres. It is possible that this book club and other ones are comprised of “everyday activists” who negotiate among themselves the values and behaviors for use in domestic, professional, and other counterspheres. Findings also suggest that researchers must reflect on their impact on the clubs they study and should address a crisis of terminology that emerges when describing the phenomena they discover. In addition, because book clubs are complex practices, studies are best informed by multiple, rather than singular, disciplines and by published material that book clubs themselves produce. This study concludes by recommending that the study be extended in the following vi ways: (1) refining its theoretical and methodological underpinnings, (2) expanding the case study design to a study that compares several clubs, and (3) extending the time frame for collecting data. vii PREFACE This dissertation details a case study on a book club currently in its fourth year of operation in Knoxville, Tennessee—the Books-N-Wine club. Comprised of five core members, with occasional attendance by other readers, this club’s accomplishments have social, intellectual, aesthetic, and political significance that researchers and book club practitioners alike may find illuminating. Even though Books-N-Wine’s website is easily found online, these important accomplishments may very well go unnoticed by others. This club does not promote itself actively in the community, and, as is customary with many book clubs even in the age of social media, this club maintains a relatively private and insular practice. At the beginning of my interactions with this book club, I built relationships with its members that were as congenial as they were professional. Members kindly welcomed me when I arrived at meetings. They graciously offered their time for interviews to share with me their perceptions of and reflections about the club. During the six consecutive meetings that I silently and (in)visibly observed, I often longed to join the club’s lively and thought-provoking discussions. I wanted to be in the club. Members’ candid and insightful comments about the reading selections corresponded to the value they ascribe to the life of the mind. Their range of emotional expressions showed their willingness to be vulnerable in the presence of others. Their deliberative dialogue, points and counterpoints demonstrated commitments to expanding their worldviews. Simultaneously, their witty humor and occasional disdain for reading selections revealed their capacity for irreverent attitudes towards traditional cultural values. Above all, their interest in each other’s daily life showed that within the safe space of the host’s home the well- being of friends trumped even the most intrepid explorations of a good book. viii Over time and in the midst of the markedly unsocial aspects of conducting this study— hours spent in transcribing, coding, writing and rewriting—my relationship with members of the Books-N-Wine club evolved. As I expressed interest in the details of their personal lives, members demonstrated their enjoyment of my presence beyond surface-level hospitality, expressed curiosity about the progress of my work, and assured me they were “rooting” for me. One member’s observation highlighted additional dimension to this relationship, that our interactions during meetings and interviews prompted more self-awareness of his involvement in Books-N-Wine. It was like “holding up a mirror,” he said. I, too, experienced heightened self- awareness beyond what a researcher normally experiences navigating the field of someone else’s turf. These social and emotional experiences of self-reflection as part of the research process correspond to several outcomes of this study that were interesting and unexpected. While I was recruiting the members of this club as participants in my study, they recruited me as a participant in the club. We all became researchers of each other, the selected literary texts, and of ourselves—gathering different data through different methods of course—but nonetheless cooperating on a complex social level than exceeds mere observation. Cultivating these levels of reciprocity and mutual self-disclosure, as many qualitative researchers have noted, are important actions for establishing trust and cooperation. Each party shared his or her life as others shared and more importantly because others shared. Each party valued his or her contribution to this project and to the success of the book club itself. We became, as this project’s title suggests, “The People Who Do ‘This’ in Common.” ix TABLE OF CONTENTS CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION ................................................................... 1 Background .................................................................................................. 1 Statement of the Problem.......................................................................... 6 Purpose Statement...................................................................................