A community of readers: Models of reading in Joyce, Morrison and Garcia Marquez

Drawing upon reader-response criticism and narrative ethics, "A Community of Readers: Models of Reading in Joyce, Morrison and Garcia Marquez" explores the ethical contributions of twentieth-century literature and its efforts to model more active and engaged modes of reading through stylistics and depictions of reading characters, with a specific emphasis on how literature relates to the articulation of a communal ethics. While literary critics have long argued for the ethical importance of literature in terms of its capacity to inculcate values, confront readers with the limitations of hegemonic history, and inspire new ways of thinking about existing ethical dilemmas, literary scholarship has been insufficiently attentive to the ethical value attributed by literary texts to modeling reading. Examining James Joyce's Dubliners, Toni Morrison's Beloved, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Cien anos de soledad---three prominent twentieth-century texts that display modernist formal characteristics and explore communal themes---the dissertation argues that the ethical value of these texts does not derive from particular messages they articulate, but rather from the narrative and stylistic techniques they employ and their depictions of reading and readers as communally relevant. The active participation these texts encourage and the models of reading they provide suggest the utopian possibilities of the reading encounter, the struggle those utopias demand, and the dangerous if seductively comfortable dystopias that result and have resulted from readerly passivity.