Reading stories politically: Theorizing contemporary American short fiction

How and why we read stories is a political question. Theories of reading are theories of sense-making, and therefore how one reads has important political consequences. This dissertation examines predominant ways of reading and subjects them to a political critique that is designed to reveal not only their political interestedness but also the hidden assumptions and presuppositions that all these theories contain.;The examination of contemporary short stories and the theories of reading short stories allow the theorization of the limits of political understanding and reading that inform subject formation under North American capitalism. This study concentrates on the historical, always connecting reading and comprehending to the conditioning outside---the historical material relations of global capitalism.