This post is brought to you by a conversation in a pub after a research seminar. A PhD student told me then that she had attended a workshop on academic blogging where my blog (either this whole site, or just the archive of my own doctoral research) was brought up for study. I had no idea that this was happening, because – perhaps naively – I didn’t think anyone was reading what I wrote. So, hello future workshop participants.
Perhaps I was taken aback by this news because it was the third time in a fortnight that I found out that people who didn’t know me personally were reading my work. The first was an email with positive peer review for an article that I’m preparing for the Journal of Eighteenth-Century Studies, although – as is often the way with these things – my response to the reviewers was to fixate on their strangest and least helpful comment, namely that my writing has a ‘non-native ring’. Alas the reviewer gave no evidence of this, so I am left wondering what aspect of my prose seems noticeably un-anglophone, and I also can’t help suspecting that this comment may have come from the belief that an English scholar would not have quoted quite so many sources in French and German.
The second trace of another’s reading of my work also came in the form of peer review, this time for a proposed book manuscript. Here the main thing was the quantity of review: four different people had been asked to respond to my plan for the volume and, while globally positive, it was striking how almost everyone picked up the same things that needed work. The book will be all the better for acting on these suggestions.
‘Who is reading me?’ Can be quite a vain question, which is maybe why I don’t think about it until something forces me to. There might be other reasons too. My academic training, and even now my lecture writing and seminar planning, has always involved in-person feedback, from supervisors, students and colleagues. I am very used to the idea that people I know are considering my work; that people who have never met me have to respond to my words in the way I respond to some anonymous critic is rather less comfortable.
Perhaps this is because it is not so much a question of ‘who is reading’ but ‘whose reading’, i.e. what does this unknown reader understand from my work: do they agree with my argument? are they extrapolating from what I wrote to a more general judgment about my abilities and biases? I’d like to know, or, then again, maybe I wouldn’t.
If I do want to know it’s because, while I’m writing, I am desperately trying to anticipate my reader’s responses, offering them prose that proceeds in an orderly and readable fashion, and, once I release that prose into the public, I’d like to know whether my anticipation worked or not. If it didn’t, then perhaps my writing could improve. Then again, I can get that kind of feedback on a draft, and who’s to say that, for every reader whose needs I’ve misunderstood, there are fifty more who adore my stuff and yet are unknown to me?
On that comforting and self-indulgent thought, I’ll stop.