We talked in my David Foster Wallace class this week about Dostoevsky (specifically about Wallace’s review of Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky), and some students raised the possibility that (publicly) reading a book like The Brothers Karamazov, say, might earn its reader some strange, disapproving looks. The same might be said for Moby-Dick, or Ulysses, or, who knows, Wallace’s own Infinite Jest.

In September, and in advance of the publication of her book Making Literature Now, the critic and Yale scholar Amy Hungerford made a case in The Chronicle of Higher Education for not reading, for refusing to read, certain books. Her example: Infinite Jest.

My small act of countercultural scholarly agency has been to refuse to continue reading or assigning the work of David Foster Wallace. The machine of his celebrity masks, I have argued, the limited benefits of spending the time required to read his work. … Wallace defended its length and its obscurities by indicating that he expected people to read it twice. If this was not a form of arrogance, I’m not sure what would be.

Let’s pause for a moment to think about what Nabakov said about reading in the first place:

Curiously enough, one cannot read a book: one can only reread it. A good reader, a major reader, an active and creative reader is a rereader. And I shall tell you why. When we read a book for the first time the very process of laboriously moving our eyes from left to right, line after line, page after page, this complicated physical work upon the book, the very process of learning in terms of space and time what the book is about, this stands between us and artistic appreciation. When we look at a painting we do not have to move our eyes in a special way even if, as in a book, the picture contains elements of depth and development. The element of time does not really enter in a first contact with a painting. In reading a book, we must have time to acquaint ourselves with it.

But a longer and better response to Hungerford’s article comes in a not-at-all-impressed review of her book by Tom LeClair at a website called Full Stop. I think it’s worth a read. Here are just a few lines to whet your appetite:

Continually reminding readers of how busy a person she is, Hungerford speaks of her need for pragmatic ‘resource allocation.’ This is the language of an administrator, not a literature lover. Maybe Dean Hungerford should resign from her administrative duties and clear some time to read works she talks about and find out about the presses she doesn’t talk about. Also irritating is the discrepancy between her supposed support of alternative publishing and the books she asks students to read. If you look at the syllabus for her lectures available on YouTube, you won’t find a single work from an alternative press, few recent books, and not a single encyclopedic novel such as Infinite Jest.