Do readers, especially professional ones, ever get to be done feeling guilty? Three of the books under review here—Merve Emre’s Paraliterary: The Making of Bad Readers in Postwar America (2017), Vera Tobin’s Elements of Surprise: Our Mental Limits and the Satisfactions of Plot (2018), and Hugh McIntosh’s Guilty Pleasures: Popular Novels and American Audiences in the Long Nineteenth Century (2018)—present as elements of their stakes the question of how and whether it is worthwhile to study the kinds of texts and modes of reception we are apparently still to think of as “guilty pleasures.” Tobin relates the story of a colleague who questions her project of writing on “plot twists” on the grounds that they are “the cheapest sorts of stories” (270). “It is all too easy,” writes Emre, “to dismiss reading that does not look like [scholarly] reading as merely imitative, emotional, information seeking, faddish, escapist, propagandist, or otherwise unworthy of critical attention in its own right—as the genetically ‘middlebrow’ or ‘mass cultural’ antithesis to the university’s highly specialized literacy projects” (3–4). McIntosh notes “ongoing discussions” among critics about whether we have “fully grasped the merits of . . . genre writers” (25). Are the rubes still reading crap? Or are those ivory-tower snoots pooh-poohing good old-fashioned storytelling again? There is something strange about that move, however. Haven’t the humanities been taking popular culture and its modes of consumption seriously for many years, and in a systematic way since at least the late 1970s? Who dismisses “the cheapest sorts of stories” now, some fifty years after John Cawelti’s The Six-Gun Mystique (1970)? Who dismisses nonacademic modes of reading, after reception studies and cultural studies? And who is still hung up on questions of the so-called merits of one writer over another, when the dismantling of such value judgments has been one of the most

中文翻译：

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批评，调整

读者，尤其是专业读者，会不会感到内疚？这里正在审查的三本书 - 默夫·埃姆雷的《准文学：战后美国坏读者的形成》（2017 年）、维拉·托宾的《惊喜元素：我们的精神极限和情节的满足》（2018 年）和休·麦金托什的《有罪的快乐：流行小说》和美国观众在漫长的 19 世纪（2018 年）——提出了一个问题，即如何以及是否值得研究我们显然仍然认为是“罪恶的快乐”的文本和接受方式。托宾讲述了一位同事的故事，她质疑她的“情节曲折”写作计划，理由是“情节曲折”是“最廉价的故事”（270）。“这太容易了，”埃姆雷写道，“将看起来不像[学术]阅读的阅读视为仅仅是模仿、情感、信息寻求、时尚、逃避现实、宣传或其他本身不值得批判关注的阅读——作为基因上的‘中庸’或‘大众文化’大学高度专业化的扫盲项目的对立面”（3-4）。麦金托什指出，批评者之间“正在进行讨论”，讨论我们是否“完全掌握了 . . . 流派作家”（25）。rubes 还在读废话吗？或者那些象牙塔式的鼻涕虫又是老式的好故事吗？然而，这一举动有些奇怪。人文学科不是已经认真对待流行文化及其消费方式多年，至少从 1970 年代后期开始就系统地对待它吗？现在谁拒绝“最廉价的故事”，约翰·卡维尔蒂的《六枪之谜》（1970）五十年后？在接受研究和文化研究之后，谁拒绝了非学术的阅读模式？当这种价值判断的瓦解是最重要的判断之一时，谁仍然被一个作家的所谓优点悬而未决？