Touching the Text: Reading Pleasure in the Eighteenth Century

Kate Devine, a graduate student in Hanna Roman’s spring 2016 “Rethinking the Enlightenment French Novel” class, discusses how we can imagine the relationship between the reader’s body and the body of the text in eighteenth-century literature in the Morris Wachs Collection. What do contemporary materialist theories, many of them explained or enacted in these texts, of reading tell us about what happened when the reader interacted with the text.