Timothy Aubry, Reading as Therapy: What Contemporary Fiction Does for Middle-Class Americans, Iowa City, University of Iowa Press, 2011.

« At the very least, the Amazon reviews demonstrate that an awareness of the cultural and historical specificity embedded in a character’s experience can coexist rather comfortably with cross-cultural identification and feelings of shared humanity. Scholarly arguments frequently frame the two perspectives as mutually exclusive, at times endorsing a version of identity politics that scoffs at notions of universality, dismissing the ability of individuals within a privileged demographic category to understand the experience of those at the margins. And critics may be correct in asserting a contradiction or tension between the urge to identify with characters and the urge to acknowledge difference; but nonacademic readers are apparently able to manage this contradiction, negotiating effortlessly, if sometimes unthinkingly, between the two urges, each of which is necessary, I would argue, in different circumstances to manage the complicated social challenges that a multiethnic and globalized America produces. Perhaps responsible for readers’ untroubled capacity to perform this particular oscillation is the manifestly affective character of their interpretive experience – a state of responsiveness that can eschew the logical imperative to decide between two incongruous perspectives. »