New Literary History

"The Textuality of Pleasure" examines the pleasures of ordinary reading as the common correlate of heightened discussions of the benefits of professional reading. Framed by a contrast between the work of reading poetic and prose texts, the paper examines Queneau's Zazie and Wilkin's Seductively Yours in order to establish the ways that the enjoyment of reading is chained to the initimate details of a text, therein seeking as well to provide a new framework for the examination of prose fiction.