ABSTRACT
Where does the meaning of a literary work reside? Our learned reflex is to plunge deep into the text, searching out meanings we assume the author has buried for us to find. But the absent communication between writer and reader is enabled, influenced, and sometimes interrupted by a host of other people: agents, editors, marketers, critics, reviewers, advertisers, librarians, and translators. The exchange is mediated as well by the object that contains the text: whether printed on paper or keyboarded into appearance on a backlit screen, books are embedded in the physical world – produced by the transformation of natural and chemical resources, distributed as a commodity within an economic supply chain, transmitted and stored in ways that reflect a society’s values about writing itself. Together these historical, material, and ideological circumstances comprise the conditions of possibility of making meaning from texts. Such factors may seem pedestrian, or not intellectually challenging for inter-
preters. Latino literary scholarship has historically emphasized social questions such as identity and the experience of marginality, yet the contextual evidence it gravitates toward is often limited to the author’s life experiences and a general set of historical parameters that have shaped them. These contexts tend to be subsumed into questions of representation: whether a particular novel does or doesn’t offer a realistic or critical or visionary portrayal of Latino life. Focusing on such textual representations can offer insight into the ways ideology works, but at the cost of overlooking the larger landscape surrounding that work’s existence – including the vital question of who its audience really is, and why they would be drawn to this form of cultural expression over others. By stepping back to consider literature’s conditions of possibility – access to literacy and to authorship, the material and historical reality of printed objects, the social value attached to competency in decoding certain kinds of texts – we gain perspective on the everyday workings of reading as a social practice. Approaching literature as a product of a specific culture of print conjoins the methodologies of popular culture studies and the close reading for aesthetic and ideological meanings that is more traditionally practiced in literary studies. Studying how literature’s
conditions of possibility have transformed over time can, moreover, illuminate the moment of media transformation in which we now find ourselves.
