"Here's a hypothetical: a man walks into a bar, buys a drink, and starts reading from a paperback copy of David Foster Wallace's " Infinite Jest." He could very well be reading " Moby-Dick" or " Gravity's Rainbow" or " Middlemarch," but, for the sake of this setup, let's say it's Wallace's 1996 novel, with its thousand-plus pages and hundreds of endnotes and the ghosts of a million bespectacled graduate students whispering, "You know it's got a nonlinear plot, right?""
"A performative reader treats books like accessories, lugging around canonical texts as a ploy to attract a romantic partner or as a way to revel in the pleasure of feeling superior to others. While everyone else is scrolling social media and silencing life with noise-cancelling headphones, the performative reader insists upon his intelligence with attention-seeking insincerity, begging to be noticed with the aid of a big, look-at-me, capital-"B" book."
Performative reading frames books as visible props used to signal intellect, status, or romantic appeal rather than to foster private engagement with texts. The practice often centers on canonical, hefty works whose physical presence conveys seriousness and cultural capital. Social media platforms have amplified and satirized the trope, turning performative reading into a recurring meme and stereotype, frequently portraying young men as its primary practitioners. The trend intersects with broader concerns about declining sustained reading and the shifting role of books in public, curated self-presentation.
Read at The New Yorker
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