Introduction: What Does American Literature Feel Like?

Reading is a bodymind experience, one that confirms “the enmeshment of the mind and body” that recent disability scholarship has put to the fore (Schalk 4), yet one that also continues to testify to some of the politicized uses of the entrenched dualism between body and mind that idealist philosophy from Plato to Descartes and beyond has sought to establish. The etymology of the word “reading,” and the long history of its practice, seemingly hinge on a bifurcation and an oscillation between t...