Mairín Martin

Bio: Mairín Martin is an academic researcher. The author has an hindex of 1, co-authored 1 publications receiving 11 citations.

Reading in the Borderland: An Ethnographic Study of Serious Readers in a Mega-Bookstore Café

Abstract: Today, mega-bookstores are one of the most powerful sponsors of reading. They are not just selling books; they are teaching people new ways to read. The enthusiasm among some individuals to read in a retail store (as opposed to the home or library) did not occur spontaneously. Mega-bookstores’ marketing strategies underwrote a “commercial-contract approach to reading” and wider social formations helped enable it. This ethnographic study explores the tension between the reading environment constructed by one Borders bookstore in a midwestern college town and the different expectations and practices that serious and not-so-serious readers bring to the cafe. Although the reading culture in the cafe appears unstructured, Borders has made sure that little has been left to chance. Borders’ fluid “social, sensual” narrative of reading is designed to control store space by affirming the identities of its preferred customers and by promoting reading practices that translate into sales. The author would like to tha...

"The Viper's Traffic-Knot": Celibacy and Queerness in the "Late" Marianne Moore

Abstract: In a 1927 letter to fellow poet Allen Tate, Hart Crane complains about his prospects for publication: “I’ve had to submit it [‘The Dance’] to Marianne Moore recently, as my only present hope of a little cash. But she probably will object to the word ‘breasts,’ or some other such detail. It’s really ghastly. I wonder how much longer our markets will be in the grip of two such hysterical virgins as The Dial and Poetry!”1 Here, the magazines are personified by their editors: the censoring celibates Marianne Moore and Harriet Monroe, respectively. Crane’s letter flattens all distinction between celibacy and censorship. His reading of censorship as a hysterical symptom of celibacy is proximate to queer theory’s own reading of celibacy as self-censorship. By this I mean that queer theory reads “celibacy” (when it reads it at all) as repression — referring to the celibate as a “latent,” “closeted,” or “reluctant” homosexual who has detrimentally internalized homophobia. In this essay, I argue that this inability to read celibacy outside the framework of failed homosexuality points to a much larger problem at the center of queer reading practices. Examining this problem promises to reconfigure key concepts in sexuality studies like “expression,” “performance,” and “silence.” Taking the modernist poet Marianne Moore as a case study, I argue that Moore’s reconceptualization of the temporal underpinnings of celibacy enables her to forge a celibacy that is not rooted in lack or repression. This essay reads celibacy as a sexuality, as an identity, rather than as a “closeting” screen for another identity; I substantiate celibacy’s “nothing” in order to rethink the epistemology of the closet. Typifying the conflation of celibacy with homosexuality, Thomas Yingling’s chapter “The Unmarried Epic” reads Crane’s lines — “The ancient men — wife-

Princess Diana's celebrity in freeze-frame Reading the constructed image of Diana through photographs

Abstract: This essay analyzes the relationship between Princess Diana's celebrity and her photographed image in two popular, posthumous media constructions of Diana's life. Utilizing Richard Dyer's work on Hollywood stars and identity authenticity, both works are contextuahzed in tabloid journalism and its ambivalent authority in the construction of celebrity image. The paper then applies a semiotic lens to each publication's construction of the relationship between photograph and language, exploring how these joined symbolic systems generate and authorize a crucial sense of the 'real' Diana. Finally, the essay explores how the mediation of the narrative source is a critical factor in determining the stability and signification of Diana's photographs.