2026 Theses Doctoral

A Book Club in the Web of Living Literature

Fernandes, Tara M.

In this study I situate The I-House Book Club within a constellation of reading communities that have marked literary history with surprise, disruption, and talking back to the center. Book clubs are often overlooked as spaces of literary adventure and pedagogical possibility. Opening up spaces with literature, by literature, and for literature in book clubs, debate, dialogue, and friction is invited. Challenging the idea of an enervated literary tradition, this study of a transnational literary community I founded in New York makes the argument for a vital Web of Living Literature. The transnational element of this particular book club in New York puts the canonical and classical text in conversation with the contemporary, asking important questions about text choice, interpretive habits, and the types of readers such spaces produce and return to the world. The focus on one rooted but adventuring transnational community shows the hopeful potential of such liberatory spaces in opening up readers, activating spaces, and enlivening the literary tradition.

My quilted vignettes use interpretive narrative research inquiry to draw the reader into the rooms, conversations, and lived practices of the Book Club. The argument of this dissertation is for the creation, protecting, and recognizing of such spaces that allow for diverse aesthetic transactions, collaborative curation of reading-lists, and a living, breathing inheritance that speaks to the contemporary reader. These all feed back into the overarching concept of The Web of Living Literature—a structure I have imagined holding the many meeting-places of literature and life.