Speaker
Description
This paper departs from the premise that any understanding of literature across the lifespan must account for the ubiquitous practice of readers returning to the books they have already read. While empirical studies on rereading remain scarce, anecdotal and observational evidence suggest that people voluntarily revisit books read in the past (Beckett, 2009; Falconer, 2009; Waller, 2019). In fact, so prevalent is rereading that Amazon-owned reading platform Goodreads introduced a new “rereads” feature in 2017 in response to user demand (Goodreads, 2017). More recently, rereading is also acutely visible on BookTok, the industry-shaping bookish subculture of TikTok (Kulkarni & Burke, forthcoming). Moreover, such narrative returns today take place not only across platforms but also across modalities and modes of engagement. The recent Amazon Prime adaptation of Jenny Han’s YA trilogy The Summer I Turned Pretty (2009-2011) offers a topical example. Original readers – now no longer teenagers – revisit the storyworld and often even the novels in relation to the adaptation within a cultural landscape framed by TikTok commentary and engineered nostalgia. Such revisitations at once exemplify and push the boundaries of what Alison Waller calls the “lifelong reading act” (2019: 2).
In this paper, I expand Waller’s model to account for the digital, offering a theoretical intervention into mediated narrative return across the lifespan. Building on Louise Rosenblatt’s concept of the “reading act”, Waller suggests:
Remembering and rereading […] are not distinct from the reading act, but represent integrated elements that function on a micro level in each tangible, phenomenological encounter with a text, and on a macro level every time that text is conjured up through conscious reminiscence, involuntary memory, rereading projects or shared discourses about childhood books. (2019: 5)
While this model accurately captures the recursive nature of reading and textual engagement, it does not account for the contemporary experience informed by algorithmic and aesthetic affordances of platforms and ideologies of the larger digital landscape. The present paper attempts to fill this gap by drawing on media studies and postdigital aesthetics, adding an important dimension to the study of literature across the lifespan.
I operationalize the media-expanded model of the lifelong reading act via the aforementioned example of The Summer I Turned Pretty. The analysis traces how the novels in relation to TikTok commentary, soundtrack nostalgia, and the adaptation itself produce complex, overlapping, and technologically mediated temporalities of narrative return. In doing so, this paper demonstrates how rereading as a narrative practice highlights broader negotiations of memory and temporality across the lifespan in the digital age.
References
Beckett, S. L. (Ed.). (1999). Transcending Boundaries: Writing for a Dual Audience of Children and Adults. Routledge.
Falconer, R. (2009). The crossover novel: Contemporary children’s fiction and its adult readership. Routledge.
Goodreads. (2017). Celebrating The Joy of Rereading a Favorite Book. Goodreads. https://www.goodreads.com/blog/show/836-celebrating-the-joy-of-rereading-a-favorite-book
Kulkarni, S. and Burke, L. (2026). ‘”You’ve read this before?” “About 40 times”: Rereading and the self on BookTok,’ in L. Burke, E. Lamb and J. Duggan (eds) Girls’ and Young Women’s Textual Cultures Across History: Imitation, Adaptation, Transformation. Routledge. Forthcoming.
Waller, A. (2019). Rereading childhood books: A poetics. Bloomsbury Academic.
| Principal domain of study | English literary studies |
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