"Moving beyond purposes for reading as fixed outcomes, this dissertation project explores the possibilities of affect theory for decentering or weakening those purposes so they might be seen as one element among many interacting in the classroom space. Because these purposes become the expected outcomes of reading with youth in secondary English classrooms, they act as boundary-makers, including and excluding other possibilities for reading. Yet, beginning from theoretical assumptions about ordinary classroom interactions being full of lively, shifting potentials (e.g. Stewart, 2007), I consider the purposes of reading for literary analysis, reading for pleasure, and reading for social transformation as made in the intra-actions of objects, bodies, and histories. Drawing on creative nonfiction and techniques of rhythm, tone, and pacing, I include stories of reading with youth designed to provoke wonder about why we read and what reading together makes possible. Ultimately, this analysis begins from a place of slowing down to capture the affective nature of reading with youth in secondary English classrooms, the space between and beyond the purposes we set for reading. Although I attended to what happened in moments of reading with youth and their teacher during the 2017-2018 school year, this project is also speculative, suggesting what could be or could have been, all the ideas, impacts and intensities that made the youth, teacher, and me think about what happened in class or the ones that would have drifted away had it not been for this dissertation."--Page ii.
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