Performative Affect: The “Crying Reader” from Eighteenth-Century Sensibility to Algorithmic Feeds
Table of contents:
- Abstract
- Research Question
- Hypothesis
- Introduction
- Theoretical Framework
- Historical Background
- The Logic of Différance and the Critique of Wholeness
- The Spatiality of Deconstruction
- Ethics and Spatial Responsibility
- Deconstruction in the Face of Crisis
- Sources: Importance and Integration
- Conclusion
- Works Cited
This assignment examines the figure of the “crying reader,” a reader whose tears serve as visible proof of a book’s power. It traces the figure from the eighteenth-century culture of sensibility to contemporary BookTok. Drawing on Birke’s diachronic study of digital reading culture, work on BookTok’s pedagogy, criticism and algorithmic literacy, and the cultural-studies approaches of Hall, Guerin and Nayar, it argues that reading emotion has always been partly performed and socially staged. It uses a deconstructive lens, attending to deferred meaning, spatial organisation, ethical responsibility and crisis, to show that tears cannot be cleanly sorted into “authentic” and “performed.” Algorithmic feeds change the conditions of this performance without inventing it.
How has the figure of the crying reader been constructed and performed from the age of sensibility to algorithmic platforms such as BookTok, and what does this continuity reveal about the relationship between private feeling and public display in reading culture?
I hypothesise that the crying reader is a recurring cultural performance rather than a spontaneous private response. Its form changes with the dominant medium, from the sentimental novel and the letter to the short video and the recommendation algorithm. Because affect and its display cannot be fully separated, the opposition between “genuine” and “performed” emotion collapses on inspection. Algorithmic feeds intensify this performance by rewarding legible, repeatable emotional signals.
Few images of reading are as recognisable today as the tearful face filmed after the final chapter. On BookTok, the book community on TikTok, such moments circulate as recommendations, reviews and social currency. Critics often treat this as a symptom of the digital age: shallow, commercial and engineered by algorithms. Yet the weeping reader has a much longer history. Eighteenth-century readers were expected to be moved, and moved visibly, by novels of sentiment.
Birke’s article frames this long view directly, reading crying readers across the age of sensibility and BookTok (Birke). This assignment builds on that move. It asks what is gained by treating the crying reader as a historically recurring figure, and what is lost by treating it as either pure feeling or pure marketing. The discussion proceeds through a theoretical frame drawn from cultural studies and deconstruction, a historical sketch, and four analytic sections, and ends by assessing how the sources work together.
The framework combines cultural studies with a deconstructive sensibility. Cultural studies, as introduced by Guerin et al. and by Nayar, treats literature and media as practices embedded in power, class, technology and everyday life rather than as autonomous aesthetic objects (Guerin et al.; Nayar). It therefore directs attention to readers, platforms and communities as well as texts.
Hall’s “Encoding/Decoding” supplies a second tool. Hall argues that media messages are produced with preferred meanings, but audiences may accept, negotiate or oppose them (Hall). Applied to BookTok, a creator “encodes” a book as devastating, and viewers may decode that framing as a reliable guide, as a marketing formula, or as something to be ironised. Reader response is never a mere reflection of the text.
The deconstructive element, drawn from Derrida, supplies the key analytic habit of the assignment. It suspects clean binaries such as authentic/performed, private/public and feeling/display, and it asks how each term depends on the one it supposedly excludes. I use this as an interpretive lens, not as a claim that the sources themselves are deconstructive. The aim is to read the crying reader as a figure in which these oppositions are visibly unstable.
The age of sensibility valued the capacity to feel, and especially to be affected by representation. Novels, sermons and poems were judged partly by whether they produced tears, and the tear became a sign of moral refinement. Reading was often social: books were read aloud in households, discussed in letters and displayed in conversation. Even a solitary reader knew that sensitivity was a trait others would recognise and approve.
Birke traces how this model of emotional reading resurfaces in later periods and in digital culture, showing that the display of reading emotion is neither new nor confined to one medium (Birke). Historical readers were already conscious of how their feelings would be perceived, and the culture rewarded a legible sensitivity. This anticipates the contemporary situation, in which the weeping reader performs for a audience, now measured in views and shares.
Between the two periods, criticism often disparaged emotional reading, particularly when linked to women and popular fiction. That history matters because today’s dismissals of BookTok as “just feelings” repeat older hierarchies that place cool, detached reading above emotional response.
The Logic of Différance and the Critique of Wholeness
Derrida’s différance names the way meaning is produced through difference and deferral: a sign never delivers its meaning in full presence but always refers elsewhere. Applied to the crying reader, tears appear to offer a moment of wholeness, an unmediated sign that the book has fully reached the reader. A deconstructive reading shows that this wholeness is illusory.
The tear signifies only within a system of conventions. In the age of sensibility, it points to virtue and refinement. On BookTok, it points to a book’s recommendability and to the reader’s membership in a community. Its meaning is always deferred to a context and an audience. Hall’s framework reinforces the point: the same tearful video can be decoded as sincere testimony, as persuasive advertising, or as parody (Hall). No single reading exhausts it.
This undermines the demand for an “authentic” crying reader. If feeling were wholly present to itself, display would be an unnecessary supplement. But the history Birke documents suggests that display and feeling constitute each other: the reader learns what a moving book looks like partly by seeing others be moved (Birke). The supplement turns out to be constitutive. The critique of wholeness therefore applies to the critic as well, since claiming to identify the “real” emotion beneath the performance presumes access to a pure interior that the argument has just put in doubt.
The Spatiality of Deconstruction
Deconstruction attends not only to time and deferral but to spatial arrangements: inside and outside, centre and margin, the structures that organise where meaning can appear. Reading culture has always had a spatial dimension. The eighteenth-century parlour, the circulating library and the letter each defined who could witness a reader’s feeling.
The algorithmic feed is a new architecture of this kind. Low et al. show that BookTok users develop “algorithmic imaginings,” folk understandings of how the platform sorts and promotes content, and that these shape how they create and interpret posts (Low et al.). A reader who understands that emotionally intense content circulates widely has a reason to stage emotion for the feed’s logic. The private act of reading is thus relocated into a space that organises visibility in advance.
Dezuanni and Schoonens describe BookTok as a site of peer pedagogy, where creators invite viewers to learn about books and reading through short videos (Dezuanni and Schoonens). Spatially, this means the crying reader occupies a teaching position: tears become a form of instruction in how to read, what to value and what to expect from a story. The boundary between private reading and public pedagogy is porous. Here too the inside/outside opposition does not hold, because the feed is partly inside the act of reading it displays.
Ethics and Spatial Responsibility
If reading emotion is staged within shared spaces, ethical questions follow about who is responsible for what those spaces promote and exclude. De Melo examines BookTok’s influence on literary criticism and diversity, raising the question of whose books gain visibility when affective recommendation becomes a dominant mode of evaluation (De Melo). Emotional intensity can open space for new voices and communities, but it can also entrench a narrow canon of “tear-jerkers” that circulate because they fit a formula.
Responsibility here is distributed. Creators answer for the reading practices they model, platforms for the logics that amplify them, and viewers for how they decode and pass on what they see. A deconstructive ethics does not offer a rule but insists on this responsibility to the other: to the author whose work is reduced to a reaction, and to readers whose responses do not fit the preferred emotional script.
Ingram’s discussion of romantasy and sexual literacy, “cliteracy,” shows a related ethical dimension (Ingram). Popular affective genres circulating through digital communities can function as informal education about desire and bodies. Dismissing the feelings these books provoke, then, forecloses recognition of what readers are actually learning and negotiating. Ethical attention means taking affect seriously without treating it as beyond critique.
Deconstruction in the Face of Crisis
Discussions of BookTok often carry a language of crisis: a crisis of attention, of literary standards, of authenticity. The crying reader is a frequent emblem, taken as evidence that reading has become shallow and commodified. Deconstruction is useful here precisely because it resists the crisis narrative’s assumption that a stable, pure practice once existed and has now been corrupted.
Birke’s historical argument supplies the counter-evidence: anxieties about emotional reading, and about reading as display, accompany the practice from the start (Birke). What is new in the algorithmic context is the speed, scale and commercial integration of the performance, not its existence. De Melo’s concern with criticism and diversity, and Low et al.’s attention to critical digital literacy, point toward a more productive response than lament (De Melo; Low et al.). Rather than demanding “authentic” emotion, readers and educators can cultivate literacies that make the staging visible, so that people can feel deeply and also understand how those feelings are packaged and circulated.
Crisis, in this view, is an occasion for analysis. The instability of the authentic/performed binary is not a defect to be repaired but the condition under which reading culture operates.
Sources: Importance and Integration
The sources play distinct but complementary roles. Birke provides the historical spine, establishing continuity between sensibility and BookTok and justifying the comparative method. Hall, Guerin et al. and Nayar provide the theoretical vocabulary of cultural studies, reception and context, which keeps the analysis attentive to audiences and power (Hall; Guerin et al.; Nayar).
Low et al. and Dezuanni and Schoonens ground the discussion in empirical and educational research on BookTok. The first explains how users imagine and respond to algorithms, and the second shows how the platform functions as a space of peer learning (Low et al.; Dezuanni and Schoonens). De Melo and Ingram extend the inquiry to criticism, diversity and the cultural consequences of affective reading, including its role in informal education (De Melo; Ingram). Together the sources move from history to theory to platform practice to ethics, and the deconstructive lens connects them by showing the same instability of feeling and display at each level.
A limitation should be acknowledged. The deconstructive reading is my interpretive contribution, and several sources concern BookTok specifically, so claims about earlier periods rest chiefly on Birke’s synthesis. Further archival work on historical reading practices would strengthen the comparison.
The crying reader is a durable figure in which private feeling and public display cannot be pulled apart. From the sentimental novel to the algorithmic feed, readers have learned how to be moved, how to show it and what that showing signifies. A deconstructive reading shows that meaning in tears is always deferred, that the spaces of reading shape what can be felt in public, that responsibility for those spaces is shared, and that crisis narratives overlook how old the anxieties are. The hypothesis is thus supported: the crying reader is a recurring performance whose forms track changes in media, and algorithms intensify rather than originate it. Rather than asking whether BookTok tears are real, a more useful question is what kinds of reading, and what kinds of readers, a given space of display makes possible.
Birke, Dorothee. “Diachronic Perspectives on Digital Reading Culture: Crying Readers From the Age of Sensibility to BookTok.” Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics, vol. 34, no. 2, May 2025, pp. 128–44. https://doi.org/10.1177/09639470251330400.
Dezuanni, Michael, and Amy Schoonens. “#BookTok’s Peer Pedagogies: Invitations to Learn About Books and Reading on TikTok.” Social Media + Society, vol. 10, no. 4, Oct. 2024, https://doi.org/10.1177/20563051241309499.
Guerin, Wilfred L., et al. “Cultural Studies.” A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, 5th ed., Oxford UP, 2005, pp. 275–349.
Hall, Stuart. “Encoding/Decoding.” Culture, Media, Language: Working Papers in Cultural Studies, 1972–79, edited by Stuart Hall et al., Hutchinson, 1980, pp. 128–38.
Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. Viva Books, 2008.
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