Birth of a mushroom picker or When a mushroom picker writes (about) a mushroom picker: The Model Reader and the Interpretive Community in Mushroom Guides and Atlases
Abstract
The lecture will be based on the possibilities of the relationship between literary science and popular culture and will focus on selected authorial practices in constructing a model reader and introducing him/her to a model interpretive community, i.e., the author-fungusman's ideas about the fungusman-reader and the very diverse fungusman community itself. The talk will show the different ways in which the image of the mushroomer as a specific kind of person is constructed in mushroom literature and how this image anchors our ideas about mushroomers and mushrooming.
The lecture will also include an excursion into the history of domestic mushroom book production and a delineation of the position of mushroom guides and atlases within this paradigm. In the form of a non-authorial reading of excerpts from selected books, the changes in the linguistic and discursive expression of mushrooms, mushrooming and mushroom pickers will be outlined.