Why read? What to read?
The fate of reading!!!
A Dialogue about Imaginative Prose
“A Good Mystery: Why We Read” NYT 11/2007
• The NEA long-term study (1982): as of 2007 Americans
continue to read less and less for fun.
• Good News! “For the first time in more than 25 years, American adults
are reading more literature, according to a new study by the National
Endowment for the Arts. Reading on the Rise documents a definitive
increase in rates and numbers of American adults who read literature, with
the biggest increases among young adults, ages 18-24. This new growth
reverses two decades of downward trends cited previously in NEA reports
such as Reading at Risk and To Read or Not To Read.” NEA 1/2009
• Why did this happen????
What factors cause people to be drawn into
imaginative prose?
• “Why people read what they read is a great unknown and personal thing.”
Sara Nelson of Publisher’s Weekly
• “But in some ways it’s just provisional. I feel like it’s a mystery what
makes us vulnerable to certain practices and not to others.” Junot Diaz
• “The right book at the right time can ignite a lifelong habit.” The Uncommon
Reader
• “I really think it’s the age at which you find that book that you really
identify with that determines the rest of your reading life. The younger you
are when you do that, the more likely you’re going to be a serious reader.”
Sherman Alexie
• “It’s that excitement of trying to discover that unknown world.” Azar Nafisi
• “There are all sorts of entrances that you can get into reading by reading
what might at first seem trash.” Alan Bennett
Other sound bites….
• “…reading is ultimately a private act.”
• “The book was a stepping off point into more heavyweight literature.”
• “What I find with readers today is they don’t go off on their own to another
book. They wait for the next recommendation.” Jonathan Galassi
• “The questions of whether reading, or reading books in particular, is
essential is complicated by the fact that part of what draws people to books
can now be found elsewhere – and there is only so much time to consume
it.”
Bloom – Targets, Goals, Objectives
• Anyone who would question any aspect of Harold Bloom’s
stated views.
• Those who would try to promote literature as a vehicle for
altruism, social improvement, or any variety of causes (cant).
Ironically, are not Bloom’s views just another form of cant? He
is an academic whose primary function is to write literary
criticism, yet cautions us to distrust academia & ideologues
(colleges / universities). Is this a paradox?
• The restoration of the deep reading experience.
• Saving irony, if such a thing is possible.
Bloom - Tone
• Ummm….haughty (or supercilious if you
prefer). Also, didactic, authoritative, convicted.
Ridiculous man crushes on Shakespeare, Dr.
Samuel Johnson, Emerson, & to a lesser extent
a handful of lesser deities in the pantheon.
Bloom – Provocative Ideas
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“What is the most challenging question facing every reader? What to read.” (too
many books, too little time….)
“Ultimately we read – as Bacon, Johnson, and Emerson agree – in order to
strengthen the self, and to learn its authentic interests.”
“Clear your mind of academic cant.”
“I suggest that the recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the
restoration of reading….But with this principle, I am close to despair, since you can
no more teach someone to be ironic than you can instruct them to be solitary. And
yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our
natures.” Can anyone, let alone Bloom, resolve this???
“Irony demands a certain attention span, and the ability to sustain antithetical ideas,
even when they collide with one another. Strip irony away from reading, and it
loses at once all discipline and all surprise. Find now what comes near to you, that
can be used for weighing and considering, and it very likely will be irony, even if
many of your teachers will not know what it is, or where it is to be found. Irony will
clear your mind of the cant of the ideologues, and help you to blaze forth as the
scholar of one candle.”
Bloom – Sound Bites
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“I turn to reading as a solitary praxis, rather than an educational enterprise.”
“Read not to contradict and confute, nor to believe and take for granted, nor to find
talk and discourse, but to weigh and consider.”
“…I am wary of any arguments whatsoever that connect the pleasures of solitary
reading to the public good.”
“The way we read now partly depends upon our distance, inner or outer, from the
universities, where reading is scarcely taught as a pleasure, in any of the deeper
senses of the aesthetics of pleasure.”
“Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how
you read.”
“A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light.” (Wallace
Stevens)
“One must be an inventor to read.” (Emerson)
“We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know
enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we
require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the way things are. Yet the
strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading of the now much-abused
traditional canon is the search for a difficult pleasure.”
Birkerts – Targets, Goals, Objectives
• “Electronic postmodernity,” an age that has
lost its taste for “the depth experience” of
reading challenging imaginative prose (aka
fiction).
Birkerts - Tone
• Foreboding urgency, frustration, near
resignation? “I have been accused of being an
alarmist and conservative and prey to
excessive nostalgia. And I accuse myself of
cowardly pessimism. Why can’t I embrace the
necessity of historical progress?”
Birkerts - Provocative Ideas
• “The question, again, is ‘What is the place of reading, and
of the reading sensibility, in our culture as it has become?’”
• “We are living in the midst of a momentous paradigm
shift.”
• “If a person turns from print – finding it too slow, too hard,
irrelevant to the excitements of the present – then what
happens to that person’s sense of culture and continuity?”
• “Through the process of reading we slip out of our
customary time orientation, marked by distractedness and
surficiality, into the realm of duration. Only in the duration
state is experience present as meaning.” (surficiality – nice
example of a portmanteau word. A combination of
“surface” and “superficiality”)
Birkerts – Sound Bites
• “What they [his students] really could not abide was what the
vocabulary, the syntax, the ironic indirection, and so forth, were
communicating. They didn’t get it, and their not getting it angered
them, and they expressed their anger by drawing around themselves
a cowl of ill-tempered apathy.” (regarding early 20th century author
Henry James)
• “We have been stripped not only of familiar habits and ways, but of
familiar points of moral and psychological reference. Looking at our
society, we see no real leaders, no larger figures of wisdom. Not a
brave new world at all, but a fearful one.”
• “The more complex and sophisticated our systems of lateral access,
the more we sacrifice in the way of depth.”
• The gains and losses of electronic postmodernity… (see p. 27)
• “There are, we know, fewer and fewer readers for serious works.”
Myers - Targets
• “Affected prose” as utilized & praised by a
small but distinguished sample of literary
intelligentsia.
Myers - Tone
• Controlled rant, witty, ironically haughty?????
Objective is definitely to entertain as he
informs. Spares no feelings. Refuses to kneel
to literary elite just because we are supposed
to.
Myers – Provocative Ideas
• “We have to read a great book more than once to realize
how consistently good the prose is, because the first time
around, and often even the second, we’re too involved in the
story to notice. If Proulx’s fiction is so compelling, why are
its fans more impressed by individual sentences than by the
whole?”
• “Great prose isn’t always easy, but it’s always lucid….”
• “The truth is that a lot of us are perfectly happy with
literature written before we were born – and why shouldn’t
we be?”
• “Impenetrability is not a sign of ‘good’ writing, and
puzzling over sentences should not (despite Toni Morrison’s
claims to the contrary) be a part of the reading experience.”
Myers – Sound Bites
• “Today any accessible, fast moving story written in unaffected prose
is deemed to be ‘genre fiction’ – at best an excellent ‘read’ or a
‘page turner,’ but never literature with a capital L.
• Conversely….”Anything written in self-conscious, writerly prose,
on the other hand, is now considered to be ‘literary fiction’ – not
necessarily good literary fiction, mind you, but always worthier of
respectful attention than even the best-written thriller or romance.”
• “But what we are getting today is a remarkably crude form of
affectation: a prose so repetitive, so elementary in its syntax, and so
numbing in its overuse of wordplay that it often demands less
concentration than the average ‘genre’ novel.”
• “The critics’ admiration for Proulx reflects a growing consensus that
the best prose is that which yields the greatest number of standout
sentences, regardless of whether or not they fit the context.”
Classic literature or literature with a capital “L”
Question: What characteristics should
distinguish a superior work of fiction????
Tenets we might use to characterize a “classic” piece of literature:
1. The novel should contain or demonstrate a universal truth
or a universal question.
• It most likely focuses on one or more question or truth
regarding the importance of man’s existence.
• The questions or truths may vary but they must apply to all
civilized men in order to be universal.
• Simply raising or even answering a question is not enough;
however, some enlightenment must take place either in the
protagonist, the reader, or both.
• Some learning, development, or change must occur.
Tenets we might use to characterize a “classic” piece of literature:
2. A classic work of literature is one which is held in high
regard because of its form, language, and / or literary
elements which contribute to ideas that are inherent in the
work.
• The form (or structure)should fit the subject: the introspection of the 18
year old narrator of All Quiet on the Western Front who is trying to
come to grips with the war in the best way he can are more suited to the
structure Remarque chose than they would have been to the soliloquies
Shakespeare uses in his plays.
• The language should also aid the writer in fulfilling a purpose. For
example, Hamlet’s use of puns is appropriate to his character, and they
demonstrate one way he deals with the gravity of his situation.
• Literary elements, in particular the use of complex, relative figurative
language, should be an integral component of the work. Think
symbolism, archetypes, metaphors, allusions, personification, etc. For
example, the river in Hesse’s Siddhartha is not only an important
symbol connected to his enlightenment but it also reflects the fluid
nature of Hesse’s style.
Tenets we might use to characterize a “classic” piece of literature:
3. The classic work of literature is one in which the
protagonist demonstrates the complexity of human
nature in his or her growth, change, enlightenment,
or manner of living.
 The reader should be able to relate to the protagonist in
some identifiable way.
 The protagonist’s “presentation” should be believable,
thought-provoking, and should invite a relationship
with the reader.
 If there are unique protagonists used, each should
provide his own distinct drama and put forth meanings
that are unique.
Tenets we might use to characterize a “classic” piece of literature:
4. The classic has a plot element with which
readers can identify: it should be interesting,
challenging, and/or “readable.”
 With regard to plot, the quality should be one that
holds the reader’s interest with its suspenseful,
stimulating, interesting, and/or provocative nature.
Tenets we might use to characterize a “classic” piece of literature:
5. The classic should be set up as a standard
by which other works are judged, or it should
be influential in some way to its readers
and/or to future writers.
 Does the novel seem destined for “great things”
because of its quality?
 It may take generations for the value of a narrative
to emerge good or bad. (bad news for the author!)
Tenets we might use to characterize a “classic” piece of literature:
6. Irony
• Verbal, situational, dramatic: irony comes in different forms
and can vary radically in its depth.
• All meaningful works of fiction are rich with irony.
• The ability to perceive and appreciate irony will very often
dictate a reader’s level of appreciation for the work.
• For the purposes’ of this course, when in doubt write about
irony whenever possible.