The Dark Side of Literacy

Literature and Learning Not to Read

Benjamin Bennett

Publication Year: 2008

Reading is good for us. The reading of literature, we are told, enlarges our horizons, extends our experience beyond our own lives. But the moral and political dangers that attend the association of reading with experience have long been understood. And is that association even valid? What if precisely our most important literary texts are constructed so as to challenge or disrupt it? This book is a radical criticism of the concept of reading,especially of the concept of thereader, as commonly used in literary criticism. Bennett starts with the point that readingdoes not name a single, identifiable type of experience or class of experiences. Her then sketches in broad terms the historical provenance of thereader, in an argument that includes discussions of Dante, Boccaccio, Cervantes, Marlowe, and German idealist philosophy. In two concluding chapters on modern German novellas, he suggests that most major European literary works since the eighteenth century are written in direct opposition to the central concepts by which criticism has sought to lay hold of them.

Published by: Fordham University Press

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This book would not have become what it is without the criticism of Marshall Brown and Stanley Corngold. Neither, of course, is responsible for its faults, but both have probably had a hand in any of its virtues. Other people to whom I am grateful for either deliberate or unwitting assistance are Paul Barolsky, Cristina della Coletta,...

Introduction

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pp. 1-8

Everyone agrees that reading, in and of itself, is a good thing. The ability to read gives us power in the real world of society and business. Reading expands and exercises our mind. Reading makes accessible to us vast areas of experience and knowledge that must otherwise have remained strictly foreign. Reading conquers death...

Part I Theory

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pp. 9-10

1. Reading and the Theory of Reading

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pp. 11-43

By “reading,” in How to Read and ABC of Reading, Ezra Pound means a discipline that one acquires only by being guided expertly in the study of exemplary texts. We do not ask people how they read; reading is something we tell people how to do. “I begin with poetry,” says Pound—immediately after suggesting his notorious...

2. Poems, Myths, and the Advent of Modern Reading

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pp. 44-82

Not many of us would be imprudent enough to suggest that major intellectual shifts simply “take place” in history at a particular point or within a relatively short span of time. The reading of any large Sunday newspaper is enough to remind us that there are many people, indeed many genuinely educated professional...

Part II History

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pp. 83-84

3. Dante and the Invention of the Novel Reader

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pp. 85-140

If we agree that modern reading, as practiced supposedly by The Reader in each of us, makes a clearly marked entrance upon the western scene in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and that This Reader (imagined principally as a novel reader), despite being strictly a theoretical construct, soon comes to occupy a place in our...

4. Boccaccio, Cervantes, and the Path to Solitary Reading

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pp. 141-184

One crucial component of The Reader of modern theory is still missing for Dante’s readers—the imagined escape from contingency by which The Reader becomes everywhere The Same Reader. My point now is that this escape is equivalent to the idea of The Reader’s strictly solitary condition, an idea which can perhaps...

5. Magic and History: The Rootsand Branches of Dr. Faustus

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pp. 185-220

The conceptual situation, at this stage in the argument, is not particularly diffi cult, but there are a couple of points that must be kept carefully in mind:...

Part III Response

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pp. 221-222

6. Intransitive Parody and the Trap of Reading:What Reading Really Is

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pp. 223-263

From this point on I will be concerned almost exclusively with German literature. But this move must not be taken to indicate a substantive point, as if western literature’s “Response” to the ascendancy of modern reading were a responsibility shouldered primarily by Germans. I could easily have added, under the rubric...

7. Kleist, Kafka, and the Refutation of Reading

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pp. 264-308

There has been a certain amount of debate about the relation between Kleist and Kafka,1 in which the question of “infl uence” tends to crop up—as if one could ever expect to be satisfi ed on so inherently vague an issue—because it is known that Kafka read Kleist’s stories carefully and repeatedly, and expressed deep

The Parting of the Ways: A Concluding Noteon the Novel and Literary Studies

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pp. 309-316

Who or what, exactly, is The Reader? An established institution in our civilized life, a component of our discursive practice so thoroughly ingrained in the way we read and understand that we could not communicate without it? Or a simple...

Notes

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pp. 317-338

Index

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pp. 339-348

E-ISBN-13: 9780823247660
Print-ISBN-13: 9780823229161
Print-ISBN-10: 0823229165

Page Count: 300
Publication Year: 2008