The Emotional Education of the Reader: A Progression through Works and Time

This article offers a revision of Jenefer Robinson's claim that an average fifteen-year-old cannot appreciate emotionally complex literature. Robinson, in her book, Deeper Than Reason: Emotion and its Role in Literature, Music, and Art, suggests that emotional engagement with literature requires that the reader have experiences in the world that can be related to the work. While this paper agrees with Robinson's thesis, it develops it to extend beyond Robinson's analysis of the reading of a single work. It claims that emotional engagement does not require a full set of the interests and beliefs at stake in any given novel. It merely requires that the reader hold some beliefs that are at stake. Through graduated emotional experiences that can come through a progression of reading over the course of his life, the reader will be prepared to read novels that require increasingly more complex emotional responses. His reading of each work contributes to his understanding of the next work that he reads, so that by the time he is fifteen he can have the skill, the emotional experience, and the beliefs and interests necessary to wrestle with the vague and ambiguous emotions that these works evoke.