The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age (Paperback) - Common

by Robert Alter

A distinguished critic rescues literature from the ivory tower and reestablishes reading as a personal source of complex pleasure and insight.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Criticism, Books About Books, Nonfiction, Self Help, American, 20th Century

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1989

About the author

Robert Bernard Alter is an American professor of Hebrew and comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, where he has taught since 1967, and has published many acclaimed works on the Bible, literary modernism, and contemporary Hebrew literature.

Reviews

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Alter is highly intelligent, learned, and erudite, and this book is very informative and challenging (i.e., difficult at times) but well worth reading.

I love his closing paragraph:

Reading is a privileged pleasure because each of us enjoys it, quite complexly, in ways not replicable by anyone else. But there is enough structured common ground in the text itself so that we can talk to each other, even sometimes persuade each other, about what we read; and that many-voiced conversation, with which, thankfully, we shall never have done, is one of the most gratifying responses to literary creation, second only to reading itself.

[Zachary Stevenson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Think Harold Bloom but less annoyingly contrarian.

“The masterworks of literary tradition, as I have tried to illustrate in regard to style as well as in regard to other issues, effect a reorganization of linguistic resources that amounts to a transcendence of the capacities of ordinary language” (106).

[Mr M]

Of all the literary pedants, Alter is by far the best prose stylist.

[Jasmine Lane · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some really good stuff to take away, the chapter on perspective was amazing- will certainly be revisiting in the future.

Also: Definitely not an 'easy' read if you aren't used to reading more academic texts- this is dense, but will leave you with so much to consider in your study. An additional title could be 'Why Reading Matters' in the spirit of Hirsch.

Last thing- if you find yourself being anti-literary lenses 'because they're wrong', definitely read his take on it in chapter 6 which gets at the idea of precise/imprecise readings,

'All that accumulates in the passage of time not only distorts texts but also sometimes illuminates them'

[Tait Sougstad · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Pleasures of Reading is, unfortunately, not much of a pleasure to read. (I've been waiting for months to drop that line.)

In the first chapters of the book, the author, Robert Alter, gives some examples of lines from highly technical critical essays, each of which mean almost nothing and are borderline absurd. Many of Alter's own lines take several tries and a dictionary to understand. If you heard of this book in some media outlet somewhere, and are looking for something that waxes eloquent about the benefits of reading, I'm just going to tell you that this is not the book you are looking for.

This is Master's-level reading. It takes an effort. A few times, I almost gave up. However, some of the things Alter says are extremely important, if you can bushwhack your way through to them.

Alter stands against the abuse of texts that is so easy to find in literary criticism today. While heralding the rich potential that makes up, in part, what constitutes real "literature", he pushes back on the notion that texts can be read any way one wants, especially as a way to express any ideology or agenda the reader brings to the text. The final chapter gives a potent case of this kind of violent reading.

The intermediate chapters each describe one of the facets of literature- character, style, allusion, structure, and perspective- gives some excerpts from texts, and leads the reader through an analysis of the text along the category being illuminated. The stated goal is to help readers detect these facets in books they read, and become aware of their experience of them, much the same way that music theory helps a listener understand what's happening in music they hear. This book is a sort of "literature theory". In this sense, I think that this book has been successful. I've already begun to see these categories be used, for better or worse, in books I read and movies I watch.

I'm docking a star on the basis of the unnecessary difficulty of this text. Yes, Alter is a professor, used to writing in technical language. This kind of language says more with less words. However, for the entry-level reader, it's not hard to imagine another draft of this same book made for the everyman. I can hear a counter-argument that difficult reading makes better readers. Presumably, anyone reading this book is interested in increasing the depth of pleasure in reading serious literature, and I don't think they should be dissuaded from that goal by the difficulty of this book.

Also, for a book that highlights "structure" as an important component to literature, each chapter meanders along, speaking one moment to the academy, another moment to the lay person, and later still to musing and thoughts interior to himself. Some phrases to help the reader anticipate what is about to happen would really help as we follow along the twists and turns. I could follow along better when I read sections a second time, after getting the lay of the land in the first reading.

If you can get through some of the weeds, there is some good fruit in this book.

Ps. The interview with Robert Alter on the Art of Manliness Podcast is one of the better discussions about reading I've heard in a while.

[Henry Sturcke · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title of this book is a mouthful: The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age. The reference to ideology is not directly political (although some of the ideologies Alter has in mind originate in politics). Instead, Alter seeks in this book to push back at recent trends dominating the academic study of literature. More than the problems of method these trends display, he laments their displacement of the act of reading.
 
Alter’s solution isn’t a return to non-critical (“simple”) reading. Instead, by examination of character, style, allusion, structure, and perspective (a term he prefers over narratology), his book argues that a familiarity with these and other techniques that set literature apart from other forms of writing enhances the reader’s pleasure.

Each of these techniques is illustrated by analyzing examples as old as Homer and the Hebrew Bible, as well as a range of novels and a few poems.

A side note: I read the first edition of this book and enjoyed finding that the front flap of the dust jacket contained a useful summary of the book’s thesis and contents. I’ve grown accustomed to this space being devoted to adjective-laden puffs instead. Another endangered pleasure of reading?

[Jack Caulfield · Rating 4 out of 5]

A worthwhile corrective to certain myopic trends in literary theory, trends as ubiquitous now as they were when the book was first written thirty years ago. The book also works as a nice introduction to various concepts and tools of literary criticism. The chapter in which Alter discusses perspective stands out. Taking a passage from Conrad, he rewrites it from various different perspectives and in various different styles in order to get at what makes the original wording work. An engaging read.

[Mark Rance · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book offers terrific insight into how narrative, particularly in novels, works. I am a huge fan of Alter’s translation of The Hebrew Bible and examples from that text are used here to support explorations of modern texts from Stendhal to Freud to Nabokov. This book is also a useful guide to parsing and objectively assessing the tsunami of literary theory that came out of France after the war and colonized universities everywhere.

[Lhb27 · Rating 5 out of 5]

Well worth the read. Alter gives you a new appreciation of Moby Dick and the importance of reading novels

[Matt Carton · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dense, erudite, thoughtful. While the book is 30 years old it addresses our issues right note lucidly.

[James Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I review a book I try to make explicit any personal connections to the work or my reading experience. However, I also engage in formal Literary criticism. By this I mean the evaluation, analysis, description, or interpretation of a literary work. My short essays are thus a mix of both formal criticism and my personal reaction to the book. Sometimes the personal aspect is minimal or non-existent. I always try to make it clear. That there are other readings of a literary text is certainly true. Among other aspects of interpreting texts Robert Alter discusses this in his lively book, The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age. He comments that, "There are many precise readings of a given text (even, paradoxically, conflicting ones), depending on what aspects of the text you are looking at, what questions you are asking, what issues beyond the text you mean to address." (p 208). This does not mean that the critics opinion is necessarily merely his autobiographical take on the work in question.
When I read professional critics I expect this approach and believe that good criticism is not merely "veiled autobiography". My favorite literary critics -- for example, Michael Dirda or James Wood -- are good examples of criticism that I respect and that exemplifies this sort of professionalism.

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is indeed a clear and perceptive explanation of the process of literary reading, maintaining the integrity of texts. His chapters on style, allusion and so one are fuly illustrated and encourage reflective reading. Refreshingly, Alter happily uses OT stories and texts to make his points, just as much as those of classic authors.

[Mckinley · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Reading is a privileged pleasure because each of us enjoys it, quite complexly, in ways not replicable by anyone else. But there is enough structured common ground in the text itself so that we can talk to each other, even persuade each other, about what we read... one of the most gratifying responses to literary creation, second only to reading itself."

[Toby Beeny · Rating 2 out of 5]

Although I agree with Alter's viewpoint, I found the book very dry and uninspiring. Not really much new here.

[Luther Obrock · Rating 3 out of 5]

The chapters on style, etc. are marvelous. The rhetoric of the opening polemic a little overblown.

[Charlie · Rating 5 out of 5]

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