Reading and the Reader: The Literary Agenda

The Literary Agenda

by Philip Davis

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of literary reading.
Reading and the Reader offers a defence of reading serious literature, where reading offers a place for inner contemplation, emotion, imagination, and thought-experiment through the energising booster-rocket of literature. It is argued that literature creates a holding-ground in which a dense sense of experience is registered. Such a place is vital to human well-being in the following respects: in sustaining the ability to use and not just suffer one's experience; to be able to think one's thoughts, even those that are customarily unadmitted or felt as anomalous or unworthy; to find room for a realm of speculation in between religions and secularization, in between literature and life. Reading and the Reader, one of the first volumes in the Literary Agenda series, exists to defend the value of reading, to narrow the gasp between the way writers and readers think, to bring literary thinking into the ordinary thinking of the world - especially at a time when the arts and humanities are under some threat. Literature is useful in terms of deep human needs. It offers a form of time-travel - across ages, countries, different minds - that provides alternatives to any conventional worldview.

Genres: Literary Criticism

160 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Philip Davis is Emeritus Professor of Literature and Psychology at the University of Liverpool where he was Director of the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society. His publications include Sudden Shakespeare, Shakespeare Thinking, In Mind of Johnson, The Victorians (volume 8 in the new Oxford English Literary History Series), Why Victorian Literature Matters and Reading and The Reader (OUP Literary Agenda Series of which he is general editor). He is currently editing the complete works of Bernard Malamud in three volumes for the Library of America. He is editor of The Reader magazine.

Reviews

[Hameed Younis · Rating 2 out of 5]

يقدم الكتاب فكرة حول الجدل الدائر في موضوع (أرضية الأدب القابضة)، وكيف كان الأدب على العموم، والشعر على وجه الخصوص، يوفّر نزلاً لكل قيمة إنسانية. وكأنه يناجي الروح البشرية، يتكلم ويصغي إلى منطوق الحياة وذاته في الآن نفسه.. وإذ يتقسم الكتاب إلى ثلاثة فصول: (لا مسميات بل أماكن)، (حسّ يعني كينونة)، (الأرضية القابضة والعالم). جادل فيها البعض من شعر شكسبير، ويليام وردزووث، هنري جيمس، فيليب سيدني، صموئيل دانيال، توماس هاردي... وغيرهم الكثير
الموضوع لا يلتقي كثيراً مع العنوان (البلاغة الأدبية)، وكان مقتصراً وغير جذاباً في أكثر مقاصده.. والأهم من كل ذلك، أن الترجمة مبتدئة جداً وخجولة جداً جداً

[سارة ناصر · Rating 3 out of 5]

يحلل بعض القصائد والشخصيات الأدبية ويسقطها على واقع القراء.

[Kerry · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book could have been really good. For example, insights such as the following touch upon ideas that we don't consider when writing or reading:

. . . I think that wraith of meaning exists not only when you cannot find the right word but also after you have found it--in the release of meaning surrounding a verbal breakthrough, the ghost of competing words invisibly surrounding the finally chosen ones.

But the book is bogged down with 1) references to poetry, which is not exactly the same as prose; it requires a different type of reading 2) references to literary works that seem to exist as common and accessible ones in the author's personal list of favorites, but which could have been substituted for better-known and more accessible works to include a broader audience, and 3) academic jargon, which masks clarity and detracts from meaning. For example:

. . . non-fictional prose is a medium of discourse, ostensibly without exceptional advantages and possessed of a merely horizontal ongoingness, which may provide a quasi-basic test of the struggle of serious writing to think in the world.

Unless "horizontal ongoingness" has a more interesting meaning, this book is an unnecessarily dry read, resulting in disappointment that the author could not more forthrightly present the ideas or make them more inclusive. If the author's agenda of this work was to alienate and bore, then the book achieved its purpose.

[(Alice) Aley Martin]

meh

[Mal58 · Rating 1 out of 5]

Davis' approach: quote a difficult and uninteresting piece of literature, then make some obvious or indecipherable point about it at great and extremely tedious length. For instance he quotes a long and tedious poem by Hardy about a chap finding himself jilted. He suggest there is something really special about the last line of the first stanza 'You did not come' being separated by a space from the first line of second stanza 'You love me not'. It supposedly creates a 'holding ground' for the reader to have some great thoughts on the subject. I wasn't having them, apart from perhaps, 'I'd be better of reading Tolstoy or George Eliot about these matters than Hardy or Davis, great authors should give me some great thoughts rather than expect me to have them...'

And so it goes throughout the book. Davis makes a point, I don't get it, or it seems banal, or it seems absurd, or it seems very laboured. Davis suggest there is a crisis in the humanities. Yes there is, and it's exemplified by this book. For me the crisis pans out in finding it difficult to find something interesting to read because there are so many critics & professors, like Davis, leading me down the garden path into a desert.

[Liam Guilar · Rating 4 out of 5]

I will have to reread this. I'm not sure if the fact I can't summarize his argument is a credit to the book or a criticism. I think Davis is performing his argument, which makes it a compliment. Unlike the Poetry book in this series which follows a familiar pattern, Davis, adducing evidence from psychology, and modern attempts to map the brain while reading, argues for the value of literary reading, not in terms of an extraneous value, but because it is unique and valuable way of thinking, with literature making available a space for a specific type of thinking in and about. I'm also fairly sure I think he's right but I'm not sure how convincing the book would be to someone who disagreed from the outset.

Both the books I've read so far in the Literary Agenda series seem to have this same problem. If they are arguing a case, who are they arguing with?