When Reading Matters

Abstract

One way to tell the story of our discipline is as a story about reading. In the early twentieth century, in order to establish the value of literary criticism, critics used the framework of professionalism to create specialized vocabulary, professional societies, and reading methods distinguished from those of laypeople. Foundational pieces of literary criticism often pry analysis apart from the affective experiences of reading literature—our sympathy, identification, shock, or sadness. Early literary critics did so in order to privilege literature's patterns and structures to argue, implicitly or explicitly, that literature is art, not life. In other words, reading literary description isn't a substitute for experiencing sensory perception of those settings, people, or objects. Fictional characters’ affective lives—and our responses to those lives—aren't a way to understand our own subjecthood.