The Dark Side of Literacy : : Literature and Learning Not to Read / / Benjamin Bennett.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Fordham University Press Complete eBook-Package Pre-2014
• VerfasserIn: Bennett, Benjamin,
• Place / Publishing House: New York, NY : : Fordham University Press, , [2022]; ©2009
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (300 p.)

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 "the" reader, as commonly used in literary criticism. Bennett starts with the point that "reading" does not name a single, identifiable type of experience or class of experiences. Her then sketches in broad terms the historical provenance of "the" reader, 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.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- Part I Theory -- 1. Reading and the Theory of Reading -- 2. Poems, Myths, and the Advent of Modern Reading -- Part II History -- 3. Dante and the Invention of the Novel Reader -- 4. Boccaccio, Cervantes, and the Path to Solitary Reading -- 5. Magic and History: The Roots and Branches of Dr. Faustus -- Part III Response -- 6. Intransitive Parody and the Trap of Reading: What Reading Really Is -- 7. Kleist, Kafka, and the Refutation of Reading -- The Parting of the Ways: A Concluding Note on the Novel and Literary Studies -- Notes -- Index