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Pleasure in the book
Posted by Dr. Margaret Zeegers on 2008/07/18
I am going to follow up on my last entry with a comment of my own following on from Virginia Woolf's. In a paper that was published in an Australian journal, so many of you will not know it, (Zeegers, M. (2006). Living in new worlds: Beyond the boundaries of literacy. Idiom, 42(2) 57-65), I duscussed the pleasure that comes from the sort of reading that Woolf seems to prefer: I said, 'It is the vicarious experience of lives in other times and other places; it is a stretch and exercise of the imagination; it is a means of developing empathy and understanding others; it is an escape from the reality of our daily lives; it shows how the world is, or was, or may be; it is a demonstration of how others have dealt with situations that may be difficult, or similar to, or different from our own; it is a means by which we may be inspired; it is a way of deriving sheer pleasure as we can laugh, cry, be outraged, or feel ennobled by engaging others’ human experience. The expression that we all know: ‘Curling up with a good book’ says it all: the comfort, the pleasure, the anticipation. This is well known by that reader who goes to the bookshelves or book piles to search out a book in confident anticipation that this will be a pleasurable thing on offer, better even than Survivor or American Idol: that’s how good it is. The dimension of that pleasure that extends and inspires needs must come from a role of a reader based on understanding and empathy that disavows prejudice and unfeeling distancing from other characters and their situations, be they actual or fictional'. Does anybody else have any thoughts on this?
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