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Reading for Life: Literature, Emotion, and Community is an innovative new module taught in the Department of English and Film at the University of Exeter, UK. It brings together final year undergraduates in English Literature and members of Exeter’s vibrant University of the Third Age (U3A) community for discussion about reading and the impact of reading upon and across life. It aims to encourage attentive, deep reading, believing that this can be experienced by all, in an infinite array of ways, regardless of formal knowledge. It seeks to model a practice of shared reading across generations that offers the opportunity for enhanced meaning.
This blog hosts the personal reading and module reflections of this diverse study group. We hope you enjoy it!
I’ve had a lot of time to think about my favorite childhood books since I have been sick for the past few days, and after much deliberation, I have to say the most influential one to me was actually one that I can’t remember the exact name of!
Growing up, my parents were strict Catholics so many of the books I read or tv shows I watched were usually religious to some extent. A children’s Lives of the Saints book was one of my favorites to read. I cannot remember the exact name or version of it. It was thick with a faded orange paperback cover, but even after some internet digging, I still cannot find the exact one.
I actually didn’t love the book because of its religious content. I loved it because reading about different saints’ lives was like reading fairytales, except even better because all of them were supposedly true. They were filled with such drama. St. Cecelia’s head refused to come off when they cut her neck with a sword! To child me, that was the epitome of a cool woman. A saint needs at least three miracles to be a saint so every story was filled with impressive feats that I loved reading about. I wanted to be like the saints I read, not necessarily religious, but generous and resilient.
Somewhere along the way the book must have gotten lost or donated to the library so I haven’t been able to re-read the exact copy. Still, sometimes I’ll find myself thinking about a random saint’s story and then I have to spend an hour googling to figure out what saint I am thinking about. Though I’m not religious at all now, I still can understand the appeal of these stories to my childhood self. They usually began life as very ordinary people who are still now remembered today simply for their great commitment to something.
There have been multiples moments – lapses – throughout my degree in which I have wondered (usually in the early hours of the morning when I have been frantically trying to meet a deadline), “Who even cares what I have to say about this? Why doesn’t my tutor just read a real academic’s writing, someone with a PhD who has a profound insight into the field?” But after tackling this module for several weeks now, there has been a few things I have come to realise about myself as a reader and my response to literature. And this response, I am happy to say, is rather more optimistic…
1. I dislike reading. ** An undeniably pessimistic start – bear with me. **
“How DARE you?!” I hear you bellow. An understandable reaction. As an English student – as a human being even– to not like reading is surely an insult. But it is not that I don’t appreciate reading or what I gain from it, I just find the physical act of doing the reading, well… tedious. My fingers start to twitch if I am forced to sit still for too long, acutely aware of the fairground world that surrounds me. If the first few pages fail to hook me, I grow tired and my attention span shortens to that of a goldfish. I should probably clarify that if I do find a book that manages to hold my attention then I do absolutely understand the delight and ecstasy that many people experience from reading; this is just a rare occurrence for me. Stephen King is one of the few writers who can seize me from the very first sentence, and suddenly I have no difficulty devouring the substantial 1000+ page monsters he churns out. I’m the Simon Cowell of reading: hard to please, quick to raise The Hand of Dismissal if I am not immediately entertained, and has an acquired taste for literature that just happens to generate mass profit. (It is a sad truth that I only put my trust in literature that has been deemed a best-seller or is a canonical work, afraid that if I search for diamonds in the rough I will have wasted valuable hours of my life reading mediocre work. Utterly pretentious and ignorant, I know.)
“But how have you got through 3 years of university without a love for reading?” one may ask. Which brings me to my second realisation…
2. I love close reading.
To be an English Literature student you don’t have to be an avid reader, which I’m often mistaken for in my tortoise-shell rimmed spectacles – the type that goes to old libraries and sniffs the yellowed pages of vintage prints of Jane Austen. If this was the case, then everyone who enjoyed reading would be suited to an English degree. Rather more accurately, to study English, one must have: a love for critique, a need to know “why”, and a delight in the discussion of books. This is where my appetite lies. And has been fed in surplus over the course of this module, debating and questioning the text each week with people from all ages and walks of life. My father, a bioethicist, would often say to me that a good scientist always asks “why” something is the way it is. I find this is not dissimilar to the study of English. Wordsworth argues in his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, that the purpose of poetry is to “illustrate the manner in which our feelings and ideas are associated in a state of excitement… to follow the fluxes and refluxes of the mind when agitated by the great and simple affections of our nature”. Wordsworth thus renders writing pointless if one is unable to understand the feelings and thoughts of the speaker. He calls for the reader to ask why the writer has written it in the way he/she has. Close reading helps me to find a deeper connection with the writer and the words they have offered.
3. My critique is valuable.
In James Wood’s, The Nearest Thing to Life, it is suggested that a good writer is also a “serious noticer” i.e. they engage with the subject not only physically, but more penetratingly at a deep, metaphorical level; viewing every pulse of feeling, slight hand movement, or even still object, as though it were under microscopic lens. I have found that to be an academic reader one must also be a “serious noticer”. To question every word and decision the writer has made. Viewing reading in this way has helped to value my own critical eye, as no one else can see from my perspective. Wood further argues that “really we are all silent critics, since not everyone has a poetic eye but everyone has an opinionated tongue.” This I have found to be a universal truth. After all, everyone has an opinion, whether they decide to keep that opinion “silent” or not comes in varying measures. Being an English student provides a platform on which this opinion can be expressed, however, it is only valued if validated, and this validation comes from extensive reading around the subject. Through this act, a whole new range of thought and commentary is sparked, and each individual finds links between texts that no other person would make. This became apparent in our seminar group as we have all read the exact same texts every week and yet have manage to come to wildly differing conclusions.
4. Literature is truly sublime.
Although literature is indeed sublime in the literal sense of the word, I use it specifically in the Romantic sense, which Edmund Burke sets out beautifully here: “The passion caused by the sublime in nature is astonishment, and astonishment is that state of the soul in which all its motions are suspended, with some degree of horror.”
The Romantic sublime is thus the witnessing of a terrible storm, yet from the safety of your living room; one is simultaneously aware of the horror and the beauty. This is how I view literature. It is a way of experiencing dark, difficult, or dumbfounding subjects that life often brings, but from the safety of my living room. If the story or thoughts of the characters become too real or relatable, I can simply close the book and set it aside. Art imitates life, so the saying goes, and it is the imitation that makes it so wonderful. Just as Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway finds himself to be both “within and without”, the reader finds themselves “within and without” the world of literature. They can relate whilst not having to truly experience the situation.
Ultimately, I think literature is essential in both simplifying and complicating the world. It manages to capture, what I like to call, That Awkward Stage Between Birth and Death. Life is as fleeting and ineffable as this phrase makes it out to be. Suddenly every moment of our life is subjected to the brief, blurry and baffled nature of memory, which literature manages to savour and put into words. My greatest frustration in life is not being able to fully appreciate the world. Through literature however, I am able to seriously notice everything around me, and for that, I will forever be in it’s debt.
In our very first seminar, a question was raised which struck me as something that I had never fully considered before: when was the last time you picked up a book and read it without knowing anything at all about it? Well, of course I’ve read many books, the plots of which I’ve not known about beforehand, despite today’s TV culture which has serialized nearly every book that has a penguin stamp on it. However, the question got me thinking about how exactly I decide on which books to read and devote my time to.
Imagine I’m perusing a library, or a bookshop. I’d like to picture myself in a quirky secondhand shop where the books smell of moths and chewing tobacco, rather than suffering under the fluorescent glare of a WHSmith. Of course, first and foremost, I read the title. I need it to grab my attention and, I will admit, I am notorious for judging the book by its cover (I clearly learnt nothing from my primary school PSHCE lessons – Sorry Miss Salisbury!). I’m a tactile person so a book with embossed lettering or a crisp, matt sleeve is probably what my fingers will settle on first as I run my hands along the row of spines sitting upon the shelf. Secondly, I’ll flip the book over. Read the blurb. I like to have a clear idea of genre, plot and target audience, just to see if the book fits. For me, reading the blurb is like trying on a pair of jeans in a shop changing room. If it looks good, and suits my style, I’ll buy. Now who has made the commendations? If anyone from the Guardian has given it a thumbs up then I’m sure to keep hold of it. If I see the words “Daily Mail”, that book is going right back on the shelf without a second glance. Usually I will stick to the authors which I’ve heard of before and perhaps I’ve read some of their other work. Or I will select the authors which other people, whom I admire (or whom I loathe and have a secret wish to trump intellectually) have recommended to me. Book chosen, tea made, and scented candle lit, I’ll begin as most of us do, unless you possess the virtuous patience and discipline it takes to read the preface, with Chapter One. But if after twenty or so pages the book is not kindling that flutter of intrigue which occurs when I get hooked on a good story, and I find myself checking my Facebook notifications every other paragraph, then I’m afraid I will never meet Chapter Two.
So I came up with an idea. What if I actually tried reading a book that I had never encountered? Never seen the book on a best-seller’s list, never heard of anyone else reading it, never come across the writer, wasn’t even familiar with the title, let alone knew anything about its content. I thought it would make a good experiment to further consider exactly how we read and how our preconceptions of a book inform our overall understanding of it and affect our reading experience.
Even picking up a book ‘randomly’ myself would be in some small way informed by all my prejudices. So I recruited a friend (who studies Natural Sciences and stays away from the library like a vampire does the sun) to go into the forum on our Streatham campus and choose for me a book to read. She reported back five minutes later with Not Not While The Giro by James Kelman. Never heard of it. It took all my willpower not to turn the book over and start scanning the back for information, but I simply opened the front cover and started to read.
I read for about an hour and I thoroughly enjoyed the session. Not having any prior expectations made the reading experience a relaxing one, and instead of taking in the words while simultaneously evaluating whether the book was living up to reviews, or anticipating the plot that was promised in the blurb, I just read. Each chapter introduced me to new characters and presented me with a short moment of interaction; a conversation with an old man in a pub, whose drinking partner was found dead in his apartment, a brusque Irish man collecting money from a Labour exchange, an awkward date in a bachelor house which resulted in a merciless eviction. I was not entirely clear when it was set or who these people were and what their connection to each other was, which often made me feel disorientated, yet this encouraged my imagination to run on and construct a story in my head. The more I read, the more I began to piece things together and locate myself, but I found overall that my interpretation of the book was freed up noticeably more than in regular reading experiences.
What I found surprisingly exciting about this mode of ‘innocent’ reading was that the book in question was not something that I would have actively chosen to read myself. I was taken out of my comfort zone and forced to read a work that was heavy with dialogue and lacked long descriptive paragraphs that establish character and backstory. It felt more like reading scenes in a play than chapters in a novel, and I found the overall tone of the book rather terse. The book was clearly not aimed at my demographic (the young female reader) as many of the references to football teams, watery ales and war veterans went over my head. But I have to say I was pleased that I gave it a chance and will probably keep reading to the end.
So I would recommend having a go at this exercise. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with some context, but I believe that we as readers should aim to be a bit more conscious of what is preventing us from trying new things!
Marilynne Robinson describes herself as a Calvinist. An image of John Knox hectoring his congregation on their evil ways and their imminent consignment to hellfire and damnation if they fail to amend their lives has been my view of Calvinism. There is the cry of the damned, “Lord, have mercy, relieve us from this torment; we did’na ken”, with the Calvinist God’s reply, “Well, ye ken the noo”! It seems I have been misled about Calvinism or, more likely, not understood. Marilynne Robinson is someone who has a deep feeling for her fellow man or woman and a strong belief in the essence of community. She does not come across as someone who would recommend anyone for the fiery furnace – though she might make an exception for the defenders of Austerity!
Lila is a story about understanding and love. By modern standards, I had a deprived childhood, with a lack of stability and few personal possessions, yet I couldn’t begin to understand how someone like Lila really views the world. This may also be true of Marilynne Robinson, but her portrayal of Lila’s insecurity and lack of trust rings true to me. Lila’s ‘family’ – if that’s what they are – cares not a jot for her and she is literally carried through her childhood in the arms of Doll, living with itinerant labourers and gaining a modicum of education before finding herself in a whorehouse following Doll’s disappearance and probable death. We discussed whether Lila was vulnerable or confident and it seemed to me that these were not mutually exclusive. I felt she was desperately vulnerable, yet had a confidence in her views of what was right. She lacked trust, yet was prepared to face uncertain and potentially dangerous situations, and was remarkably open. She didn’t hesitate to tell Reverend Ames that she didn’t know her real name and had worked in a whorehouse, perhaps to test whether he was serious about wanting to marry her. Maybe she felt that if she held anything back, it would give him a reason to abandon her, as Doane had done, but she still kept mentally preparing herself for having to move right until her baby was born.
Lila also looks at community and what it means. The first community that we are introduced to at the start of the book reads like a bunch of no-hopers camped out in a shack. Doll is the only one of the group prepared to make any effort and, for no apparent reason, decides to take off with Lila. They fetch up with the itinerant labourers led by Doane, who has a definite sense of honesty and that a job should be done properly, but he has no time for education or religion, or any real sense of communal responsibility. The whorehouse is a community based on obligation to Mrs, from which Lila manages to escape and finds herself in the community of Gilead, in which Reverend Ames is the leading character.
Marilynne Robinson’s strong belief in the importance of community becomes clearer in When I was a Child I read Books. This set of essays includes a strong religious flavour that deal with interpretations of passages in the Bible. However, Robinson also deals with contemporary issues, such as austerity, the value of money and education. The essay entitled Austerity as Ideology is a ferocious assault on the economic policies of Western governments, more especially since the financial debacle of 2008 and how the perpetrators have been able to transfer the consequences so that people’s livelihoods and education have been sacrificed while they have been able to increase their own wealth and influence. There is a hint of the conspiracy theory in Who was Oberlin? where Robinson talks about C Street where “… men active in the national government … (are) … apparently devoted to the project of putting political power to the uses of an authoritarian or theocratic version of Christianity.” This was written before 2012 and it seems that recent events may have borne this out.
It might be with not having done English in a little while.
And by ‘done English’, I crudely mean to have been sat reading, and really reading; be thinking about what I’m reading and its merits and lack thereof. Knowing I’d then sit with a group of people, discuss, debate and compromise with them, in aid of a module.
It might be because of that time apart (although my Drama term definitely covered those processes in a way; with the discussing, debating and compromising being on its feet, rather than sat down. And the acting making it then inhabiting those struggles on their feet, rather than talking them into the room and then politely escorting them out as with a seminar.)
It might be that because of all this, with my last time reading a novel for a class technically having been March 2016… that returning to books for this module, has felt a little like coming home.
I’ve had chance to grow attached to literature again, without something feeling at risk.
When rehearsing a play, your understanding of the words feels somewhat vulnerable, especially when knowing this would then be assessed. When writing, your understanding of your own words is all well and good, but it really is a guessing game for when put in front of someone else. With my playscripts recently, I have enjoyed rereading them, but I have feared for how, or whether they would land. Or equally, I have thought back on the successes and the surprises when they became vocalised, and felt relieved or nervous.
I’ve realised reading is much safer. Safer for me. Lila, especially, may have cast me out onto a dusty path in 20th Century Midwest America, but gosh I loved the company. Something about the intimacy of Marilynne Robinson’s indirect third person, or the palpability of the three-dimensional, and yet faceless character of Lila, really caught me. Insisted I stayed close. For safety perhaps. Mine and hers.
As I mentioned in the seminar, I felt taught by the novel. This echoes Johanna’s comments of how we are occasionally not told enough to just read, and to use reading to help inform our own voice as writers. I have mixed thoughts about that, but definitely agree Lila has shaped my understanding of the easy power good writing can have over those receiving it.
This feeling of being taught also surfaced for me in the measured humanity of the novel. It’s rare you encounter a piece of fiction that seems to impart the sense of a life so completely as Lila does. How eventually, through the character, I feel you come to understand the notion of grace.
I also agree with the critics who observed how Robinson ‘slows’ the process of reading. My experience with Lila very much captured what Eliot conjured in Mill on the Floss, of how being being curled up with a book is similar to being aware of ‘a great curtain of sound’ being drawn around you. You are held.
Yet, escapism as it may be, you are still your actual self when reading. You encounter the book on the terms of who you were and what you were experiencing.
I feel there is something for me in how I was ill when I began the book, and feel better upon finishing it. For falling for reading again.
This morning’s lecture certainly gave me a lot to think about regarding reading and emotion. I am not a passive reader. When I read, I expect to feel some sort of emotional response, even if this is resentment or critique that the author clearly should’ve got with a different angle. I often find myself talking through a text. Sometimes ohh that is nice phrase / yes I like that / why did they do that? More recently, I have come to write particular phrases down on post-its notes and stick them around my writing space. I don’t necessarily analyse them but keep them in the back of my mind.
Being purposeful to include a variety of forms, I have created a short list below of things that have moved me, at various points in my life.
All of these things began life as texts in one draft or another.
Lazarus Original Cast Recording
This is not the David Bowie version but Lazarus is instead sung by Michael C. Hall of Hedwig, Dexter, and Six Feet Under Fame. This opens with dark and powerful notes that transport me someplace else whenever it appears on my shuffle.
This song reminds me to stay grounded, and focus on what is happening in front of me. I saw the musical at King’s Cross Theatre on a day trip up to London during exam week. It is a very experimental show and whilst my Dad loved it, and I loved the soundtrack I wasn’t sure if I was going to quite get the show. However, when this was played early on, I knew I could settle in and relax for the rest of the show.
Fun Home – Alison Bechdel
Fun Home the Musical was adapted from Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel about a lesbian cartoonist navigating her father’s death and introduction to college.
Last year my best friend, who was graduating, and I decided to spend our term three student loan on a trip to New York to do something a little crazy before she went. We ended up going to the show but didn’t sit together. It was actually performed in the round, and she had been worried that tickets would sell out so wanted to buy them from the hotel. I didn’t want to spend that much money and knew they wouldn’t so I bought them later in the day.
So whilst, I ended up front row, she ended up many seats back quite a bit to the left of me. This is the one on the list that really made me cry, probably more accurate to say sobbing. When we met in the foyer, both of us were crying and every single time we stopped, would mention something else we loved that would set us off again. My playbill is actually tearstained.
The Woman in Black
I studied The Woman in Black in Year 10 for Drama GCSE. I was young, impressionable and had been to the theatre quite often since an even younger age. I had also never been so scared in my entire life. We sat in the stall, deeply immersed in the fog, loud noise, and occasional Woman in Black aisle appearance. I have never heard so many swear words or seen so many people fall out of their seats.
I also came out of it mildly traumatised. I didn’t sleep properly for weeks. And could barely remember the second act from hiding behind my scarf. Yet it still remains to be one of the greatest pieces of theatre I have ever encountered. The film with Daniel Radcliffe was released on DVD, a couple of years ago, and we tried to watch it as a family. Within the first five minutes, I cried and screamed at Mum to turn it off, much to the hysterical laughter of my sister.
I’ve decided The Woman in Black is just one of those films I will never get to see.
The Book of Strange New Things – Michael Faber
I actually read this book accidentally. I had been left in a train station in the Netherlands by a friend of mine for several hours. It was cold but I hadn’t had the chance to just sit and read uninterrupted for a long term so went to the bookshop to choose something. The blurb was the reason I was slightly confused after the first chapter: “Peter Leigh is called on a journey of a lifetime, a highly unusual humanitarian mission into deep space”. I saw space, and understood mission to be a specific task, rather than as a religious missionary. I can’t actually recall reading any science fiction before, so why I even chose this I’m not sure.
Peter is there to bring religion to the aliens. This was a concept I found fascinating and the discussion of linguistics and communications was enough to keep me more than entertained throughout. I do feel dissatisfied at the ending but just because it wasn’t what I wanted to happen, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t a good ending and I think I have come to accept this.
This is a book that I want to re-read knowing that I know the plot. I want to focus on the structure of the novel and the characterisation of Peter. I would recommend it to everyone who is even a little intrigued by the premise.
Homewrecker – Ocean Vuong
If I get the opportunity to talk poetry, I will often head straight to my favourite contemporary American/Vietnamese poet Ocean Vuong, who actually has a real life poetic name.
Homewrecker is taken from his debut collection Night Sky with Exit Wounds and it is beautiful.
You can (and should) read the full text here: https://linebreak.org/poems/home-wrecker/
As a warning, don’t listen to the audio available.It isn’t Ocean speaking and in my opinion, doesn’t do justice to the poem. Ocean naturally has quite a lilting and softly spoken voice that contrasts with his vivid and powerful imagery. His balance of rhythm, metaphor and anaphora create a strong sense of time and place. I particularly enjoy …’your fingers / sweeping through my hair –my hair a wildfire’ and ‘in the museum of the heart / there are two headless people building a burning house’.
Ocean is about the same age as me but already has such a craft of language that I could sit for several hours flicking through his collection and constantly find something new to underline, something else to wish I had written.
Hopefully you will enjoy this list, and the variety of emotions it will bring. I’d love to hear what things have moved you at various points in your lives.
In one of our earlier classes, I was surprised to learn that libraries were in their earliest days designed to be as much a place to be seen as a place to read. I think, in general, people today associate reading with a more introverted existence. A more reserved person’s ideal night is often excusing themselves from going out to stay in with a good book. E-readers now have also made it possible for most people to get their hands on a new book without leaving their home.
But while reading Northanger Abbey, I was struck by the social role that reading took in that novel. One of the first foundations of Catherine and Isabel’s friendship is when they find out they have the same taste in gothic novels and spend the whole day inside together reading them. It is also reaffirming to Catherine when Tilney acknowledges the joy in reading novels, rather than more practical and instructional histories. It strengthens their bond and, to me, is further proof of how well they work together.
While socially we now are now more connected than ever, sometimes it feels like reading and books get excluded from that. Thinking on it later though, I realized I belong to what functions as kind of a virtual library and a social network at the same time with the specific idea of what you’re reading being seen and advertised to others: Goodreads.
Goodreads is an online network where you can rate and review books you’ve read. It also lets you mark books you want to read one day. It is a place to organize and keep track of what you read. Also a place, for me at least, to sometimes procrastinate actual reading.
Goodreads takes the books you read and puts them in a public space where others can scroll through what you’ve read and how you liked it in a matter of minutes. I personally find Goodreads so addicting and love how it makes up for my own lack of organizational skills. If I can’t remember the name of a book I got from the library three years ago about a prisoner of war, all I need is to go look through my books and see that it was Unbroken.
The numerical 5 star rating system is tricky, though. Some books I’ve read and have really enjoyed I find myself giving three stars to while other books that I didn’t like so much I find myself giving four or five to simply because they’re considered to be of a higher literary merit. With the rating system, it’s hard to know if I should be rating purely on how good I thought a book was or how much I enjoyed it.
Writing reviews though allows me to fully explain what the book meant or how I saw it in the moment. I love also going through others’ (mostly strangers) reviews. Reading reviews of books that you love and seeing how others are able to capture what makes those books so great is an addicting experience that isn’t available that much outside of a college classroom or possibly a book club.
It’s also refreshing to read reviews that are just by other ordinary readers. Reading movie reviews in the paper or talking about books in class both usually involve some level of critical analysis, references to theories from people who have studied film or literature academically. Sometimes it’s just nice to read about someone saying they really enjoyed this book because they found the main character relatable and it helped them through a bad break-up. It reminds me of how it is okay to just read for fun sometimes and that it is okay that if, like Catherine, not every book I read is the most educational.
Referring to the unclear dividing fact and fiction in literature, Zunshine writes:
“Think of our own bookshops’ commitment to carefully demarcating shelves containing fiction from those containing non-fiction, even though the former offer plenty of information that deserves to be assimilated by our cognitive systems as architecturally true, and the latter contains a broad variety of cultural fictions (just consider treatises on dating and dieting).(Zunshine, Lisa, Why we read books, Section 5 of Part 1, Location 1314 in Kindle version)
This has had legal implications: the authors of “The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail” took Dan Brown to court claiming that Brown had plagiarised the framework of their book for “The Da Vinci Code”. The court ruled that because “Holy Blood” was alleged by its authors to be history, its premises could be interpreted in any fictional work without any copyright infringement (Wikipedia, edited)
Thus if it’s non-fiction, the facts can’t be copyright!
Hi everyone, I just saw this article today and the sub-title caught my eye;
“How did our culture became so polarised – and what can Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, written 60 years ago, teach us about how we live today?”
It seemed like it might be interesting in light of our module and seminar discussions, so I read on…
“The Uses of Literacy, published 60 years ago next month, was his second and by far his most famous book. In it, Hoggart argued that collective engagement in a project of civic literacy would grow naturally out of the increasing education of the working classes, and that knowledge really would translate into power.”
This has similar themes and concept to some of my Sociology work on mass culture production, including the mass-production of literature. The article describes how the ‘marketing man’ began to “take an unalloyed good like universal literacy and turn it into an expedient for selling mass culture – books, movies and songs created as if in a laboratory with a clinical focus on appealing to the greatest number.”
…”Hoggart’s definition of mass product was something that contained no emotional truth – nothing that could be measured or felt as real, however painful that reality might be to confront – because it was produced by people who believed their audience had no ability or desire to detect that truth. “Sex-and-violence novels,” he wrote, epitomised “an endless and hopeless tail-chasing evasion of the personality”, a description that could have been taken from a review of Fifty Shades of Grey.”
In particular, the comment about ‘sex and violence novels’ reminded me of our lecture and seminar discussions yesterday. To what extent is it true that writers just write what the publishers want to publish? For me, this doesn’t feel like the way that Robinson has approached Lila, and gathering from the seminar discussions this is partly why we all valued her integrity and writing style.
Anyway, I just thought that the article was an interesting link between reading, community and contemporary culture, and wanted to share it with you all,
