Reading, Not Readings

As the main purpose of this blog is to encourage reading, we wanted to note a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article by Mark Edmundson entitled "Against Readings." That's readings with an "s." "By a reading," Edmundson writes,"I mean the application of an analytical vocabulary — Marx's, Freud's, Foucault's, Derrida's, or whoever's — to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art." In other words, let's get back to reading books, without getting wrapped up in literary theory.

I remember reading another article about a young woman's disappointing experience as a graduate student in literature at Yale. At one point she asked one of her professors who her favorite authors were. The professor replied, "I don't read for pleasure anymore." Yikes!