A Memoir of My Reading

Modern Philology, 2022

There is a strain of intellectual biography that focuses on an individual's history and engagement with reading as a means to understand that individual-in essence, this truism suggests we are what we read. But as Dionne Brand notes in her Autobiography of an Autobiography of Reading, quoting Christina Sharpe, that the "we" invoked here is "curious" in regard to readers like herself because "that 'we' constituted with no reference to one's own being-a 'we' made impossible by 'me'" (28). Brand's volume takes this conundrum as the animating question at the center of an intriguing exploration of the making and unmaking of the postcolonial self as a reader of colonial texts. The late 2020 publication of Brand's meditation on how the colonial experience impacts what and how one reads is particularly timely against the ongoing background of Black Lives Matter Movements and COVID when so many of us have turned to reading to continue the ongoing work of greater self-awareness as well as to make sense of our current moment. Like all of Brand's writings-her fiction, poetry, and essays-this book offers another compelling perspective on the possibilities of Black aesthetics and continues her crucial interventions that seek to overturn the epistemic violences engendered by colonial literature, reading, and archival practices. This slim but powerful volume is an edited and transcribed version of the Canadian Literature Centre Kreisel lecture given by Brand on April 16, 2019. In addition to contributing to the lecture series' mission of spotlighting the complexity and diversity of Canadian literature, Brand's autobiography of reading also provides a dynamic model for charting our own autobiography of reading. Indeed, one of the key values of this volume for

2011

International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2022

Modern Philology, 2022

There is a strain of intellectual biography that focuses on an individual's history and engagement with reading as a means to understand that individual-in essence, this truism suggests we are what we read. But as Dionne Brand notes in her Autobiography of an Autobiography of Reading, quoting Christina Sharpe, that the "we" invoked here is "curious" in regard to readers like herself because "that 'we' constituted with no reference to one's own being-a 'we' made impossible by 'me'" (28). Brand's volume takes this conundrum as the animating question at the center of an intriguing exploration of the making and unmaking of the postcolonial self as a reader of colonial texts. The late 2020 publication of Brand's meditation on how the colonial experience impacts what and how one reads is particularly timely against the ongoing background of Black Lives Matter Movements and COVID when so many of us have turned to reading to continue the ongoing work of greater self-awareness as well as to make sense of our current moment. Like all of Brand's writings-her fiction, poetry, and essays-this book offers another compelling perspective on the possibilities of Black aesthetics and continues her crucial interventions that seek to overturn the epistemic violences engendered by colonial literature, reading, and archival practices. This slim but powerful volume is an edited and transcribed version of the Canadian Literature Centre Kreisel lecture given by Brand on April 16, 2019. In addition to contributing to the lecture series' mission of spotlighting the complexity and diversity of Canadian literature, Brand's autobiography of reading also provides a dynamic model for charting our own autobiography of reading. Indeed, one of the key values of this volume for

Open Cultural Studies, 2018

This article addresses the topic of reading in the course of life. Its point of departure is the oral-history research carried out between 2009 and 2015 among 138 narrators (informants, respondents, interviewees) across the Czech Republic. The author presents its background, parameters as well as one of its general achievements-four moments of initiations on an axis of our reading life. The first of these takes the form of sociability (being accepted); the second-autonomy (mastering the skill); the third- maturity (being independent), the fourth-reflection (mirroring). What follows from this is the finding that reading undergoes continual development, whether a long continuity or a meandering chain of partial discontinuities. Thus, our oral history-based research shows that being open to the lifetime span provides us with a specific sensitivity towards reading, stressing mainly the fact of its being rooted in particular time-conditioned, life-motivated and purposive situations.

Comparatismi, 2018

• This essay investigates the emotional attachments we bring to a book: we will describe the identification processes that reading may involve, and how these processes affect the reader's experience and identity. When it is authentic, the act of reading cannot be considered as a moment of mirroring, but it includes a more profound identification experience to the extent that reading becomes a sort of event, a gesture that at times may alter the reader's perception of her identity since, through it, she can access the buried spaces of the unconscious. If it is true that every work demands an interpretation, at the same time the fruition of literary texts by readers is inextricably linked to their desire for personal knowledge. This is why reading is neither a cognitive nor a psychobiological experience, insofar as it involves a more complex and personal interpretative and intersubjective activity: reader and text become a sort of innovative enterprise through which connections are not only unmasked , but above all continuously created. For the purposes of the discussion and to illuminate better the point I want to make, I will implicate myself and my own personal experience as reader of Sylvia Plath.

What does it take to be an ardent reader? Research on literacy and reading motivation has shown that one's upbringing and background, specifi cally the relationship between attitude and beliefs are crucial factors in shaping one's reading habits. With that as its basis, this paper captures signifi cant fi ndings from interview data of university students of differing backgrounds who are profi cient in English and more importantly, who share the love of reading. The researchers aim to better understand the reading experience of these Malaysian readers by listening to their accounts of early and current reading experiences. The researchers choose to analyze and understand the data from a qualitative approach because it accords these voices more depth. While each voice is regarded uniquely in its own historical context and construct, their voices when in concert, point to the construction of new insights in the researchers' stance on what it takes to be an ardent reader. To learn from these voices is to reiterate not how infrequently young Malaysians read, but how possible it is to shape young Malaysians into ardent readers.

Educational Theory, 1997

Virtually all we do involves reading. We read one another's faces and gestures; we interpretand are affected bythe architecture of buildings, the design of a classroom, the style of a haircut. We construe the meaning of the rituals of religious services and university commencements. Like all we do, reading requires a balance of fairness and critical evaluation, of tact and self-protection; and like all we do, reading reveals the self, its preoccupations, and obsessions. Self-protection and critical evaluation: reading is a serious and potentially dangerous activity. Whether we realize it or not, what we read affects what we become. We do well to be on guard, actively challenging the author. Tact and fairness: because in reading, we enter another person's domain. As there arc rituals when we enter someone's home, so too there are ritual observances in reading. Self-revelation: because the reader brings herself -her habits, attitudes, and mentalityto everything she does, centrally to her manner of reading, her interpretive frame. As we read, we too are read: and sometimes we discover ourselves by reflecting on the patterns of our interpretations andmisinterpretations. Like aperson, areading can be rude or pious; it can be abusive or tender; stingy or generous, literal or fanciful; naive or suspicious; religiously, politically, or sexually obsessed; relentlessly tenacious or readily distracted; sensitive, hypersensitive, or obtuse.

Simply put, this dissertation explores the reading experience. It explores the possible reasons as to why people love to read and the impact that the experience of reading has on the reader. The dissertation does so with particular reference to the novel. Issues such as canonicity, popular fiction, affect theory, the function of reading, and the place of literature in a reader’s life are tackled through the reading of several critics and important thinkers, and the varied thoughts are juxtaposed and explored in order to come up with potential answers to this unanswerable question. Two important traits of the novel with regard to the impact it may have on the reader are explored in more depth. The first of these is the epiphanic characteristic of the novel and the representation of the epiphanic in the novel. The second is the possibility of affirmation through tragic narratives. What this dissertation ultimately does is to analyze critically the incredibly personal act of reading as a universal phenomenon, taking into consideration aspects of the novel which make the medium more amenable to analysis and criticism. What this project essentially seeks to achieve is a critical analysis which attempts to justify why readers keep on reading and why people keep becoming readers regardless of new media and other distractions. The key word that surfaces continuously throughout the dissertation is identification, and this is the term that holds the various strands of thoughts and theories together, which in the end communicate—on an affirmative note—the need for the love of reading to remain a reality as well as the improbability of its dying out.