Fallen Into Knowledge

I have decided to start including some of my thoughts, of the academic variety here in the blog.  These thoughts are not fully formed, so take with a buckets of salt, and feel free to respond:

From Jamison:  “It is instructive here to juxtapose Auerbach’s discussion of the odyssey in Mimesis, and his description of the way in which at every point the poem is as it were vertical to itself, self-contained, each verse paragraph somehow timeless and immanent, bereft of any necessary or indispensable links with what precedes it and what follows …the historical un-naturality (in Brechtian sense) of contemporary books which, like detective stories, your read ‘for the end’ - the bulk of the pages becoming sheer devalued means to an end - in this case the ’solution…’” (126)

I know I find it difficult at best to slow down in my reading and enjoy the texture of a text - I am always in a hurry to “get to the end,” even when I am reading the Odyssey.  So the question is:  when did the primary motivation in reading become consumption?  And, Just what are we trying to gain by consuming the book?
What about the reading experience make us want to be done with it?  to get to the end?
Further, and perhaps more concerning to me, is the prevalent assumption amongst literary critics that the interesting work pertaining to a text happens after the text has been read.  That is, the text is assumed to be an object to be analyzed, and not as facilitating an experience:  the text as static and not as acting upon the reader.  Does this tendency, too, come from a capitalist / consumerist mentality?  Or, more pointedly, what would a non-capitalist reading look like (assuming we can even talk about it, enmeshed as we are in capitalist structures)?  Immediately, Marx’s somewhat undeveloped concept of the “sensuous revolution” comes to mind:  that we might relate to each other as persons, not as objects to be consumed.  I think a return (? move to ?) a model that pays attention to reading as an actualizing experience of a text would be a step in the right direction.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 6:20 pm and is filed under Philosophy, School. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.