The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical
monographs about the importance of literature and of
reading in the wider world and about the state of
literary education inside schools and universities. The
category of 'the literary' has always been contentious.
What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is
dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an
arena for thought. It is sceptically challenged from
within, for example, by the sometimes rival claims of
cultural history, contextualized explanation, or media
studies. It is shaken from without by even greater
pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social
attitudes that can follow from it; by technological
change that may leave the traditional forms of serious
human communication looking merely antiquated. For just
these reasons this is the right time for renewal, to
start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value of
literary reading. Reading and the Reader offers a
defence of reading serious literature, where reading
offers a place for inner contemplation, emotion,
imagination, and thought-experiment through the
energising booster-rocket of literature. It is argued
that literature creates a holding-ground in which a
dense sense of experience is registered. Such a place is
vital to human well-being in the following respects: in
sustaining the ability to use and not just suffer one's
experience; to be able to think one's thoughts, even
those that are customarily unadmitted or felt as
anomalous or unworthy; to find room for a realm of
speculation in between religions and secularization, in
between literature and life. Reading and the Reader, one
of the first volumes in the Literary Agenda series,
exists to defend the value of reading, to narrow the
gasp between the way writers and readers think, to bring
literary thinking into the ordinary thinking of the
world - especially at a time when the arts and
humanities are under some threat. Literature is useful
in terms of deep human needs. It offers a form of
time-travel - across ages, countries, different minds -
that provides alternatives to any conventional
worldview.
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