ABSTRACT
What is it that we hope to experience when we read a literary text from an earlier era? Are we looking for unimpeded access to a culture far removed from our own, for contact with the mind of a writer far distant in time? Are we looking for amusement or instruction or moral elevation or escape? For an encounter with transcendence, for visceral engagement with past conflicts, for a glimpse of something alien, or for some or all of the above, mutually exclusive though they may appear to be? What we want out of our reading will depend greatly on the genre, type, and specific subject matter of the work we happen to choose: most of us would not go to the poetry of the Earl of Rochester for moral elevation, nor to the Enneads of Plotinus for light entertainment. But what we want from a given text will also depend on the social and intellectual baggage we ourselves bring to it, on the specific coordinates of our individual lives, on the shared assumptions that characterize our particular cultural affiliations and our broader historical situation.
