ABSTRACT
People often distinguish between reading for pleasure and reading as part of the task of critical evaluation and argument. Repeated readings are more feasible with shorter texts such as lyric poems and short stories. In case of longer texts, re-reading remains ideal, but may be impossible in practice. In fact, any reading of a text aloud, even if it is the whole text, is still an adaptation, just as a performance of a play is an adaptation. The reader has his or her own ideas about the text, and finds ways of emphasising some aspects rather than others. Writers like J. M. Coetzee and Seamus Heaney, have taken the trouble to make audio versions of their own work suggests that this is not altogether a trivial approach to literature. Some theoretical approaches to literature have a tendency to undermine clear distinctions between primary and secondary texts, insofar as all are part of a network of writing with no simple origin.
