ABSTRACT
To study literature is to study writing, yet intertwined with writing is the practice of reading. Michel Foucault suggests that writing should be conceived of not as a ‘product’ or a ‘thing’, but rather as an ‘act’ (1991: 104). Reading too is an ‘act’. Literary and critical theory has had much to say about the business of writing and about the meanings of texts, but to use Wolfgang Iser’s phrase, what of ‘the act of reading’ itself ? Reading is seemingly the simple process of receiving and transforming the black marks on a page, and yet the complex dialectic that opens up when an individual consciousness encounters a text – when a reader meets the voice and words of an author – has provoked the curiosity of those interested in precisely what goes on when we read. What reading constitutes, as an activity, a discipline or a dialogue, has long been the subject of debate. For example, reading is often seen to invite a kind of intimacy; it suggests a private, solitary space that the reader inhabits, perhaps a forgetting of the world and a falling into words and fi ction. Yet, on the other hand, reading is also understood as a decidedly social activity, a promiscuous process of exchange. In this sense reading is essentially the act of entering another’s thoughts and, as such, becomes an intense engagement with something or someone other. It is described as one of those rare moments when the boundaries between the self and the other collapse. The practice of reading is thus an unusual, perhaps unique, instance in which we give over to another, allowing their consciousness to become our own. In ‘Phenomenology of reading’ (1969) Georges Poulet pointed out that when we read the barrier between us and the book falls away. You are inside the book and it is inside you. Before we begin to read the book is an inert object, separate from us; it cannot become alive or be animated until our consciousness enters into it and realizes it as a work.
