ABSTRACT
Chapter 1, The Meditative Reader, focuses on the reading experience as a self-conscious mental and physiological process through an exploration of literary spirituality. It adopts a transhistorical outlook on reading practices and develops a detailed historicized account of reading techniques from the Medieval period through to contemporary poetics. Based on Augustine’s conception of reading as a potentially transformative practice, which brings literary and spiritual concerns together to enhance the ethical value of literacy, this chapter studies the place of time in the reading experience. Whereas studies of Augustine are rightly concerned with his use of narrative, I look at the notion of narrative and experienced time through the prism of the reading and reciting of non-narrative texts. Close readings of Robert Lax’s poetry in particular provide a remarkable test of interpretive practices based on the techniques of spiritual exercises, thus revealing the reading process as the potential self-questioning basis for a decidedly pluralistic, time-based experience of meaning.
