Literature and Transformation

Thor Magnus Tangerås

Description

An inquiry into readers’ experiences of life-changing encounters with works of literature

This book develops a method called intimate reading to investigate how ordinary readers are deeply moved by what they read, and the transformative impact such experiences have on their sense of self. The book presents unique narratives of such experiences and suggests a theory of transformative affective patterns that may form the basis of an affective literary theory.

Part One, Introduction; Intimate Reading: a hermeneutically oriented narrative method; Part Two, Narratives and Interpretations; Five Readers Re-membering: Intimations of life-changing reading experiences; Chapter 3, Narrative One: Veronica’s Bruise, Interpretation: Listening to the Heart; Chapter 4, Narrative Two: Nina’s Life-long Friend Flicka, Interpretation: The Nostos of MySpace; Chapter 5, Narrative Three: Esther’s Episode, Interpretation: From Discord to Concord; Chapter 6, Narrative Four: Jane’s Visionary Reading, Interpretation: The Big Bang and the View from Above; Chapter 7, Narrative Five: Sue’s Buried Life, Interpretation: Re-membering the Body’s Song; Part Three, Discussion; Chapter 8, Reading by Heart: Literature as Spiritual Necessity; Chapter 9, Towards a Theory of Transformative Affective Patterns; Bibliography; Index.

Sujets

• Mental health
• Psychology

Informations

• Publié par: Anthem Press
• Date de parution: 19 février 2020
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781785272967
• Langue: English

Extrait

Literature and Transformation
Literature and Transformation
A Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences
Thor Magnus Tangerås
Anthem Press
An imprint of Wimbledon Publishing Company
www.anthempress.com
This edition first published in UK and USA 2020
by ANTHEM PRESS
75–76 Blackfriars Road, London SE1 8HA, UK
or PO Box 9779, London SW19 7ZG, UK
and
244 Madison Ave #116, New York, NY 10016, USA
Copyright © Thor Magnus Tangerås 2020
The author asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019955671
ISBN-13: 978-1-78527-294-3 (Hbk)
ISBN-10: 1-78527-294-2 (Hbk)
This title is also available as an e-book.
CONTENTS
Preface
Acknowledgements
Chapter One Introduction
Transformative Reading Experiences
Presuppositions: Change, Crisis, Being Moved
Chapter Two Intimate Reading: A Narrative Method
The Anteroductive Logic of Inquiry
Reliability and Validity
Research Design Overview
Sampling in Interview-Based Qualitative Research
Recruitment Strategy
Interview Method
Presentation of Narratives
Philology and the Manuscript Matrix
Critical Selection of Narratives for Interpretation
The Construct of Life-changing Fiction Reading Experience
Analysis of Narrative Structure
Idiographic Interpretations of the Narratives
Chapter Three Veronica’s Bruise
Listening to the Heart
Chapter Four Nina’s Life-Long Friend Flicka
The Nostos of MySpace
Chapter Five Esther’s Episode
From Discord to Concord
Chapter Six Jane’s Visionary Reading
The Big Bang and the View from Above
Chapter Seven Sue’s Buried Life
Re-membering the Body’s Song
Chapter Eight Reading by Heart: Lexithymia and Transformative Affective Patterns
Mode of Engagement
Realisation through the Experience of Being Moved
Alloiosis: Qualitative Change from Crisis to Resolution
Complex Affective Configurations
Art for Heart’s Sake
Bibliography
Index
Preface
A few years ago I came across an article by the science fiction author Nicola Griffith, in which she wrote about the responses she had had from her readers. Her books, it turned out, had changed people’s lives, helping them to accept their own identity and situation:

A woman in Australia, married with two children, read Ammonite and wrote me a letter to tell me that my novel had shown her what the empty space inside her meant: she was a lesbian. At a bookstore reading in the South, a man told me Slow River had made his job bearable during a truly awful period in his life. A woman in the Midwest approached me at a convention: No, she didn’t want to chat, but she thought I ought to know that Ammonite had literally saved her life: she had been planning to kill herself but instead, for six months, read the book cover to cover, over and over, endlessly, immersing herself in a world of women until she knew it was okay to be a woman, to stay alive and become herself. 1
Shortly thereafter, an author I know told me of a reader who had contacted him to say that his novel had given him the courage to go on with his life when everything was black. About this time I also discovered David Shield’s intriguingly titled memoir, How Literature Saved My Life. The serendipitous confluence of these events impressed themselves upon me. I myself had previously experienced the transformative power of the written word: in my late teens I felt ‘like some watcher of the skies, when a new planet swims into his ken’ as I discovered the hitherto hidden continent of poetry. Later on, as a literary scholar I would come to feel that there was something missing from, or taken for granted in, literary studies: the question of literature’s importance and meaning in our troubled lives. It was as if the wonder and deep engagements with literary works was deemed self-explanatory or, even, an affective fallacy, something to be set aside in order to move onto the ‘important’ stuff: explication, judgement, criticism.
However, many avid readers find sustenance and meaning in literature, which is why we are drawn to it in the first place. As William Nicholson once said, ‘we read to know we are not alone.’ And so I decided to find out more about the role of literature in readers’ lives . In a time in which there is purportedly a ‘crisis in the humanities’, 2 a time in which the importance of the classics is dwindling and people read fewer books, I believe it is incumbent upon literary scholars to address this exigency; to illuminate the vital link between imaginative literature and the soul’s needs, not by offering yet another apologia, but by empirically investigating the meaning of literature in readers’ lives.
The experience of the work of art, argues the influential literary scholar Rita Felski, ‘is not just a matter of conveying information, but also of experiencing transformation’. 3 ‘If you are listening to what people are saying’, proposes Felski, ‘they will explain at length how and why they are deeply attached, moved, affected by the works of art which make them feel things’. And then she asks: ‘What would it mean to do justice to these responses rather than treating them as naïve, rudimentary or defective?’ 4 The purpose of this work is precisely to replace Felski’s if by when, in order to turn her conditional would into a definite does : in other words, to do justice to people’s responses by listening to them relating at length how they are moved, affected and changed by works of literature. I wish to find out how reading imaginative literature may be experienced as life-changing, and what such experiences can tell us about the value of literature and reading. Such a method of inquiry requires careful elaboration. In the chapters that follow, I will first look into what previous research can tell us about transformative reading experiences, as well as psychological studies of narratives of life-change. Thereafter, I will explicate the procedures and justifications of a method that I call Intimate Reading. The method attempts to present a clear rationale for how to approach interviews, how to transcribe and edit narratives, how to critically select narratives for interpretation and how to interpret them. In recent years, narrative methods of qualitative inquiry have flourished. 5 The concept of narrative, however, is elusive, indeterminate and contested. It is ‘variously used as an epistemology, a methodological perspective, an antidote to positivist research, a communication mode, a supra-genre, a text-type’. 6 As such, it is necessary to clarify methodological and procedural problems related to such inquiry.
The main body of this book is the presentation in detail of five dialogic narratives of life-changing experiences, and my subsequent interpretations of these. The first narrative presents Veronica’s experience of reading D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. My interpretation addresses four main issues: the nature of Veronica’s crisis prior to and during the reading experience, her account of her process of transaction with the novel, her interpretation of the kind of change she has undergone and what role she ascribes to Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the configuration of her story. I will argue that Veronica’s problem , that of finding the strength to escape from the entrapment of a confining relationship, only masks a deeper crisis: an emotional bruise that can no longer be held at bay by avoiding contact with her underlying emotions. An essential element of her mode of engagement with the novel is the visceral and a bodily form of knowing. What appears to be a rather straightforward case of deciding to take action, may only be a surface manifestation of a deeper change having taken place: Veronica learns to ‘listen to the heart’. The meaning of her story must be understood in relation to her serendipitous discovery of the book, and how the reading experience opens up for another transformative experience many years later, when reading The Winter’s Tale . The latter enables her to heal her bruise, by metaphorically ‘bringing her mother back to life’.
The second narrative is the only one to thematise an accumulative experience of re-reading. Nina has returned to Mary O’Hara’s novel My Friend Flicka time and again in the course of her life. It has been a companion for 40 years, ‘making unbearable times bearable’. Central to Nina’s life is the ‘great struggle’ to find her ‘own place in the world’, and ‘the enormous process of turning things around’ in order to achieve this. Like Ken’s story, ‘a coming-of-age story, about arriving at something, about overcoming something’, Nina’s is a story of a quest: to overcome, by healing the split