Read for Your Life—How Literature Can Enrich Your Life

By Robert DiYanni, New York University

In memory of all my splendid teachers of literature, who inspired me to follow in their wake.

Preface

I begin with a series of questions.

• Why do you read literature? What is your main purpose?
• What do you want from your experience of reading literature?
• How might you read literature more rewardingly?

Answers to these questions provide a starting point for thinking about how you read literature and why you read it the way you do. Why and how you read literary works can matter as much as which works you read.

I believe that most of us read literature for the pleasures it brings—pleasures of story and suspense, of sound and sense; of plot and structure, conflict and resolution; of voice and style; pleasures of being engaged intellectually and emotionally with a mind in the act of thinking. We read literarature for how it enlarges and deepens our understanding of ourselves and the world.

To some extent at least, these things may well be the case for you. My goal, thus, in this book, is to help you better enjoy, appreciate, and comprehend literary works and relate them productively to your life. To that end, I offer a set of “ways in” to reading literature designed to increase your pleasure, deepen your appreciation, and enhance your understanding.

My approach is suggestive rather than prescriptive. It’s less a system than a method, less a template or formula than a set of strategies for engaging with literary works pleasurably and productively.

These “ways in” are not exhaustive, of course; other approaches exist, alternative strategies to read literary works productively. But the strategies I provide have worked for me and for other readers, young and old, as well. These approaches to reading literature result, consistently for readers, in beneficial literary encounters and rewarding literary experiences.

And they can work for you.

Read for Your Life ranges across poetry, fiction, drama, and essay, with each genre comprising one of the book’s first four parts. For each literary genre, I identify six “ways in” to literary works. One of these techniques, the” interrupted reading,” concludes each of the genre sections. I include two additional sections: literary elements and basic literary theory. In the first of these, part five, I use the familiar literary elements as the basis for sample analyses of poem, story, play, essay, and epic. Part six offers an introductory overview of a dozen paired critical approaches, or theoretical perspectives, on literature.

I base my approach to reading literature on the following axioms:

1. We read literary works as acts of imagination—as imaginative (re)creations made of words.
2. We read works of literature as symbolic actions, not as literal statements.
3. The characters we encounter in literary works are neither simply words-on-a-page nor real people, but rather possible people, whose feelings and thoughts we can share virtually, and whose inner lives we can understand.
4. We read literary works as distinctive and singular, but also as part of larger literary and cultural contexts. Although we experience literary works as unique creations, we read them, simultaneously, as part of an ongoing tradition.
5. Our reading of literature, though it begins in private and touches our singular intellectual and emotional being, is also social, even civic and ethical.
6. Our reading of literature is dialogic: we read in dialogue with authors of literary works. We also read in conversation with ourselves and with other readers.
7. Literature enables us to develop our judgment through observation and reflection. It provides occasions for us to achieve a degree of discernment, even of wisdom.

Hermeneutics

As serious readers, we do our best to understand the literary works we read—poems plays, stories, novels, and essays, for example. The assumption is that a baseline exists upon which readers can agree. To understand a literary work—or indeed any text—we need to put ourselves in the circumstances—psychological, social, linguistic, and cultural—of the writer (and of a work’s characters as well). This is a hermeneutical, or interpretive, responsibility, perhaps the single most important responsibility of any reader. This interpretive work requires careful and sustained attention to a work’s words and phrases and sentences, its beliefs and attitudes, its implied ideas and values.

To some extent, this analytical, interpretive work is creative in the broad sense. It requires care in understanding what a writer has created, and to appreciate how a literary work comes to mean and convey what it does. Not every reader, and not every literary critic, possesses the skill, knowledge, and tact to comprehend literary works in this way. The art of reading requires dexterity in navigating a work’s tone, temper, and texture. It requires an effort to discover how the writer creates a world in through resourcefully deploying language and form.

Hermeneutic proficiency is also based on an ability to understand another’s thought and meaning, and a further ability to communicate that understanding clearly to others. Hermeneutic expertise requires readers to understand a literary work, and to mediate that understanding with others. It requires absorbing the literary work in such a way that a reader makes something new of it and then conveys to others skillfully that understanding of what the work says and suggests, along with how it does those things.

I believe that you will find my varied ““ways in,” or “takes,” on reading literary works helpful, and the application of literary elements and theories of value. An investment in refreshing your reading practices will increase your understanding, deepen your appreciation, and enhance your enjoyment of literature.

I am confident that Reading for Your Life will help you experience the pleasures and rewards reading literature so amply provides. Why not begin experiencing these rewards and pleasures right now? Just scroll down or turn the page….

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface

PART ONE: Reading Poetry—6 Ways In

Prelude: The Pleasures of Poetry

1. Looking & Listening—Billy Collins: Introduction to Poetry; Gwendolyn Brooks,:We Real Cool; Lucille Clifton: homage to my hips
2. Speaker, Structure, Sound—W. B. Yeats: An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
3. Argument—Andrew Marvell: To His Coy Mistress
4. Tone—Elizabeth Bishop: One Art
5. Poetry & Arts—W. H. Auden: Musée des Beaux Arts; William Carlos Williams: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus; Pieter Breughel the Elder: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus; Walt Whitman: from Song of Myself
6. Interrupted Reading—Robert Frost: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening

PART TWO: Reading Fiction—6 Ways In

Prelude: The Pleasures of Fiction

1. Questions—Katherine Anne Porter: Rope
2. Surprises—Petronius: The Widow of Ephesus
3. Voices—Jamaica Kincaid: Girl
4. Cultural Values—Sandra Cisneros: There Was a Man, There Was a Woman / Barbie-Q
5. Fiction & Arts—Ernest Hemingway: from The Revolutionist / from A Farewell to Arms
6. Interrupted Reading—Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour

1. Mental Theater—Terrence McNally: Andre’s Mother
2. Subtext—Wendy Wasserstein: from Tender Offer
3. Language & Style—William Shakespeare: from Othello
4. Scene and Sound—William Shakespeare: from Macbeth
5. Soliloquy—William Shakespeare: from Henry IV, Part I
6. Interrupted Reading—George Bernard Shaw: from Arms and the Man

PART FOUR: Reading the Essay—6 Ways In

Prelude: The Pleasures of the Essay

1. Beginning & Ending—Brian Doyle: Joyas Voladoras
2. Annotation—Francis Bacon: Of Youth and Age
3. Style and Tone—Mary Wollstonecraft: from A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
4. Slow Reading—Leslie Jamison: A Street Full of Splendid Strangers
5. Reading Framework—Jamaica Kincaid: from On Seeing England for the First Time
6. Interrupted Reading—George Orwell: A Hanging

PART FIVE: Reading with Literary Elements—6 Takes

Prelude: The Value of Literary Elements

1. Elements of Poetry—G. M. Hopkins: Spring and Fall: To a Young Child
2. Elements of Fiction—Alice Walker: Everyday Use
3. Elements of Drama—Lady Gregory, Isabella Persse: The Rising of the Moon
4. Elements of the Essay—Annie Dillard: Living Like Weasels
5. Elements of Epic—Homer: Iliad and Odyssey
6. Elements of Speeches: Elizabeth I, Speech at Tilbury/Sojourner Truth: Ain’t I a Woman

PART SIX: Reading Literature Through Critical Perspectives—6 Double Takes

Prelude: The Value of Critical Perspectives

1. Formalist and Reader-Response Perspectives
2. Biographical and Historical Perspectives
3. Psychological and Sociological Perspectives
4. Mythological and Structuralist Perspectives
5. Deconstructionist and Post-Colonial Perspectives
6. Eco-Critical and Influence & Values Perspectives

Prelude: Understanding Literary Conventions