I return to the topic of reading. In my earlier post on How to Read a Book, I briefly mentioned Harold Bloom’s similarly titled How to Read and Why that is primarily composed of Bloom’s suggestions on how to benefit from reading some of the classic works of literature.
In the first chapter, Bloom claims that we read because the experience has a number of important and highly desirable effects on the individual reader. I think it is important to examine carefully these claims.
He suggests, for example, that reading imaginative literature alleviates loneliness. Elsewhere Toni Morrison expressed a similar view: “I was lonely for the company of those people in the book.” Does reading literature have this effect? I am dubious as I know of no direct evidence for this kind of influence.
In my case, enjoying the company of my literary friends is not the same as lessening my isolation or in any permanent fashion decreasing the loneliness that I sometimes feel. Yes, I learn that there are other individuals who sometimes think and feel the way I do.
While this is somewhat reassuring, still I know that it is a fictional world that provides this confirmation and it won’t be long before I will have to come to terms if not with loneliness, per se, the relatively solitary world in which I now live.
In several places Bloom suggests reading “is the search for a difficult pleasure” and that it is “the most healing of pleasures.” However, further on, a certain inconsistency creeps into this claim when he admits “You cannot directly improve anyone else's life by reading better or more deeply.”
To be sure, reading is a great pleasure, one of the finest. But is that experience therapeutic which I take what Bloom means by “healing?” Here there is some supporting evidence, although it consists of only a small number of studies that leave much to be desired in terms of methodology.
Reading poetry is claimed to be therapeutic by some investigators. Others have employed self-help manuals to alter a wide-variety of undesirable behaviors with findings that are at best mixed.
There are also a small number of laboratory studies on the effects of reading literature. But these studies employ artificially created reading materials that are specifically tailored for use in the laboratory and they seem quite unlike the ordinary reading experiences that Bloom, as well as most everyone else would like to know more about.
Finally there are a few quasi-experimental field studies that document the positive effects of reading well-known works of literature. If interested, I invite the reader to read a review (the last essay) of this issue that I wrote a while ago.
Bloom does not ignore the underlying quest for knowledge, “not just of ourselves and others, but of the ways things are.” And later he writes, “We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life.”
But ultimately Bloom believes “We read to strengthen the self and to learn its authentic interests.” Absent any systematic research, at least that I am unaware of on these claims, each of us must ask if and to what extent that holds for us.
In my case, I know that literature has reaffirmed the interests that I have and the life it has led me to. And to that extent, it has certainly reinforced the confidence I have in this pursuit. Would I be saying this if I were unable to read literature? The question is tantalizing but impossible to answer.
Throughout this post, as well as others, I have asked for evidence relevant to the issue at hand. Is this question reasonable? Fair? Does it make sense to seek evidence for claims about how literature shapes an individual?
By training and background I am prone to ask questions like this. In time, empirical studies of these matters will develop. I know it exists in other areas of literary analysis that are not directly relevant to this one. The questions may be premature at this time but perhaps this will not be the case for long.
Showing posts with label Harold Bloom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Harold Bloom. Show all posts
2.11.2009
1.08.2009
Harold Bloom How To Read and Why
The first chapter of Harold Bloom’s How to Read and Why is an eloquent manifesto about the importance and joy of the reading experience. Why read at all? Bloom’s answer turns on its pleasures, the knowledge it imparts, “not just of the self and others, but of the way things are” and its various other effects on the individual.
On the matter of the effects of reading literature, I find Bloom less persuasive and at times inconsistent. He claims, for example that “imaginative literature…alleviates loneliness.” I think there is very little research to support that. He claims that reading is “healing.” I assume here he means in a therapeutic sense. Yet, I know of no systematic body of knowledge that demonstrates this.
Against this background, Bloom then goes on to say: You cannot directly improve anyone else’s life by reading better or more deeply. I remain skeptical of the traditional social hope that care for others may be stimulated by the growth of individual imagination, and I am wary of any arguments whatsoever that connect the pleasures of solitary reading to the public good.
As I understand this statement, Bloom is saying that reading cannot directly change a person’s behavior nor does it have any effect on the “public good.” How odd to juxtapose these claims next to his earlier remarks about the way reading can alleviate loneliness and is the “most healing of pleasures.”
Still this chapter in Bloom’s book is a powerful reminder of the significance of the literary reading experience. In the remaining chapters Bloom amplifies this theme by discussing specific works of literature including short stories, poems, plays, and novels. The volume is an excellent introduction to literature.
In addition to the foregoing remarks by Bloom, other selections from the first chapter follow:
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.
Literary criticism, as I have learned to understand it, ought to be experiential and pragmatic, rather than theoretical.
It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions that they continue to read for themselves.
…eventually you will read against the clock.
…formula of how to read: find what comes near you than can be put to the use of weighing and considering.
Ultimately we read…to strengthen the self and to learn its authentic interests.
The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social.
…if you become an authentic reader, then the response to your labors will confirm you as an illumination to others.
We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
…recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. Think of the endless irony of Hamlet, who when he says one thing almost invariably means another, frequently indeed the opposite of what he says.
And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.
We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life.
We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the ways things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading ….is the search for a difficult pleasure.
On the matter of the effects of reading literature, I find Bloom less persuasive and at times inconsistent. He claims, for example that “imaginative literature…alleviates loneliness.” I think there is very little research to support that. He claims that reading is “healing.” I assume here he means in a therapeutic sense. Yet, I know of no systematic body of knowledge that demonstrates this.
Against this background, Bloom then goes on to say: You cannot directly improve anyone else’s life by reading better or more deeply. I remain skeptical of the traditional social hope that care for others may be stimulated by the growth of individual imagination, and I am wary of any arguments whatsoever that connect the pleasures of solitary reading to the public good.
As I understand this statement, Bloom is saying that reading cannot directly change a person’s behavior nor does it have any effect on the “public good.” How odd to juxtapose these claims next to his earlier remarks about the way reading can alleviate loneliness and is the “most healing of pleasures.”
Still this chapter in Bloom’s book is a powerful reminder of the significance of the literary reading experience. In the remaining chapters Bloom amplifies this theme by discussing specific works of literature including short stories, poems, plays, and novels. The volume is an excellent introduction to literature.
In addition to the foregoing remarks by Bloom, other selections from the first chapter follow:
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?
Reading well is one of the great pleasures that solitude can afford you, because it is, at least in my experience, the most healing of pleasures.
Literary criticism, as I have learned to understand it, ought to be experiential and pragmatic, rather than theoretical.
It matters, if individuals are to retain any capacity to form their own judgments and opinions that they continue to read for themselves.
…eventually you will read against the clock.
…formula of how to read: find what comes near you than can be put to the use of weighing and considering.
Ultimately we read…to strengthen the self and to learn its authentic interests.
The pleasures of reading indeed are selfish rather than social.
…if you become an authentic reader, then the response to your labors will confirm you as an illumination to others.
We read, frequently if unknowingly, in quest of a mind more original than our own.
…recovery of the ironic might be our fifth principle for the restoration of reading. Think of the endless irony of Hamlet, who when he says one thing almost invariably means another, frequently indeed the opposite of what he says.
And yet the loss of irony is the death of reading, and of what had been civilized in our natures.
We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life.
We read deeply for varied reasons, most of them familiar: that we cannot know enough people profoundly enough; that we need to know ourselves better; that we require knowledge, not just of self and others, but of the ways things are. Yet the strongest, most authentic motive for deep reading ….is the search for a difficult pleasure.
12.08.2008
Harold Bloom
I am an admirer of Harold Bloom. Oh, that I had his erudition. In a recent New York Review of Books essay, (The Glories of Yiddish New York Review 11/6/08), he reviews a book by Max Weinreich titled History of the Yiddish Language. While I do not speak Yiddish (or Hebrew or any other foreign language very well), I was fascinated by Bloom’s review.
There were two elements of his analysis of Yiddish that struck a responsive chord. The first is that “irony is endemic” to the language and second that questioning is one of its central features. Endless irony and questioning, both ways of speaking and writing I like to employ. Heavens knows why.
Earlier I wrote about the continuous questioning in the language of Night Train to Lisbon. It was the reason I liked the book so much, a style of speaking and writing that seems rare today, like Yiddish. As far as I can tell, neither Prado or Gregorious was Jewish and I doubt Mercier, the author of Night Train to Lisbon, is either. Who knows?
I greatly enjoyed reading Bloom’s review, The Glories of Yiddish and collected several passages. There follows a selection:
But then, irony is endemic in the very nature of Yiddish, a fusion always conscious of its otherness…
“Yiddish speakers speak not so much with individual referring words as with such clusters of relations, ready-made idioms, quotations and situational responses. Since each word may belong to several heterogeneous or contradictory knots, ironies are always at hand.” Uriel Weinreich
It is not the denotations that the language covers but the emotive and semantic directions of the hearer’s empathy. In this mode of discourse, the overt clash, ironic or clever, between words of different stock languages in one sentence is a major source of meaning, impact, and delight.
The fate of an American Jewish culture that possesses no distinctive spiritual and aesthetic components is difficult either to describe or to prophesy.
If assimilation is defined as a minority’s adoption of the customs, values, and habits of the majority, the American Jews are leagues beyond mere absorption into the cultural diffuseness of their country. I can no longer know (or care) which of my many students are more-or-less Jewish, and many of them do not know either. Should this be deplored? Increasingly I am uncertain.
…my classes are filled by many Asians and Asian-Americans who have replaced Jews as the most alert and able of students.
…the Talmud always is close by, helping to make Yiddish perhaps uniquely the language of questions.
The uncanny familiarity of Yiddish for Jewish…has something to do with its insinuating, questioning quality. Yiddish is the Hamlet of languages: the Prince of Denmark’s play abounds with questionable enigmas and a plethora of instances of the word “questions.”
Though Yiddish and Talmud share the style of generally answering questions with fresh questions, I cannot imagine the Talmud written in Yiddish.
Neither American nor Israeli Jews are now a text-centered people, any more than American Gentiles are. Deep reading wanes, and bilingualism is a vanishing phenomenon.
The vibrant Yiddish language, fused and open, questioning and celebrating, someday soon will be no more.
There were two elements of his analysis of Yiddish that struck a responsive chord. The first is that “irony is endemic” to the language and second that questioning is one of its central features. Endless irony and questioning, both ways of speaking and writing I like to employ. Heavens knows why.
Earlier I wrote about the continuous questioning in the language of Night Train to Lisbon. It was the reason I liked the book so much, a style of speaking and writing that seems rare today, like Yiddish. As far as I can tell, neither Prado or Gregorious was Jewish and I doubt Mercier, the author of Night Train to Lisbon, is either. Who knows?
I greatly enjoyed reading Bloom’s review, The Glories of Yiddish and collected several passages. There follows a selection:
But then, irony is endemic in the very nature of Yiddish, a fusion always conscious of its otherness…
“Yiddish speakers speak not so much with individual referring words as with such clusters of relations, ready-made idioms, quotations and situational responses. Since each word may belong to several heterogeneous or contradictory knots, ironies are always at hand.” Uriel Weinreich
It is not the denotations that the language covers but the emotive and semantic directions of the hearer’s empathy. In this mode of discourse, the overt clash, ironic or clever, between words of different stock languages in one sentence is a major source of meaning, impact, and delight.
The fate of an American Jewish culture that possesses no distinctive spiritual and aesthetic components is difficult either to describe or to prophesy.
If assimilation is defined as a minority’s adoption of the customs, values, and habits of the majority, the American Jews are leagues beyond mere absorption into the cultural diffuseness of their country. I can no longer know (or care) which of my many students are more-or-less Jewish, and many of them do not know either. Should this be deplored? Increasingly I am uncertain.
…my classes are filled by many Asians and Asian-Americans who have replaced Jews as the most alert and able of students.
…the Talmud always is close by, helping to make Yiddish perhaps uniquely the language of questions.
The uncanny familiarity of Yiddish for Jewish…has something to do with its insinuating, questioning quality. Yiddish is the Hamlet of languages: the Prince of Denmark’s play abounds with questionable enigmas and a plethora of instances of the word “questions.”
Though Yiddish and Talmud share the style of generally answering questions with fresh questions, I cannot imagine the Talmud written in Yiddish.
Neither American nor Israeli Jews are now a text-centered people, any more than American Gentiles are. Deep reading wanes, and bilingualism is a vanishing phenomenon.
The vibrant Yiddish language, fused and open, questioning and celebrating, someday soon will be no more.
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