Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter One Introduction
- Chapter Two Intimate Reading: A Narrative Method
- Chapter Three Veronica's Bruise
- Chapter Four Nina's Life-Long Friend Flicka
- Chapter Five Esther's Episode
- Chapter Six Jane's Visionary Reading
- Chapter Seven Sue's Buried Life
- Chapter Eight Reading by Heart: Lexithymia and Transformative Affective Patterns
- Bibliography
- Index
Chapter One - Introduction
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 March 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Chapter One Introduction
- Chapter Two Intimate Reading: A Narrative Method
- Chapter Three Veronica's Bruise
- Chapter Four Nina's Life-Long Friend Flicka
- Chapter Five Esther's Episode
- Chapter Six Jane's Visionary Reading
- Chapter Seven Sue's Buried Life
- Chapter Eight Reading by Heart: Lexithymia and Transformative Affective Patterns
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Transformative Reading Experiences
In her autobiography Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? Jeanette Winterson writes:
I had no one to help me, but the T. S. Eliot book helped me. So when people say that poetry is a luxury, or an option, or for the educated middle classes, or that it shouldn't be read at school because it's irrelevant, or any of the strange and stupid things that are said about poetry and its place in our lives, I suspect that the people doing the saying have had things pretty easy. A tough life needs a tough language – and that is what poetry is. That is what literature offers – a language powerful enough to say how it is.
Winterson regards poetry as a medicine for the soul: ‘Fiction and poetry are doses, medicines. What they heal is the rupture reality makes on the imagination.’ This is of course an ancient idea. In The Therapy of Desire the philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes:
From Homer on we encounter, frequently and prominently, the idea that logos is to illnesses of the soul as medical treatment is to illnesses of the body. We also find the claim that logos is a powerful and perhaps even a sufficient remedy for these illnesses; frequently it is portrayed as the only available remedy. The diseases in question are frequently diseases of inappropriate or misinformed emotion. […] logos is being said to play a real healing role, and to heal through its complicated relationship to the intellect and the emotions.
The interest in Logos as the medicine for the soul has seen a great revival in recent years with the emergence of various forms of bibliotherapy. ‘Over half of English library authorities are operating some form of bibliotherapy intervention,’ according to a study cited in the Guardian. Bibliotherapy includes not just fiction, however, and some forms have an instrumental rather than aesthetic orientation. And yet there are ways of mediating literature in which it is the very attention to the aesthetic dimension that brings about medicine for the soul.
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- Information
- Literature and TransformationA Narrative Study of Life-Changing Reading Experiences, pp. 1 - 16Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020