Wednesday, August 17, 2011

Notes on Walking a Literary Labyrinth: A Spirituality of Reading

By Nancy M. Malone.


"While the line of print in a novel, for instance, proceeds mostly in unbroken fashion from one margin of the page to the other, and plot and character development drive us forward until we reach a sense of wholeness at its end, to read a poem well we must go slowly, attend more carefully to all its elements.  Line breaks and their meaning arrest us.  Our innate sense of rhythm and, in some poems, our appetite for rhyme, though less robust in us than in readers of the past, are fully satisfied.  Above all, we must savor the words themselves for their full import, their sound and resonances, their relationship to other words in the line, the poem."


"...reading is a keenly personal act...reads a book against the template of his own personality, experience, tastes, and dispositions at the moment, so that in a very real way each reader is the co-creator of the work being read; it is not a one-sided affair."



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