Here is my rule: Never sneer at another person's taste in reading. Never make another person ashamed of a story that they love. You don't know what hunger that book is satisfying. And the book you despise today may be part of their personal canon in ways that you are simply unable to understand.
So writes Scott Card in the Rhino, but not before doing exactly the thing he says we shouldn't do:
...what academia considers to be the "canon" has become absurd...the whole process was kidnapped by idiots.
The result was pretentious twaddle like James Joyce's Ulysses...Whatever insights into the human condition James Joyce had to offer were trivial compared to the labor of receiving them.
...I mean really – do you take Stephen Dedalus or Leopold Bloom into your heart and life?
Well, yes, very much so. And no less an authority than OSC tells me that I shouldn't be ashamed of it, and that people who despise this particular taste may simply be unable to understand it.
Also, this question -- "why in the world would you need a university to teach you how to read the literature of your own language?" -- is answered in part by his own lucid explanation of Austen's status as an innovator, which is the kind of thing one might not glean as a solo reader.
Recent Comments