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It's definitely the consciousness presented as a whole through the book, or the "total effect" of the book as it is expressed in its language, that gets me. I can empathize more with an attitude taken towards the events of the book, which is manifested through the way in which they are rendered,... Loomis
Loomis, you do seem to be talking here about your location of the book's controlling voice and the ideological purview of the author. I agree with you that often our past readings (and reading habits or modes, perhaps) can be more important than real life experience in our response to books. And this is especially true in the case of modern and post modern texts, which are often so self-consciously intertextual. But because any incorporation of snatches of other texts and discursive styles within a book immediately offer us differential meanings - dense traces of other historical uses, other contexts - it can be very difficult at times to decide just where the controlling voice lies. Or to put it another way, the controlling or dominant voice cannot subsume without residue all the meanings ('other voices') on offer.
However this level of reading also seems to me of a more analytical-interpretive variety. The act of reading - how we make sense of texts, and why they pleasure or stimulate us in the way they do is just so complex, that I tend to think that there's not *one* predominant way in which we read (visual, aural or whatever), but that we move between various levels and kinds of reading, depending on our purpose, desires, mood, health, etc. - and the type of text itself. |
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