Play and the Politics of Reading - by Paul B Armstrong (Hardcover)

About the Book

"Classrooms and curricula should be structured to foster the playful interaction that can teach students how to negotiate social and political differences in an emancipatory, noncoercive manner.... Teaching reading as a playful exercise of...

Book Synopsis

"Classrooms and curricula should be structured to foster the playful interaction that can teach students how to negotiate social and political differences in an emancipatory, noncoercive manner.... Teaching reading as a playful exercise of reciprocity with otherness can help prepare students for a democracy understood as a community of communities."--from the "Pedagogical Postscript"

Reading is socially useful, in Paul B. Armstrong's view, and can model democratic interaction by a community unconstrained by the need to build consensus but aware of the dangers of violence, irrationality, and anarchy. Reading requires mutual recognition but need not culminate in agreement, Armstrong says; instead, the social potential of reading arises from the active exchange of attitudes, ideas, and values between author and reader and among readers. Play and the Politics of Reading, which has important implications for education, draws on Wolfgang Iser's notion of free play to offer a valuable response to social problems.

Armstrong finds that Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, Henry James, and James Joyce provide apt examples of the politics of reading, for reasons both literary and political. In making the transition from realism to modernism, these authors experimented with narrative strategies that seek simultaneously to represent the world and to question the means of representation itself. The formal ambiguities and complexities of such texts as Howards End and Ulysses are ways of staging for the reader the difficulties and opportunities of a world of differences. Innovative formal structures challenge readers to reconsider their assumptions and beliefs about social issues.

Review Quotes

This intelligent and high-minded book nobly seeks to prove the unlikely: that reading itself can be an exercise that will strengthen democracy, educate students to live in more open and pluralistic societies, and lead all of us (if we are as fair-minded and intellectually generous as its author) to the privileged station of being 'liberal ironists' (where we know everything is groundless yet plunge on with ideals we cannot justify). Armstrong provides close and well-reasoned essays on Henry James, Joseph Conrad, E. M. Forster, and James Joyce to show how a critic as intelligent as himself can observe four writers deploying strategies of ambiguity, flexibility, and multifaceted self-awareness--all of which can elicit from their sensitive readers the give-and-take, the shared understanding, the 'dance' of reciprocated acknowledgment, and the 'consensual relationship of mutuality' on which reading of the best sort depends, the kind of reading that once made Lionel Trilling say: 'A real book reads us.'

About the Author

Paul B. Armstrong is Professor of English and Dean of the College, Brown University. He is the author of The Challenge of Bewilderment: Understanding and Representation in James, Conrad, and Ford; The Phenomenology of Henry James, and Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation. He is also the editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Howards End by E. M. Forster and a forthcoming revised Norton Critical Edition of Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad.