Reader’s Block, Inability to Read or A Misunderstanding of Literature?

This article is in support of Gerald Graff’s Chapter, “Disliking Books at An Early Age,” which was an extraordinary analytical masterpiece that helped me gain insight and made me reflect on my own ability to read books. As someone who’s been into reading since the past five years, and has recently been facing a reader’s block, which I thought was because of my busyness with work and college, I have understood the root of my problem. Whenever I try to read books, I am often trying to engage myself fully in the book, to feel as if I’m a part of it and sometimes that needs so much effort - to be involved fully and to give in completely to a story - that I, most often, end up losing track and shortly setting aside the book because it feels too much of a burden for my mind to escape my reality and to completely immerse myself in the book.

That we should be completely immersed in a book cultivates the idea that one must be in an empty and heavily influenced state of mind, that allows us to remove our versions of reality from our heads and to give in to the reality of the literature we are reading, which, fundamentally, is a form of escapism and when reading is seen through this lens and this purpose, it is only good for pleasure, for a moment’s escapism, and not for a grander and more broader purpose.

Essentially, I think the core of Graff’s discussion focuses on the theme that escapism through books, which has long been thought the purpose of them, is not the whole of what defines literature, which is a theory I find to be greatly convincing.

Literature is not just a means to delve into important issues and thoughts and stories through escaping into new worlds and adventures but it is also rather a collective process of bringing out our own critical reflections and opinions, which help make us feel as if we are not just experiencing new worlds and thoughts, but rather, also cultivating our own through the ladder of ideas created by those existent words and stories. Literature is not just meant to be enjoyed but rather also as a means to build our own critical, deep, reflective, philosophical and psychological ideas by using literary works as a base to form our foundation of thoughts on specific and broader issues and opinions held about certain aspects of life. This is why I believe annotations are heavily important when it comes to reading, to read is a great experience but to write and analyse works is to cultivate our own perspectives and to grow and give way to broaden our minds beyond what already exists and to form new ways of thinking about things.

Graff’s admittance that although readers, more often than not, follow the process of firstly getting engaged completely by a book, which makes them join into the cycle of enjoying reading and then forming critical opinions regarding their reads, his story, however, followed an opposite route which has made a significant difference in his life and in changing his opinion on the value of literature as a whole.

Another point that I particularly found persuasive in Graff’s argument was his counterargument to Bloom’s work against literary professors or theorists who analyse works too much, in The Closing of an American Mind, that states, “a liberal education means reading certain generally recognized classic texts, just reading them, letting them dictate what the questions are and the method of approaching them-not forcing them into categories we make up, not treating them as historical products, but trying to read them as their au­thors wished them to be read….These teachers, as Bloom puts it, engage in "endless debates about methods-among them Freudian criticism, Marxist criticism, New Criticism, Structuralism and Decon­ structionism, and many others, all of which have in common the premise that what Plato or Dante had to say about reality is unimportant."

Graff, in contrast to this opinion, states that Bloom, in trying to use Plato or Dante to prove his argument is only contradicting himself by using only specific points of these philosophers that cater to his own personal opinions and not to what Plato or Dante wished to convey through their works. He uses their examples to prove that literature must be read as authors meant them to be read and not for forming our own questions but Graff rightfully counterarguments this claim by putting forward that in involving these authors in his own argument, is Bloom not using their works to build up his own questions and prove his own personal arguments against the many theories of literature?

To conclude, Graff’s argument has a made a huge impact on my own views of reading and in critically thinking about his article, I, myself, have ended up cultivating my own new ideas on the theories of literature and the purpose of reading in general, which further supports Graff’s point that reading is not just a way of enjoying another’s creations, but rather of building our own ideas and thoughts through those works, and for improving and growing as an individual through the literature we read, which adds to its broader and cultural value.