Description:
"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...
Brief description: Paul B. Armstrong is Professor of English at Brown University. He is the author of Play and the Politics of Reading: The Social Uses of Modernist Form, also from Cornell University Press, and of How Literature Plays with the Brain: The Neuroscience of Reading and Art, The Phenomenology of Henry James, and Conflicting Readings: Variety and Validity in Interpretation.
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.'
--William M. Chace "Common Knowledge"