Make Literature Sexy Again

In his forthcoming book Reading Relations: How Authors Enter Our Lives, Australian English professor Dan Dixon offers a proposition that will probably seem obvious to most people. When we read books, sometimes we fall in love with them and may even come to consider the author and the characters as friends. 

This is obvious to anyone who has ever experienced that intense feeling while reading a book. And yet Dixon’s thesis, at least in the academic world, will probably come across as revolutionary—or rather, counterrevolutionary.

Over the past several decades, the academic left has made reading a chore. Rather than reading for enlightenment or pleasure, reading now entails “deconstructing the text”—that is, approaching it with the assumption that one can take it apart to find evidence of racism or other forms of bias like “colonialism.” In deconstructing a text, it is imperative to resist emotional engagement. Falling in love with a text is precisely what the left insists one must not do.

Dixon’s Reading Relations offers a way back to sanity. As Dixon observes:

does the way we come to know an author resemble the way we come to know a person socially (perhaps as a friend, an acquaintance, a crush, an adversary)? This book comprises five linked responses to this question with a chapter dedicated to each. I intend to show that describing reading as an experience that shares emotional ground with our social lives prompts us to attend to the kinds of affective attachments that frequently resist description by, or encourage disdain among, scholars of literature, such as relatability, friendliness, and identification. These attachments can facilitate insight, comfort, vanity, or naïveté, but whatever their effects they should not be ignored.

No, they shouldn’t. Literacy is dropping in our time, not only because of digital distractions, but also because so many journalists and academics treat literature as the written equivalent of kale salad—something to be endured, not a living thing to be adored. We should not resist falling in love with books and authors. It is only natural when confronted with a great book to begin to think of its writer as a friend—or sometimes, as a seducer.