![]() ![]() There is something about love that does not sit well with the literary academy. ![]() For no sensation empirical as love can have any importance as a "response" to novels qua novels. We are as Heraclitus described us: "Estranged from that which is most familiar." Suddenly this incommensurable "Love", and this other, more vague surmise - that the novel we loved was not simply "good" but even represented a Good in our lives - these ideas grow shameful and, after some time, are forgotten entirely, along with the novel that first inspired them. We find that our initial affective responses are no longer of interest to the literary community in which we find ourselves. Maybe we continue this interest and take it further, deciding to study novels in earnest, or even teach them, review them, or write them.Ī peculiar thing happens at this point. ![]() And as serious young adults, we are thrilled to be able to talk of theme, of the mechanics of plot and the vicissitudes of character. Soon enough, though, I grew up and grew serious I became intellectually responsive to the text. I was too young, at 11, to realise serious people don't speak of novels this way. I felt it was very good and that the reading of it had done me some good. EM Forster's A Room With A View was my first intimation of the possibilities of fiction: how wholly one might feel for it and through it, how much it could do to you. ![]()
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