J. Hillis Miller tackles some pretty interesting questions in this little pocketbook. Why should we read literature? What is literature? Why is literature dead? How should we read literature? Why have we always read literature? I really like his answer to the question of why we read literature. The way he writes about the kindling of the passion for reading makes me think of my own delight in immersing myself in books when I was a child, something I carried on into adulthood.
The first book, the first piece of literature I ever read, was Anne of Green Gables. I was six. The book was about 300+ pages long, yet I was determined to read it. I think it had something to do with watching the movie on television or hearing about the story from a friend. Whatever the reason, I committed myself to the task and even though it took me a year, I read it. I don't know what my next book after that was, or what I read in between, but after that, I was hooked. Devouring books became an obsession and I lived book to book as a child.
Miller's On Literature is a book for my Politics and Economics of the Canon class although I might have read it of my own accord, because the writing is nice. I like his argument--that human beings have an innate need to immerse themselves in the other world, an alternate reality that books create with their words on the page. And even though literature is dying, as a result of the new media, the new theories that take away the authority of language in a text and replace it with analyzing the race, class, and gender representations in novels, there will always be a place for reading stories and escaping.
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