Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- PROLEGOMENON
- PART I ORIGINS
- PART II FORM AND MATTER
- PART III READERS AND READING
- 8 Critical autonomy and readership
- 9 Dexterity and textuality: the experience of reading
- PART IV ANCIENT AND MODERN
- PART V TEXTS AND TASTES
- PART VI ANATOMISING THE SELF
- ENVOI
- Bibliography
- Index
9 - Dexterity and textuality: the experience of reading
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 03 May 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of abbreviations
- Acknowledgements
- PROLEGOMENON
- PART I ORIGINS
- PART II FORM AND MATTER
- PART III READERS AND READING
- 8 Critical autonomy and readership
- 9 Dexterity and textuality: the experience of reading
- PART IV ANCIENT AND MODERN
- PART V TEXTS AND TASTES
- PART VI ANATOMISING THE SELF
- ENVOI
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
But who shall be the master? The writer or the reader?
Denis Diderot, Jacques le Fataliste et son Maître (1796)Lord Kames was much taken by the apparent link between high levels of skill as a reader and disciplined and determined activity as a note-taker. In Loose Hints upon Education (1781), he even ventured that ‘A person who reads merely for amusement, gives little attention; ideas glide through the mind, and vanish instantly. But let a commonplace book be in view: attention is on the stretch to find matter, and impressions are made that the memory retains.’ His countryman James Beattie agreed wholeheartedly, claiming that ‘When we are so much master of the sentiments of another man as to be able to express them with accuracy in our own words, then we may be said to have digested them, and made them our own; and then it is, and not before, that our understanding is really improved by them.’ Significantly, however, neither of these influential Scots theorists of polite culture was willing to go further in his analysis of the benefits of note-taking and offer a comprehensive treatment of the different processes that constitute the activity of reading. Indeed, they left largely unmentioned, and perhaps unconsidered, the various facets of the consumption of a text that may well have been completely intertwined and interconnected in practice but which also were (and are) to some degree theoretically distinguishable.
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- Commonplace Books and Reading in Georgian England , pp. 120 - 136Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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