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Introduction: Mapping the Terrain
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 September 2009
Summary
John Kelleher, who taught Irish literature at Harvard for many years, reports the sequence of experiences he had as a reader of James Joyce's novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:
I remember that when I first encountered Stephen Daedalus I was twenty and I wondered how Joyce could have known so much about me.… Perhaps about the third reading it dawned on me that Stephen was, after all, a bit of a prig; and to that extent I no longer identified myself with him. (How could I?) Quite a while later I perceived that Joyce knew that Stephen was a prig; that, indeed, he looked on Stephen with quite an ironic eye. So then I understood. At least I did until I had to observe that the author's glance was not one of unmixed irony. There was compassion in it too, as well as a sort of tender, humorous pride. (1958, 83)
Kelleher presents these responses as successive discoveries about Joyce's novel. We might equally well interpret them as changes in Kelleher himself as a reader. Changes over time – not just in the content of one's response to a story, but in the kind of response itself – require an account of how one develops as a reader. That is the subject of this book.
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- Becoming a ReaderThe Experience of Fiction from Childhood to Adulthood, pp. 1 - 20Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1991