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E. M. DADLEZ, waxler, robert p. The Risk of Reading: How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and theWorld. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014, vii + 191 pp., $77.00 cloth., The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Volume 74, Issue 3, July 2016, Pages 310–311, https://doi.org/10.1111/jaac.12298
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Extract
The Risk of Reading offers an argument for the importance of literature as a source of self‐development and self‐understanding, defending the ability of narrative to render a reader and that reader's life intelligible in profound and unexpected ways. Most of the book is devoted to the demonstration of these points by means of some eloquent examples of deep reading. The argument itself will not be of enormous interest to analytic philosophers, who already have Alan Goldman and Martha Nussbaum to hand for a philosophical treatment of such issues. It is nonetheless interesting to see how such an argument emerges from the different field of literary studies. Waxler's Risk was a risk for him in more than one respect, and he has been roundly criticized by scholars of literary and cultural studies for what is referred to as an “unapologetically conventional homage” to literature, for his criticisms of the digital age (which admittedly cover a lot of familiar ground), and, finally, for his assumption that there can be a human nature or, worse yet, a meaning to be discovered in the human condition. Of course, much of this criticism may well enhance the attractiveness of Risk for some philosophers. And to give him his due, Waxler has the courage of any convictions on offer in this book. He is one of the organizers of (and a participant in) a Massachusetts prison rehabilitation program that has literature and literary reading as its focus. So the contention that literature can lend coherence or purpose to our lives, that linguistic narrative provides us with a process that can contribute to self‐understanding, is entirely authentic.
