On Rereading
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- £24.99
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- £24.99
Publisher Description
After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently reread, canonical works of literature she was supposed to have liked but didn’t, guilty pleasures (books she oughtn’t to have liked but did), and stories reread for fun vs. those read for the classroom. On Rereading records the sometimes surprising, always fascinating, results of her personal experiment.
Spacks addresses a number of intriguing questions raised by the purposeful act of rereading: Why do we reread novels when, in many instances, we can remember the plot? Why, for example, do some lovers of Jane Austen’s fiction reread her novels every year (or oftener)? Why do young children love to hear the same story read aloud every night at bedtime? And why, as adults, do we return to childhood favorites such as The Hobbit, Alice in Wonderland, and the Harry Potter novels? What pleasures does rereading bring? What psychological needs does it answer? What guilt does it induce when life is short and there are so many other things to do (and so many other books to read)? Rereading, Spacks discovers, helps us to make sense of ourselves. It brings us sharply in contact with how we, like the books we reread, have both changed and remained the same.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this accessible, sometimes engaging, but often repetitive and predictable "autobiography of thoughts and feelings elicited by novels," Spacks, an emeritus University of Virginia literature professor, revisits an array of formative texts from her childhood, adolescence, and academic career. To investigate rereading's "continuum between stability and change," Spacks first focuses on the unexpected rewards and occasional disappointments of reexamining children's literature from an adult perspective. This establishes a pattern that generally holds for the rest of the book: lively close readings of texts, which may or may not explicitly pertain to rereading, followed by bland reiterations of her conclusions about the value of revisiting texts. The three chapters on rereading novels emblematic of certain eras (the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s) seem little more than extended musings on the fact that culture, family, and friends affect our reading experiences. Spacks's insistent focus on her personal history and experiences, while inherent to her project, is especially wearisome here. A later chapter on "professional rereading." which deals with the work of literary scholarship and larger concerns regarding the canon, proves much stronger. However, the book's often obvious conclusions and absorption with the author's own experiences leave it unable to overcome the question it poses about Saul Bellow's Herzog: "And why should a reader care?"
