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Learning to Read Modernism - Textual Practice.pdf (160.97 kB)

Reading childishly? Learning to read modernism: reading the child reader in modernism and psychoanalysis

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journal contribution
posted on 2023-06-09, 06:22 authored by Helen TysonHelen Tyson
This article focuses on portraits of childhood reading in writings by Sigmund Freud, Virginia Woolf and Marcel Proust. The figure of the child reader, I suggest, functions as one of what Charles Altieri has described as the ‘projected readers’ of modernism – the ‘ideal’ readers imagined in and constructed by modernist texts, as a way of modelling how we might respond imaginatively and psychologically to this difficult form of writing. But there is, of course, a fundamental disavowal at work in such representations of the child reader in works that are evidently not written for children to read. We, as adult readers, are solicited to identify as a child. What happens, I ask, when we do so? What is it that we are we being encouraged to identify with? Tracing the figure of the child reader through debates about difficulty, high and low culture, maturity and infantilism, in criticism and psychoanalysis, I suggest that this child reader is, crucially, an overdetermined figure. Modernism reminds us of a vestigial child in us all, but this is not an exclusionary regression imposed upon an implicitly inadequate reader by the highbrow text. Neither is this simply a fantasy of naïve consolation (the child as pure identification). The child reader, I argue, opens up the vexed psychic life of reading modernism.

Funding

AHRC - Doctoral Funding Queen Mary University of London

History

Publication status

  • Published

File Version

  • Accepted version

Journal

Textual Practice

ISSN

0950-236X

Publisher

Taylor & Francis

Issue

7

Volume

31

Page range

1435-1457

Department affiliated with

  • English Publications

Research groups affiliated with

  • Centre for Modernist Studies Publications

Full text available

  • Yes

Peer reviewed?

  • Yes

Legacy Posted Date

2017-05-22

First Open Access (FOA) Date

2018-05-08

First Compliant Deposit (FCD) Date

2017-05-22

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