My name is Ellika Burma and this is Erika Lombards, and we are respectively the principal investigator, as it's called,
and the postdoctoral research assistant on this project, broad title, Postcolonial Writers Make Worlds.
But this particular reading series we all involved in is Great Writers Inspire at Home.
So this the series, the the seminars that we're all involved in, the workshops,
explore how books come to us and how we as readers come to books, and it's those pathways that we're particularly interested in.
These are not theorised pathways necessarily. And they're also not necessarily critical pathways, their pathways involving that immersion in a book,
immersion in a in a in a poem or in a story or in a novel that we have as readers.
And what this then raises is a question of being addressed, how we are addressed by books, some people might say by texts,
but that's a word that we we're a little bit uncertain about in this project, how books and poems call to us and how they tell our stories or not,
which is relevant to the fact of the the writers, the British writers,
Asian and black British writers that we have invited to participate in the project, how books current today available to us tell our stories or not.
And if they don't tell our stories, how then do they appeal to us?
Where do we identify? And this then relates to a further question, as I've already anticipated, of identity,
how our identities are supported, echoed, confirmed, or in fact negated in the books that we turn to read.
And there's a particular emphasis on that verb turn in that in that question.
It's not simply a question of the books we read,
but the books we actually turn towards to read the books we feel called by the books that relate to us in some way.
And just to pick up two instances of writers who have addressed this question of calling and of identifying with a story,
a book, a text, a poem or not feeling negated.
Here are two examples. This is Edouard Loui, who's a French writer, and he wrote this.
He was he's talking about his reminiscing in a piece in The Guardian in February.
He's reminiscing about a conversation with a taxi driver in which he announced that he was a writer and the taxi drivers response to him,
which resonated with his own experience, his own relationship and his family's relationship with literature, with books.
Literature was not something we paid any attention to.
Quite the opposite. On television, we would see that the literary prises went mostly to books that did not speak of us.
And in any case, like the taxi driver, we were aware that prise or no prise books in general took no interest in our lives.
My mother would say it over and over us, the little folks.
No one is interested in us.
It was the feeling of being invisible in the eyes of other people that drove her to vote for Marine Le Pen, as did most of my family.
My mother would say she's the only one who talks about us.
So you see how that that quotation raises this question of the books that talk to us,
that tell our stories, that have an interest in the little folks and the and the books that don't.
And Erica has some fascinating stats in a moment to share with you about that.
Here is the other example from a writer participating writer on this in this project,
Aminatta Forna, in which she she she talks about taking back stories and reversing the gaze.
So she talks about owning stories where there aren't stories that call to us.
What then do we do as writers? How do we adjust the balance?
And she says the power of the story lies in the hands of the storyteller.
To see oneself only ever reflected to through the eyes of another is to view the self through distorting lens.
This is the shared experience of all those whose place in history has been marginalised as she goes on to quote someone called Cornelius Eady,
who's the father of Cave Covais Khanum, a writer centre with a focus on African-American writing,
and he said with startling foresight, according to her.
Right now, as we speak, this is, by the way, Eddie was speaking in November last year as Trump had been elected.
Right now, as we speak uptown,
there are people in a building who are trying to write a narrative about who we are and who we are supposed to be and what to do about us.
When you lose that story or you allow that narrative to be taken from you.
Bad things happen. It's our job and our duty to make sure we get to write our own story, the fullness of who we are in our own language,
and what that project, what this project then would contribute to that observation is the making sure we also get to read our own stories.
Right. And how we identify and this is as important, how we identify what those stories are,
how we reach those stories out there, and how we feel drawn in by those stories.
What is it about those stories that lets us in? So just a few words on on the post-colonial, because that is a word that is mentioned in our blurb,
postcolonial writing is conventionally seen as relaying stories from the periphery, the third world, the global south.
But we would want to add to those nominated spaces there that Britain, too, can be perceived as a post-colonial space.
And that's one of the the questions, the explorations of all of these books that we're reading in this project.
And with the emphasis on reading and readers, how do we then, as readers located in Britain,
receive these stories, how we called buy them, how do they call us and how do we identify in relation to them?
So we are fascinated to hear from those who have read these books.
And we know that different groups have read different books. We we are very curious about how you felt positioned by the book.
Did you feel positioned as a British reader? Did you feel positioned as an ordinary reader?
Did you feel positioned as a literary reader? Did you feel yourself to be British in the ways in which the the book spoke to you, addressed you,
or did you feel that you were reminded of aspects of your heritage for those of you who have backgrounds from elsewhere?
So the accent throughout, and I'm sure we will repeat this throughout all the conversations will have the accent
is on these verbs and it's very much on doing reading is doing reading as an activity,
as an act. The accent on the verbs, locate, identify, call.
I've used all of them in what I've already said. The accent then is not so much on representation, on speaking on behalf of or witnessing,
which is still very much the the focus or the perceived focus in postcolonial writing and reading.
So we're not that interested in images that stand for something else, experiences of difference or strangeness.
We're much more interested in involvement in immersion through reading, so interested in moving beyond code.
And in my bit after the break, I'll say a little bit more about that beyond code.
How do we get there? But just to put it in a nutshell for now and then I'll hand over to Erica.
We're interested in the novel, a poem or poem as an act of communication, not as standing for something else.
So the experience of reading becomes primary. And for those of you who are at all familiar with Jacobsen's six linguistic functions,
any any communication kind of groups itself or concentrates around,
according to Jacobsson, one of those functions with poetic writing, literary writing,
grouping here, according to Jacobsson, the poetic function of language.
What we're really keen to do in this project, and I certainly am very intrigued by, is whether we can see the literary text, the book, the novel,
the story, the poem as involving all of these functions at once in an unfolding and dynamic process, speaking to context, to information,
speaking to the sender, the writers particular stance, emotions,
speaking to your responses as readers will receive it receive is speaking also to the nature of the language,
the channel, the the the metaphors or similes or what have you that you might be interested in.
And then also, of course, to code. That is that is Jakobson in a very, very tiny nutshell.
And I'll say a little bit more about that later. But what what we're really keen to do is to stretch that that diagram out,
to see to see the writing and our reading of this writing as an act of communication unfolding in time, a bit like music.
I want to talk about how books come to us,
and I want us to think about what happens to books before they end up in our
hands and how this can affect both what we read and our experiences of reading.
So when most of us walk into a bookshop and we pick a book off the shelf, we don't necessarily think about what it takes to get it there.
Maybe we have an idea of a writer toiling away in solitude in a quiet room with a quill pen or an old timey typewriter.
And we have a kind of a montage in our heads of a thick manuscript envelope being sent of rejection letters until
eventually there's acceptance in the meet sort of jump cuts to a book on the shelf or a book launch or something like that.
It's a bit more complicated than that.
This is a diagram by Claire Squires and Ray Murray that I'm not going to go into a lot of detail on because it's complicated.
This is what is called a communications circuit,
and it tells us about the different stages that a book needs to go through before it gets to the reader.
So to simplify things, we have an author who in the UK usually needs to convince a literary agent that they write well enough.
The literary agent takes on the author and then tries to sell the manuscript to the publisher.
The publisher prepares the manuscript for publication,
so typeset that edits it does a cover design in consultation with marketing people and sales people,
and then printing companies make the book, which is then sold to various kinds of booksellers, wholesalers and then retailers.
That's Waterstones or that sort of bookstore.
And then that's where we come in as readers and buyers of books, because books are commodities and the book industry is fuelled by sales.
At every stage of a book's life, there are decisions being made about what is likely to bring in the most profit.
Profit can come in different forms. The main one is economics, so that's book sales, that's money.
But there's also symbolic profits and that's one's reputation in relation to the competition.
That's things like literary prises, good reviews that can also translate into economic profit.
So if you win, the book is often a huge spike in your sales, but that's not necessarily the case.
Profit potential has everything to do with the reader.
But I want to draw a distinction here between the real people who buy or borrow and read books and the
readers and book buyers that publishers have in mind when they're making their publishing decisions.
There's an important difference between the two, and I'm going to talk more about that.
But what's important here is that it's the publishers sense of the market that influences
both what they choose to publish and how they present that book to the market.
And I should add here that booksellers have a lot of influence in this regard as well,
because they're the ones who are buying from the publishers to sell to to readers.
So who are the publishers and who are they publishing for?
This seems like a useful question to ask.
It may not surprise you that in Britain, in the publishing industry, it's has been and continues to be overwhelmingly white in composition,
especially at editorial levels, the people who are choosing which books to take on and how to kind of work with the text itself.
Writing The Future, which is a 2015 report that's based on hundreds of interviews with publishing industry insiders and authors,
suggests that these predominantly white publishers are concentrating on a market that comprises what they called people like us.
And by people like us, they mean white people, female people who are aged between thirty five and fifty five.
So, again, going back to Aminatta Forna, this is something that she says,
she says there is an orthodoxy whereby the presumed reader is totally monocultural, white middle England.
We know from looking at census data that this is a very outdated view.
I think sometimes a paradigm gets created and everyone starts to subscribe to it.
So there's no doubt that there is a market that fits this demographic profile.
But this is not the only market and in the future, with the demographics of Britain changing,
there's a good chance that this idea of the market is going to be increasingly obsolete.
But when economic times are tough and they have been tough for the last decade, publishers tend to make more conservative decisions.
They're more likely to do what they know works for a market that they know rather than taking a risk on something different.
And this has meant that writing by black, Asian and minority ethnic authors in the U.K. has been consistently under represented.
The Writing in the Future report suggests that things have actually gotten worse in the last 10 years.
Statistics in the bookseller show that out of thousands of books published last year in twenty sixteen,
fewer than one hundred were by non-white British authors, which is quite a shocking statistic.
I think this narrowing of scope, this kind of whitewashing perhaps is something that we see reflected in school curriculums as well.
But it's not just a case of underrepresentation. It's also, to some extent, a case of misrepresentation, according to writing in the future.
That same report, and I quote, The best chance of publication for a black Asian or minority ethnic novelist is to write
literary fiction that conforms to a stereotypical view of black or Asian communities.
Writers are advised by agents and editors to make their manuscripts marketable in this country by upping the salary count,
dealing with gang culture or some other image that conforms to white preconceptions.
In addition, the same report found that a majority of black Asian minority ethnic novelists reported that their ethnicity
was the main focus of their publisher's publicity campaign rather than any more universal aspect of the book.
So effectively, if you are a new black British writer at the moment, there's a kind of pressure on you, whether implicit or explicit,
not only to write a certain kind of book that maybe plays into existing cultural or racial stereotypes,
but also to allow these aspects of your identity to be the most prominent thing associated with you and your writing.
At worst, this potentially turns writers and books into kind of the objects of anthropological study, no longer crafters of words and worlds.
I think it's important to note here that publishers are not necessarily trying to please real people,
but they may be operating out of their own narrow expectations. So this is a presumed market.
These are imagined readers. And of course,
even those who might count as part of the white female market won't necessarily share the preferences or prejudices that publishers might be assuming.
And I also want to be clear that their writers at work who subvert these kinds of expectations in their writing or who toy with them in exciting ways.
But let's think about the implications of this situation for readers.
When a British writer or what he or she writes or writes about is presented in this way,
what might it mean for why treat his experiences of this book or the senses of themselves in relation to it?
And what might it mean for black, Asian and minority ethnic readers experiences of this book or their sense of themselves?
These are the questions I want us to have in the back of our minds as we move on to something more practical, which is Butkovitz and I think this is.
Kind of a way in which a lot of these ideas are really clearly illustrated, so we're all familiar with the kind of shorthand language of book covers,
and that's how publishers and marketers try to entice us to buy or to read a book and how they
communicate what what is what we can expect when we read it to know if it's our kind of thing.
So, um, I'd like to ask the audience what what do you expect when you see a book that looks like this?
Anyone, anyone? Fifty Shades of Grey.
If you can think about actually standing on this hill, I think you'd be falling for it.
See how long it is. It's actually been Photoshopped. Yeah, definitely something kind of like a 50 Shades of Grey rip off.
Maybe this is a case of a couple of publishers seeing something that worked and thinking, let's get on that bandwagon.
That's how things like vampire romance novel becomes a genre.
Right. Um, OK. So. The funny thing is that covers a very conventional two.
This is a really interesting subgenre of back of women looking out at things at the top.
You're going to see this everywhere. Now, from now on, it's I've ruined pretty much 70 percent of covers of literary literary fiction.
And the one at the bottom is using the exact same image. That image comes up countless times and people's book covers,
which is unfortunate for the author who thinks they're presenting something that's kind of new and original.
But it's a moody picture. So, yeah, OK, so.
The question I want to ask now is what happens when the genre, the genre of a book becomes an entire cultural or religious identity?
Again, you can see a double image there and then what happens when a whole continent becomes a genre so that any
book about Africa necessarily needs to have a kind of Lion King acacia sunset thing going on on the cover,
no matter how different the actual books are within that group.
So now this is this is a question I to ask is,
does this look like does this look like a book that includes the author's experiences of living in a caravan in Scotland?
So one of the things we find with lots of fauna and.
To be fair, OK, I grew up in Sierra Leone and in Scotland, what we find is that she's consistently positioned as African in.
Kind of the way that she's presented in the U.K. market, so let's look at this is Jordan, Gosia, a teacher's books, Purple Hibiscus and half votes.
And this is in itself a kind of a fun subgenre, which is sort of blurry black woman's face with some kind of smeared colour somewhere.
Um, now let's look at the memory of love.
I mean, it's clearly in the same genre, right.
Of of book covers. So Forna is being positioned as being like a teacher.
I'm. Just a fun fact is that here's Lawrence Hill's book, Someone Knows My Name, which uses the exact same picture.
It's doing the same thing. And it also won the Commonwealth writers prise.
So the memory of loved it as well. Um. OK, so now I want to sort of zip back to what we might think of as literary fiction in Britain.
Can can you tell me the kinds of words you might use to to talk about these covers?
What are the connotations that you'd have? Anyway, nostalgia.
Tasteful, melancholy. Pardon me, Blake, but also bleached, bleached out, especially on the right.
Pretty predictable. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Is that that you just you just get that from the cover. It just screams overrated anything.
I see there's there's a back story to the of your going on here, but you're telling the same old story, I'm sure.
Well, let's let's think of that in comparison to these ones.
Joe, also by British writers, what are some of the words you use to describe these?
An exotic. Powerful.
Let's just let's go back to. I mean, that's quite the there are some orange and ridiculous.
I like a parent or something, is that right?
Childlike appeal. I'm seeing some nuns in the.
Infantilized, do you think that's infantilizing what's on the book or infantilizing the.
Person who's supposed to buy is. When you do, the Clintons think this is the right team and that's why you.
The other. So this one is for male Greenup's, I don't know if we're getting this,
we should probably give you a mike to catch this, but I thought it was quite male.
OK, can you can you say that again into the microphone, sorry, just so that we can record it,
otherwise you're going to be sort of faint voices that are used is used in both of those books is quite a male Sundt,
it seems to me, because it's got seraphs the Atonement particular.
It's all it's all lines and calls. So, yeah, I mean, I don't find those appealing, whereas I do find the other books that's much more exotic,
much more intriguing would be much more likely to pick those off the shelf and to read.
And of course, he does have a very large McKewon, has a very large male readership.
He's a top writer for female readers. Yeah, yeah.
Well, you said. Is not white men actually said white women, white women.
But what women the publishing industry is the publishing industry. Well, actually, we don't have statistics for the U.K., but in the US at least,
editors and publishers, I think it's like seventy nine percent of women.
And I think but I think anecdotally it's quite similar in.
The U.K., although that is still a kind of a boys club involved, but but there's also a question of these female,
let's assume female editors and publishers presenting mckewon in this case in a certain way to a presumed audience,
is that there's a structure of expectations that's being played, too.
And there's also I mean, it's also difficult in all of these images assessing chicken and egg.
You know, what comes first. The perceptions and those perceptions are enhanced and supported, by the way, in which the books are presented.
And then those that in turn, of course, shapes the. Yeah, it's a feed.
It's a feedback loop.
So so that's why we know what a Fifty Shades of Grey look like book cover is, because we've come to associate that with certain kinds of books.
So we've kind of been, you know, conditioned in a way as well.
OK, so now I want to move across to three different covers of the same book,
and I'd love for people to tell me what you think, what what's going on in these three covers.
If you're not familiar with Brick Lane, it's a Booker Prise winning novel.
Um, it largely takes place in London, I think is something that I just throw out there as you look at these covers.
It's pretty much. Can we have a Michael?
It's very much a woman's story, obviously, the the one on the far right, which is based on the film,
which I haven't seen of it, and then the middle one is clearly, again, the idea of women together supporting each other.
But the the one on the left, I think, looks like kind of patchwork quilt.
So that, again, is a kind of women's activity.
So it is clear that it is meant to appeal to your sense perhaps of the repressed Bangladeshi, I think is Bangladeshi that right woman?
And I think that kind of limits its readership when you if you go into a shop to buy that,
that does very much look like a book that's designed to appeal to women who need some kind of solace in female company.
Hmm. Yeah, I think there is definitely a gendered aspect to this one on the left is more.
I'm sorry, just can you I'm waiting for the man he's intimidating you to say that the one on
the left feels more useful and accessible to a wider market than the two neutrals.
So it's sort of more of my background, more gender neutral for me, basically sort of playing on the subject.
Yeah, I think I'd agree with that. Actually, that's the hard cover. I think it's the double day version.
It might interest you to know that the one on the left is actually the British hardcover.
And these are the two are by Scribner, which is based in New York.
I don't know if that effect was published. Yes, that's the first one.
Yeah. Yeah. And then, yeah, I want to talk about this, this movie tie in addition a little bit, because does that does it scream London at you at all?
I mean, I would think that this is about a kind of a.
A woman in a rural setting, maybe kind of again, is that idea of female companionship like and this kind of wistful,
I don't know, slightly, slightly, sort of, you know, over the shoulder. Look, I can tell you for a fact that they made the background more orange.
Because one of the things in preparing for this presentation,
I looked at a lot of different book covers and one of the things I noticed was that you pretty much don't get an Indian book that's blue.
Your colour palette is sort of purple, yellow, orange, red.
And it needs to be that because otherwise people aren't going to know that it's it's to do with the subcontinent.
You know, African books are a bit harsher.
You might get some, like luminesce, sort of like angry colours.
And mainly it's just sort of sunset your sunset palette and some harsh black silhouettes or something like that.
So, yeah, I think is that yeah, that's what I have.
But I just want to. Go back to this kind of contrast that we have.
And for us to bear that in mind the next time we're looking on a bookshelf, Tesser.
I was also struck by how many faces from the front are on the covers of very beautiful women,
and so in one way that makes it seem that the view of women looking away is actually quite liberating because there's not going to be an
unattractive woman if there's a woman's face on the front of the book and often from the so-called minority in terms of British culture,
it's usually going to be a very attractive, beautiful, glamorous picture.
And I think that often happens with the authors as well.
Like many of the authors we're discussing on this project, and I know you're not discussing Zadie Smith,
but she's one who's never discussed without the very glamorous image of her.
And and so, you know, in one way, the books could appeal to women.
The one on the right is going with the kind of Bollywood glamorous South Asian beauty sort of thing.
And that happens to Adichie as well, I think.
Yeah, I think one of the things I also draw attention to is what's at stake in having the back of a woman's head rather than her face on a cover.
If you're aiming at female readers, say I'm.
My feeling is that it's it makes that woman into a screen onto which you can project yourself so you can imagine yourself into that character.
And these are pretty much, as far as I can tell, all or white women.
But then you don't get that with this because there's an underlying assumption that you can't imagine yourself
into this this point of view and maybe even you can't imagine yourself into this person's point of view.
Um. So I think that's something to bear in mind as well, how that how that.
You know, that becomes another person rather than a screen onto which you can or a kind of a way in, you know.
I think it's interesting how many of us, yeah, we saw.
Just when you think that there's only two or three that are actually confronting us.
Of these guys are talking about. Oh, that's interesting.
Yeah. I also I feel like the more minimal a book covers,
the more sort of subliminally reminds us of like Penguin Classics and kind of
the the tradition of rendering very respected books and very minimal covers.
So all of the cluttered ones are kind of kind of removing them from that show.
So maybe maybe not quite as serious. Yeah, definitely.
And the difference between those two great ones is that there's a lot of seriousness about those as opposed to the funny.
Yeah, kind of. Yeah, I think you're right.
I mean, look at crowded lines, this is not serious, is really crowded, and then there's a kind of a and again, busy, busy stuff happening there,
which is which is why I think the Monica Ali strikes us as being something that is more of maybe as you someone's age sort of gender neutral,
or it may be presented as a much more serious, serious book.
So, as promised, I'm just going to say a few words here without much assistance from the slides about how we come to books at a different level,
how books appeal to us as well as texts in this case, actually, as as as a script for reading, if you like, as a score for reading.
So the question here about I'm just going to put on a couple of key words under the heading of approaches to reading.
What I'm interested in talking about here is how books identify readers and how we as readers relate to or identify ourselves through books.
So this goes back to that point about the novel, the poem,
or indeed the play script as an act of communication and how we become involved in this act.
And that's what we're particularly focussed on here,
with the emphasis on US readers as full participants in the thinking process that any text puts into motion.
We're full participants along with the writers. The the writers generate the text, sure.
But we as readers put life into the text in the same way, if you like,
as a musician enlivens a score for music or indeed actors do with a play script.
So we have full participants in the in the thinking process at any text puts into motion.
And our thinking as we read finds its shape through the unfolding poem or novel as we
read and as we project ourselves imaginatively into the scenarios presented to us.
And for those of you who like a little bit of theory, a little bit of criticism,
I'm particularly identified here myself with Rita Belski, a literary scholar who, in the limits of Critique,
a book called The Limits of Critique, talks about literary engagement,
that is engagement over critique in ways that are very, very useful to how we approaching reading in this project.
In this book, The Limits of Critique, she distances herself from decoding and the hermeneutics of suspicion.
I can gloss that in a moment that my pages are stuck together.
That has become the default approach for literary reading really since the 1980s.
Hermeneutics of suspicion interpretation based on the idea that there is some secrets in the text that we need to unlock,
that we need to break open like sort of cracking open and not to get to the kernel.
And rather, Belski very helpfully wants to give acknowledgement as as do we on this project to the full
complexity of aesthetic experience that unfolds when we encounter a text or a book as readers.
Here's a quotation from Belski where she says, interpretation or reading is fundamentally a matter of mediation.
Translation what she also calls transduction. This is what allows books to move across geographic boundaries, across temporal boundaries,
cultural boundaries, as they are slotted into new and ever changing frames.
She writes. Because if you if you really think about it's quite remarkable that we are able to enter other worlds through our reading through books.
You know, it's something that's often said to key stage one, you know, young readers, you know, a whole new world opens to you through this book,
but it is actually something worth thinking about how and how that process of boundary crossing actually happens.
And this activity of slotting into new frames or immersion involvement in alternative thought worlds correlates with, for me,
very interestingly, with Jane Katz's thoughts on the sympathetic imagination, which he writes about in his book The Good Story,
which is actually based on dialogue that he carried out with a psychoanalyst who could see in this dialogue the identifications
that are stimulated by the sympathetic imagination allow us to project ourselves into other mental states rights.
So we we enter sympathetically into the mind world of the book and also of the characters.
He also writes, this is a quote from him with a very simple quote.
We live other lives from the inside. We're not just looking at, you know, these.
Others, these other characters, as we're represented on book covers, know we are living these these lives, these worlds from the inside,
in post-colonial contexts, including in Britain, often characterised by fraud,
forms of division, inequality, separation, borders crisscrossing one another.
This engagement is the sympathetic identification of bridging borders and translating difference can work in particularly effective and striking ways.
And that's what we really want to explore, where we have the the discussions with with the writers in the weeks ahead.
A very interesting question, which is for another time, but it is one that I'm hoping to pursue at some point, is whether these cross border IDs,
these sympathetic engagements happen more intensely or with a greater frisson of excitement in post-colonial environments.
But that is a very, very big question.
So reading, then, is no longer so much driven from the point of view of this project by the sense that the novel,
a poem is keeping something from us that demands decoding. So we can't we kind of not that interested in what this metaphor is telling us.
We want to move beyond code and think rather about reading as a process of a continually unfolding process of inference gathering.
This is why we're so interested in these recordings to so we constantly kind of taking it.
I mean, it's happening and it's sort of nano micro second way as we read, we constantly sort of taking taking on meanings,
rejecting some as not relevant to the story being constructed and accepting others.
But and I think this is a this is an important watchword to move beyond code in terms of our reading,
in terms of the teaching of literature is easier said than done.
Our training in literary criticism, and this applies also to those of you who are a level readers in the room, are training in literary criticism,
conditions us to approach a poem or a text through a particular framework or frameworks in quite a detached way,
as if the you know, the book, the text is out there. And and it's something that we need to approach precisely by untying it, by cracking it open.
So what we're keen to explore here is a much wider inference based model, which is temporally bound like music and really hard to capture,
but we are interested in in getting hold of this interplay of flow and containment at every point as we read our thoughts flowing onto the next word,
yet also shaped by that word as it passes and as it interacts with the other words in the sentence.
And here I reach to some fantastic linguists called Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson
would be very helpful to me in thinking my way through this this different approach.
They write that the address see if you remember the Jacobsen's model earlier,
the sort of the the the message the message receiver is involved in a continual balancing
of inferences concerning that act of communication that is involved in any book.
To put it very, very roughly. As the sentence unfolds on scrolls, meaning at once spreads out in the reader's mind and is channelled by it,
spreads out, channel spreads out, channelled as we process new elements as we read.
So all these elements are part of the communicative flow of of anything that we read, any bit of text,
and I would just like you to pause for us or to pause for a moment on this quotation.
I just read it and I would like you to observe as I read it,
you've already read it silently, visually as I read it, I try to observe what is happening.
For you, in your minds, in your perception, as you receive this sentence like a long legged fly upon the stream, his mind moves upon silence.
Which is. From Yates's late poem, The Long Legged Fly.
Like a long legged fly upon the stream, his mind moves upon silence.
Whether you know the poem or not, I wonder if people could just worry about the microphone,
if you could just sort of call out particular perceptions that come to you as you as you read those those two lines.
I mean, surprising about it is it's kind of the wrong where I have to read it normally, see how it is my response to the Cyclone Larry five.
So you start off being stopped and you're talking about you're actually forced to pay very close attention and follow
the sentence word by word as it's being read by the time you get any other responses as opposed to the business,
isn't it? So you can make two pages in a way that is a very precise photographic image.
So even in this case, I had to speed up the first sentence on the second and the parallels between the two to see how this is just treated.
So it forces you to focus you anything else?
I think I can thought about. I mean, the only thing that I can think to accept that is pretty normal.
I don't know, maybe five Al.
This heavy is. Thank you. Yes, and thank you for movement on.
The plan students removed from the site of the. Britney.
It's quite a trembling silence, isn't it? It's a it's a it's a silence held in tension because there's there's movement and it's stillness.
At the same time, the song, Like a Fly is still presumably on the surface of the of the stream.
But the stream is moving right before.
Yes, I know a great great in the silence is the constant right at the moment.
It the man in the street as the silence instead of being consciousness as a street interrupted by silence is the other way around it.
Silence is the street interrupted by something which is quiet or not even interrupted.
Maybe. Perhaps just visited or. Yes, visited. Possessed.
Immersed. Yes. Thanks for those those remarks, I think they've all been suggesting I'm really going to state the obvious now,
but I think, you know, it's worth doing. So we're reflecting on the very, very complicated process that is reading.
We are holding more than one thing in our mind at once when we read that right.
It's we move very, very rapidly from the Somali word, which would, in a sense,
we can disregard it's you know, it's right at the beginning and we could put it to one side.
And we have fly. We have surface. We have stream.
We have mined. We have we have stillness and movement together, dynamically together.
And for me, there's something very interesting, perhaps the most one of the most interesting words, because it's a directional word,
is the word upon in that in those two lines, because it's it's both this there's a signification of up being on the surface.
Right. But there's also a signification of being held to being suspended up.
Up. So.
That was, pardon the pun, just skimming the surface, but how do we then approach reading of central importance then for for us?
And we're going to keep exploring this as we go along, is that reading or interpretation is not something done to a poem, a novel, a text?
It's not an invasive or aggressive act at dismantling, unmasking, breaking down and unpicking instead comprehension and interpretation.
Reading is what happens in the course of as we're receiving the the book,
the text through the play of meanings as the text or the poem presents itself to the reader.
So reading then the readings that we're very interested in are readings that
don't attempt to extract some some latent some period meaning in the text,
some repressed message, some deeper interpretive code that lies behind the words on the page, the meanings seemingly on the surface,
a rather reading sets different currents of suggestion and implication running.
So quoting here from a cognitive theorist, Mary Crane, and this is my final bit of, if you like, I don't know, critique, I suppose, when reading.
Mary Crane writes, We do not need to add theory to our experience of the text, but rather register what the text itself is saying.
It's said act of communication that we are paying attention to. So our task is to follow our readings as we read.
Think about how we are receiving the text.