Insomniac's blog

A cure for insomnia? Just kidding. I think literary reading is reading for content as well as pleasure. While literary reading may be considered "scholarly", I think literary reading is something that people do for different reasons, including for school. Reading, for some, is the pleasure of discovery...a new place, a new idea, something that may be encountered outside of the normal daily environment. I'm not sure what literary reading is for me. Perhaps a combination of all of those things.
One of the areas in high school that always irritated me is that assigned literature was never really explained. Sure, the concepts, plot, characters, and such were often explained in detail, but the reasons for reading the literature were never explained. Why read Shakespeare? What significance does Lord Byron have on my life? Sure, Mark Twain is entertaining, but why does he write his dialogues like that? Many of these "why" questions can be answered by applying other educational disciplines into literature. For example, if I, as a teacher, were to assign The Flivver King by Upton Sinclair, it would probably not make much sense to pupils if they did not understand the history of Henry Ford and the Ford Motor Company. When I become a teacher that is what I want to do, combine literature with history in order to generate a larger picture for pupils. Literature is fantastic in that it encompasses not only various literary genres but that it also exposes people to a wide range of topics including history, art, psychology, and so forth.
So what is Literary Reading? I am not certain if I know the answer to that. Hopefully, by the end of the term I will have a better understanding of literary reading.