Ramona Tausz reviews On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Great Books, by Karen Swallow Prior, at The Federalist. [link fixed -ed.]
"Written for an audience unfamiliar with close reading or textual analysis, the book relies on what Leland Ryken’s foreword terms 'good old-fashioned example theory.' The characters in good books, Prior believes, offer readers 'vicarious practice in exercising virtue,' forming proper habits of thinking about right and wrong.
"It’s a useful approach—provided that Sidney [Philip Sidney in Defense of Poesy] was right about literature being chiefly for instructing. At any rate, Prior deftly demonstrates how this sort of exegesis ought to work."
No comments:
Post a Comment