National Reading Summit Report

On Friday I had the honour of speaking at the TD National Reading Summit, a conference organized by the Reading Coalition, designed to initiate the development of a national reading policy. It was an amazing event, humbling in so many ways. For one, it was fantastic to see good intentions combine so successfully with drive, talent, and ambition to create such a thoughtful event. This was not a passive affair, but one in which a great deal of debate, discussion, and sharing of knowledge went on, all well-recorded and with a clear eye on defining and meeting achievable goals.

The day began with Canadian sci-fi author Cory Doctorow, a careful thinker fascinated by our future and how the present technology culture will inform it. He gave an absolutely fascinating discussion on issues pertaining to copyright, which have rapidly become altered by a trend toward the licensing of material rather than purchasing. E-books, for example, are not owned once purchased but only licensed, which means their use is highly restricted and subject often to the whims of the licensee. The recent overnight deletion of Orwell’s 1984 from idle kindles, without the permission of users, acting as one stunning example of how different the world has become. It is impossible to imagine a similar event occurring with a bookseller and a newly purchased hardcover. Mr. Doctorow made a number of novel and intriguing points regarding the power of copyright to promote and protect the sharing of media and stories, while also protecting the author from theft and distortion. Part of his argument on the important role of copying for creativity, can be found in this article in Locus Magazine. Mr. Doctorow also practices what he preaches, and you can download many of his books for free from his site.

My own session was shared with Patsy Aldana and Jane Pyper. Ms. Aldana spoke of her work with the International Board on Books for Young People (IBBY), an organization that brings books to children during times of trauma, brought on by war or national disaster, for example. Her description of a volunteer reading to shell-shocked children in shelters in Lebanon, as bombs fell all around, was heart-breaking, incredibly humbling, and only one of many similar examples of the incredible work done by this organization all around the world. IBBY relies primarily on volunteers, and the contributions of donors. You can become a member of the organization for as little as $10.

Jane Pyper is the City Librarian in charge of the Toronto Public Library, the world’s busiest urban public library system. I was raised in libraries, and recall with great fondness the trips my family used to take to the library on every Saturday. I loved everything about that place, and knew every inch of it. Each visit would end with me reluctant to leave, but thrilled with the stack of books I could barely carry out on my own. Ms. Pyper spoke about the concrete things that needed to be considered in order to create a reading society in Canada. Her most important point, I think, was to stress that in the context of promoting literacy, we cannot afford to indulge elitist beliefs of good and bad reading. All reading is good reading, be it a novel, choose-your-own-adventure, graphic novel, comic-book, blog, magazine, or fact-book.

Thomas King, the Canadian author, entertained us all during lunch, with a demonstration of his considerable storytelling skill. He explained, in his inimitable fashion, how his path to becoming a writer was merely an accident; seeking refuge from bullies in a library put him on this path. One can only imagine how different world would be if that building he sought out had turned out to be a bakery.

Announcement: Twice-a-week Posting

Dear Readers,

We thank the people who took part in our poll on the preferred frequency of posting in OnFiction. The results were that 11 people thought we should continue posting three times a week, 13 thought we should post twice a week, 4 people thought we should post once a week, and 8 had no preference.

We started to consider our frequency of posting when a friend told us there was too much to read and think about. We were also starting to realize, ourselves, there were periods when we could not easily keep up with posting three times a week.

With these considerations, therefore, we have decided to reduce our rate of posting to twice a week: Mondays and Thursdays. We apologize to those who liked the three-times-a-week posting, but we hope this new schedule works adequately for most people.

Thank you all very much for your support of OnFiction.

Gratefully, The Editors

Science Fiction: I, Robot

Science fiction emerged nearly 200 years ago. The novel generally recognized as its first fully realized work was Frankenstein, or The new Prometheus, by Mary Shelley. It's about an idealistic scientist, Victor Frankenstein, who constructs and brings to life an artificial man.

Mary Shelley came from a distinguished family and lived in a distinguished circle. She was the daughter of the famous feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and the social-reformer and novelist William Godwin. She wrote Frankenstein at the age of 18, not long after she had eloped with Percy Bysshe Shelley, the poet, while the two of them were staying in Switzerland with Lord Byron.

Since then, of course, science fiction has thrived, and although often denigrated as mere genre fiction, it has included some fine and thoughtful novels and short stories. Among these is Isaac Asimov's I, Robot. Like Frankenstein before it, and like all the best science fiction, Asimov's novel offers a way of thinking about what it is to be human.

Alex Proyas's 2004 film I, Robot, does a pretty good job in living up to the reputation of the novel that inspired it. It features Asimov's three famous Laws of Robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

But the film has a new plot, which takes up the theme of Shelley's Frankenstein: what happens if human science and human design have effects that turn to be not quite as designed? The film features the very appealing Will Smith as a detective assigned to find out why the benign father of robotics has been killed, apparently by one of the robots that he designed to embody the three laws. Is there something wrong with the laws? Or was it a malfunction? Or did a robot start to become all too human?

The film, I, Robot, has not achieved the cult success of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, but it's still one of the best science fiction films I know. You can read a longer review of it in our archive of Film Reviews which you can reach by clicking here. I would give the film four stars on a five-star scale.

Isaac Asimov (1950). I, Robot. New York: Doubleday.

Ridley Scott (1982). (director). Blade runner. (film, USA).

Mary Shelley (1818). Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. London: Lackington et al.

Rasas and Self-modifying Feelings

Among the most thought-provoking accounts of how emotions are important in literary reading is David Miall and Donald Kuiken's (2002) theory of self-modifying feelings. David has recently supplemented this account in his chapter in Directions in Empirical Literary Studies (2008).

Miall and Kuiken propose that self-modifying feelings can occur when two elements come together to produce “metaphors of personal identification that modify self understanding” (p. 221). One element is the literariness of a text, for instance in its defamiliarizing qualities. The other element is personal, for instance in a remembered emotion evoked in the course of reading. Just as in a conventional metaphor, one thing is, or can become, something else, so, in metaphorical identification, one emotion can become another, or can be experienced in a new way. They say that in literary reading:

Remembered feeling ... does not remain merely replicative; what began as remembered feeling may become fresh feeling. Either the original feeling is modified, or limitations of the original feeling are shown in such a way that a fresh feeling is created in its place. In several previous studies, we have provided evidence of the modifying power of feeling, in particular showing how aesthetic feelings, i.e., moments of defamiliarization in response to foregrounding, instigate an affectively guided search for alternative interpretations that, in turn, shape subsequent understanding (p. 229).

I have, for some time, thought of Miall and Kuiken's theory as a version of the ancient Indian theory of rasas (Gnoli, 1968). Rasas are literary emotions, experienced in reading literature or when watching a drama or hearing poetry. In his (2008) chapter Miall also makes this connection. He points out that, in the Indian idea, rasa has a timeless quality. It is an idea of an emotion as experienced by many people across many circumstances.

One of the accomplishments of literary reading is to locate emotions in a specific place and time, by means of the context of a story. In a particular story an emotional event is attended to by the reader because it has been foregrounded by the writer, and because of the foregrounding it can elicit a particular memory of an emotion in the reader, and this may contrast with the timeless quality of its corresponding rasa. In his 2008 chapter David says this:

… a rasa is also considered as separate from everyday emotion, being an emotion that is experienced only in the context of art (Gnoli, 1968). However, when experienced it is felt to be real in a way that makes ordinary life seem illusory, thus rasa does not involve suspension of disbelief so much as suspension of what we take to be reality (p. 100).

In the experiences of literary art, conjunctions can arise between (on the one hand) the specifics of a story and of a reader's memory, and (on the other hand) the timeless qualities an emotion. It is perhaps, David suggests, in conjunctions of this kind that self-modifying processes may begin to unfold.

R. Gnoli (1968). The aesthetic experience according to Abhinavagupta. Varanasi: Chowkhamba Sanskrit Series Office.

David Miall (2008). Foregrounding and feeling in narrative. In S. Zyngier, M. Bortolussi, A. Chesnokova & J. Auracher (Eds.), Directions in empirical literary studies: In honor of Willie van Peer (pp. 89-102). Amsterdam: Benjamins.

David Miall & Donald Kuiken (2002). A feeling for fiction: Becoming what we behold. Poetics, 30, 221-241.