human psychology: Seneca the philosopher-playwright, Montaigne the essayist, Wordsworth the poet and George Eliot the novelist. As such, this book demonstrates how different forms can create different – and yet analogous – spaces in which to do existential thinking.
The four authors were selected due to the strong links between them: Montaigne is a reader of Seneca, Wordsworth is a reader of Seneca and George Eliot is a reader of Wordsworth as well as the Senecan-influenced Spinoza. Furthermore, these four authors have had strong influence upon the future that came after them, with particular relation to what might now be called (albeit perhaps too reductively) mental health and well-being. There are well-established links between Seneca and modern psychological techniques for effecting calm (outlined in Chapter 1). Montaigne’s Essays offer a vital model of personal and practical psychology, an individualistic experiment born out of his reading of Stoicism. Wordsworth became established for future generations as the archetypal ‘healing poet’, and the work of George Eliot, I will argue, had a significant role within the intellectual climate that helped found the discipline of psychology itself.
Chapters 5, 6 and 7 set out the results of three practical reading experiments. These studies were designed to test the theoretical and literary work that sits alongside them in ways that would not generally be accommodated by a traditional piece of literary scholarship. They are exploratory attempts at multidisciplinary thinking and try, in some way, to bridge the gap between the arts and sciences, between theory and practice, and between private concerns and public health. The experimental work of this book is indebted to research carried out by the Centre for Research into Reading, Literature and Society (CRILS) at the University of Liverpool. In particular, research into the impact of the Reader Organisation’s shared reading model on mental health and well-being.
My methodology is rooted in the scholarly tradition of practical criticism. This is a form of literary study which is grounded in the attentive close analysis of primary texts, rather than a reliance on works of secondary criticism. It is a methodology which was first developed by I. A. Richards in his seminal work of 1929, Practical Criticism, in which he set out the results of a reading experiment which sought to demonstrate some of the limitations of methods of literary study which depend too heavily on the crutches of historical or theoretical context, at the expense of the actual words on the page. This approach is in line with what in the social sciences is now known as Grounded Theory, involving the bottom-up gathering and analysis of data, working inductively rather than being driven from above by the framework of a deductive hypothesis.1
I am concerned with the impact of literary texts on real lives and it was important therefore to select a methodology that would allow me to forge a direct connection to the literature being analysed and to get closer to the real, first-hand experience of serious reading. The chosen methodology also helped to establish a sense of continuity across the two distinct parts of this book – the theoretical and the practical – as it placed me, within my own terms, in the same testing position as the experimental participants of Chapters 5, 6 and 7: as a reader and struggling human, tasked with responding directly to a series of primary texts, without the assistance of external critical apparatus.
While certain critical approaches and theories have a tendency to make literature feel prohibitively distant and disconnected from the real and present struggles of individual modern life, the intention here has been to develop forms of interdisciplinary thinking and experimental design which firmly reconnect actual readers with texts and which demonstrate how literature might be of aid to human beings in those very struggles.
In her well-received monograph The Limits of Critique, Rita Felski offers a theoretical argument against the dominance of any one theoretical model of reading: in particular, critique based on the hermeneutics of suspicion. She makes the case for the encouragement of what she calls ‘post-critical reading’ in which ‘the reader’ is not an abstract concept as in reader-response theory, but a specific autonomous individual capable of a range of responses besides the trained default of intelligent suspicion:
We need ways of thinking about individual readers that does not flatten and reduce them, that grasps their idiosyncrasy as well as their importance. Texts cannot influence the world by themselves, but only via the intercession of those who read them, digest them, reflect on them, rail against them, use them as points of orientation, and pass them on.2
Such individual readers should not be restricted to those trained within the professionalised confines of a single approach, but should be allowed to offer from within themselves, Felski argues, riskily generous, personal and imaginative responses that arise prior to formalization:
The import of a text is not exhausted by what it reveals or conceals about the social conditions that surround it. Rather, it is also a matter of what it sets alight in the reader – what kind of emotion it elicits, what changes of perception it prompts, what bonds and attachments it calls into being. One consequence of this line of thought is a perspective less dismissive of lay experiences of reading (which also precede and sustain professional criticism).3
It was with this aim of investigating lay reading that the memory of I. A. Richards is evoked in this book, and the techniques that he first introduced into English Literature scholarship are put to service.
If this book is to some degree an alternative to literary studies as conventionally carried out within the academy, it is also offered as a challenge by literature and literary study to certain therapeutic prescriptions adopted within the field of psychology. By separating itself off from the means through which humans have traditionally thought about and found ways of dealing with the psychological – whether that is art, literature, philosophy or religion – there is the risk that the discipline of psychology cannot help but become narrowed and diminished into popular instrumental programmes that offer up second-order solutions to problems that they cannot fully understand. As Philip Rieff writes in The Triumph of the Therapeutic, ‘Scientific regression may occur in any discipline that does not insist upon mastery of its own historical development. A social science that refuses to remember its founders will not realise when it is being silly or repetitious.’4
Freud recognised the important role that literature played as a holding ground for the psychological, before psychology came into existence as a distinct concept or discipline: ‘The poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious; what I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.’5 The psychoanalyst Adam Phillips claims in the introduction to his new edition of Freud’s collected works that ‘it would not be overstating the case to say that, for Freud, reading has been the modern equivalent of what, beginning in the eighteenth century, had been called the experience of the sublime. To write and to read was to be close to the source of something, close to the source of the most important something.’6 Where in most contexts that ‘something’ may seem all too vague, in literature it becomes a powerful inner drive towards meaning in the secular age.
Notes
1Barney G. Glaser, and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (New Brunswick, NJ: Aldine, 1967).
2Rita Felski, The Limits of Critique (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 171–72; hereafter cited as ‘Felski’.
3Ibid.,
