Tidskrift för lärarutbildning och forskning 4-02/1-03

Greeting to the Conference
feelings, emotions, associations that the individual
reader brings to the text.
When the reader’s attention is focused mainly
on the cognitive aspects of their consciousness,
on the abstract ideas to be carried away after the
reading, I term the reading mainly efferent. This
seems to be comparable to investigation.
When the reader’s attention is mainly on
the sensations and feelings called up during
the reading, I term the reading mainly aesthetic.
Note that I say mainly, to accommodate
both foreground perceptions, and the minor
background.
It seems to me that the Swedish title can take
care of both of these aspects. Of course, it is
important to insist that always at the same time
there is a blending of the two aspects, with one
or the other predominating. There is a continuum
of possible readings with proportions of
attention to one or the other.
The reader’s purpose, unconscious or conscious,
leads to more moments of attention to
one or the other, and determines the efferent or
aesthetic character of the total reading event.
While I was writing the book, it had the
tentative title, Literature as Human Relations.
This reflected the fact that I was motivated by
my belief that democracy is a way of life. The
title, Literature as Experience seemed to indicate
that the aesthetic literary experience can be the
basis for developing the ability to put ourselves
democratically into the place of others and to
imagine critically the human consequences of
actions. The literary or more broadly, aesthetic
experience is a way to develop the democratic
respect and sharing of other people’s feelings
and beliefs.
Unfortunately, experience is ambiguous. It
is both a verb and a noun in English. As a verb,
it points to what I want to explain, the literary
work as a process of undergoing an event, or
the recollection of that event as an organized
unit. As a noun, it suggests precisely what I am
attacking – that the work is a thing, an entity,
like an already-existent kernel to be dug out
of a text. The book is an argument for literary
reading as an undergoing, a living-through,
an erlebnis.
Then I thought of Literature as Discovery.
Again this presented problems. It suggests
the quest for some entity, something that you
believe already exists –like Columbus believing
there was land, and discovering America. When
the reader starts to look at the text, there is
indeed an assumption that it is a text a set
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