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Reading "Great Books": Non Truth-Committed Discourse and Silly Novel Readers

2003; Oxford University Press; Volume: 39; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/fmls/39.1.1

1471-6860

Christopher Routledge,

Narrative Theory and Analysis

This article is concerned with the nature of literary discourse. Drawing on Searle's ideas, it argues that “literary” readers adopt a “non truth‐committed” approach which allows them to remain ambivalent to questions of truth or falsehood, and engage with the text on the basis of a more diverse set of criteria. It further suggests that while defining literature as a type of discourse (rather than a formal set of textual features) avoids the familiar ideological difficulties of choosing a canon, it also makes it possible to identify certain texts as more amenable to particular kinds of reading. In order to illustrate our discussion, we rehearse some familiar approaches to Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey; for example, that the novel is, at least in part, concerned with the difficulties readers face in selecting the appropriate way of reading. We argue that Catherine Morland is a bad reader of novels because she approaches them in a “truth‐committed” way; this accounts for the difficulties she encounters in the “real world”. At the same time, the novel nudges its own readers towards avoiding a repetition of Catherine's mistake. In exposing its own constructed nature, the narrative encourages the reader to engage with the text in a “literary” way, resulting in what we are calling a “non truth‐committed discourse”.