The book is devoted to the theory and practice of reading. Reading is a singular
event – it is a contingent, individual and intimate activity; due to that, its history,
theory and systematics are particularly hard to construct. Endeavours
to analyse reading soon make one realise that such investigations belong to the
field of experimental studies: studies on the nature of the experience of reading.
The aim of the author is to reflect as fully as possible the richness and wonderful
inconsistency of the activity of reading, as it corresponds to the intricate
matter of life. In the chapters of the book, one can find the descriptions
of various experiences of reading, transformed and arranged by the author
into certain sequences or models. They make it possible to grasp the complex
universe of the phenomena of reading as the forms of articulation of reading:
the transmittable statement describing what happens with the readers and
the text while reading.
We do not know everything, and yet we have to speak and write about it,
since we are anxious about our future. In order to do so – precisely, to think
about ourselves and the world without sufficient knowledge about both –
we have inventions concerning the past and the future at our disposal. Inventions
and fictions are necessary for all of us. Literature and philosophy, which
we learn to read at school and university, belong to the kind of “inventions” that
prepare us for the times when different types of knowledge turn out to be inadequate
or even useless. Proposed by the author, phenomenological reduction
in the didactics of literature is to result in the establishment of a constant point
of support for imagination and conversation. If school-level Polish literature
and language teaching aspires to be engaged in the pursuit of preparing young
people to put in an effort to understand the world they live in, an excellent
tool is still at our disposal; this tool is literature, along with the act of reading
it and the conversation by means of it. The time of reading is not a different
kind of time – taken from life or complementing it. It is simply the time of life –
as there is no other – spent in the company of books
