The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about
the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and
about the state of literary education inside schools and
universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been
contentious. What is clear, however, is how increasingly it is
dismissed or is unrecognised as a way of thinking or an arena for
thought. It is sceptically challenged from within, for example, by
the sometimes rival claims of cultural history, contextualized
explanation, or media studies. It is shaken from without by even
greater pressures: by economic exigency and the severe social
attitudes that can follow from it; by technological change that may
leave the traditional forms of serious human communication looking
merely antiquated. For just these reasons this is the right time
for renewal, to start reinvigorated work into the meaning and value
of literary reading. The Novel: A Survival Skill is the fruit of a
lifetime's search for a different, more immediate, but again
systematic and serious way of talking about literature. Developed
over many years, it offers a completely new account of the
relationship between a writer, his or her work, and the reader. As
such it radically undermines traditional literary criticism and the
various criteria used for evaluating a work of fiction. Drawing on
ideas from systemic psychology, Tim Parks suggest that both the
content and style of a novelist's work, the kind of stories told
and the way in which they are told, form part of a more general
strategy or simply habit of communication that the novelist has
learned within his or her family of origin. The reader reacts to
these in very much the same way he or she would react to the same
communicative strategy in a real life encounter, different readers
reacting differently depending on their own backgrounds and habits
of communication. Looking at the different value structures that
can dominate in any family-good/evil, independence/dependence,
success/failure, belonging/exclusion-this book looks at how a
number of major writers position themselves within these value
structures, how this positioning is manifest in their writing, and
how readers have responded to this depending on their own
positioning in the same semantics. Thomas Hardy, for example, a man
eager to believe himself courageous but terrified of the
consequences of any socially 'unacceptable' behaviour, constructs
stories which are courageous in their willingness to debate
difficult issues, but which constantly suggest that any attempt to
behave courageously is condemned to disaster. Hardy as it were
imprisons himself in a world where it is folly to take risks. He is
thus exceedingly conservative in his life, while at the same time
able to think of himself as courageous in his writing. The Novel: A
Survival Skill looks at the way different readers in different
periods respond to this depending on their own position with regard
to fear, courage, social convention and so on.
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