A few weeks ago I took a swipe, more or less for no reason, on those dedicated professional educators who enable and facilitate student access to those parts of the curriculum centred around the acquisition of literacy skills in language, together with the necessary skill sets required to access, respond to and enjoy literature.

English teachers, in other words. And yes, many of them do write like that. Some of them even talk like that. In public. As the late, truly great, Tom Sharpe once wrote, ‘There’s nothing like calling a spade an earth-inverting horticultural implement.’

I suggested that too much teaching and commentary relies on attempts to interpret the psychology of characters, ‘I think Darcy’s a bit of a snob at first, but he’s probably just shy’ or ‘Nostromo’s hot Italian blood leads him to steal the silver’.

So I was pleased to see Terry Eagleton make the same point in his new book How to Read Literature

Some of the time it is hard to distinguish what literary critics say about poems and novels from talk about real life. There is no great crime in that. These days, however, this can be true for rather too much of the time. The most common mistake students of literature make is to go straight for what the poem or novel says, setting aside the 'literariness' of the work- the fact that it is a poem or play or novel, rather than an account of the incidence of soil erosion in Nebraska. Literary works are pieces of rhetoric as well as reports. They demand a particularly vigilant kind of reading, one which is alert to tone, mood, pace, genre, texture, rhythm, narrative structure, punctuation, ambiguity- in fact everything that comes under the heading of 'form'.

And then, of course, I became anxious. What if this wasn't a case of great minds thinking alike, what if this was a case of my thinking having been so formatted by the Oxford traditions that I thought what Eagleton thought by some kind of mind control. I go to his lectures thirty years ago- the lectures that became Literary Theory and I become so encultured that thoughts I believed to be independent are merely running along tracks laid down in the English Faculty.

Maybe not. Because Eagleton's solution is not 'Read more Saussure' but close reading.

Admittedly How to Read Literature is intended mainly for beginners but Eagleton hopes 'it will also prove useful to those already engaged in literary studies, or those who simply enjoy reading poems, plays and novels in their spare time'. It's probably important for beginners to learn how to do close reading- if only because it produces undergraduate essays faster than reading literary criticism, but Eagleton (un?)intentionally reveals the limitations of such an approach when he subjects Baa Baa Black Sheep to seven pages of analysis (most of which I skipped so I can't tell you exactly what he learned from this nursery rhyme)

We need something more to allow us to talk and interpret GTA V and Dombey and Son. Because Eagleton’s purpose in writing the book- he feels that certain types of reading are under threat- is valid. I’d just like to observe that this is not exactly due to modern time constraints. Dombey is about 800 pages long, which I guess will take most readers between 15 and 40 hours . I’ve already spent 30 hours on GTA V and I’m about 40% of the way through. Google suggests that the average teenager spends 30 hours a week online. We have the time to read. And it's not the concentration that's lacking; most videogamers, me included, could tell stories about staying up till 3 a.m on a game. Dickens has never kept me up till 3 a.m though and it's very rare that Stephen King will. I think the answer lies in the 'interactivity' of the web and videogames and this I shall return to in a subsequent post