Paul Jay claims that we need to pay renewed attention to the aesthetic to address and incorporate everyday experience into our academic discussions. Clearly, at stake here is the opportunity to reconceptualise the symbiotic relationship between literature and ordinary readers. In this essay, I propose a concept that I call ‘wild reading’ through which to understand sensuous, and potentially violent, acts of reading texts, as represented in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The novel repeatedly portrays reading as an act of wild, sensual submission to seductive ‘texts’, as if one were succumbing to the charms of an irresistible lover. I am going to focus on, and analyse, particular scenes in the novel, by means of which I will conceptualise and discuss the notion of ‘wild reading’ as performed by Wilde's characters. Ultimately, I suggest ‘wild reading’ as a useful aesthetic category for our own everyday experience of reading and as a vehicle through which we might understand actual readers’ desire-driven acts of imagination triggered by a seductive text.
In this essay, I discuss specific ways in which the Odyssey ensures its reception by broader and future audiences by employing both professional and amateur storytellers and internal listeners as guarantors of the story's viability. My focus here is on the differences between Demodocus’s professional storytelling and Odysseus's nominally nonprofessional storytelling. While the former serves to please groups of an audience who expect “safe” pleasures by listening to traditional epic tales, the latter opens an affective space between listeners and the storyteller, where the listeners’ affects are mobilized by Odysseus’s unpredictable and perhaps less skillful ways of narrating stories. Odysseus’s amateurism (as I would call it) instigates the audience’s desire to listen more and becomes a successful strategy to captivate the audience’s minds. In this age and culture often defined by the “narrative turn,” many of us are interested in telling good stories that can impact broad audiences. This much-loved, ancient work of fiction can teach us various techniques of good storytelling that can move the hearts of generations of audiences.
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