The Writer’s Seductive Power

Abstract

For those who love books, reading is a seductive affair between reader and writer. Fiction of any type undeniably brings mental pleasure to its readers. To write fiction is to speak to the other, with style and art. To review the writer’s magic is to reveal that literary writing is like a declaration of love, a linguistic construct bent on seduction, as Freudians would attest. Desire, whether powerful or powerless, is present in not only the essence of the act of writing, in the very theme of the story, but also in the reader’s horizon of expectations. This is why it is fruitful to bring a psychoanalytic approach to bear on reading literature.