Abstract
For the writer, writing is eventful; one might say it is in itself eventfulness. More than any activity, it involves thought, but the thought involved in it is by nature captive, specialized and intense. … Reading is eventful also. It, too, engages the faculties, so closely that reflection is only possible when the book has been finished and put down. At a first reading one has little but reflexes.1
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Notes
Elizabeth Bowen, ‘Foreword’ to Afterthought: Pieces About Writing (London: Longmans, 1962) 9.
J. Hillis Miller, Versions of Pygmalion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990) 21.
See, for example, Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, The Wolf Man’s Magic Word: A Cryptonymy, trans. Nicholas Rand (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), and Esther Rashkin, ‘Tools for a New Psychoanalytic Literary Criticism: The Work of Abraham and Torok,’ Diacritics, 18 (1988) 31–52.
See, for example, Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, in Visual and Other Pleasures (London: Macmillan, 1989) 14–26.
On dread, see Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); and see Andrej Warminski, ‘Dreadful Reading: Blanchot on Hegel’, Yale French Studies, 69 (1985) 266–75, where Warminski quotes Blanchot on ‘the dread of reading’: ‘The dread of reading: it is that every text, no matter how important and how interesting it may be (and the more it gives the impression of being so), is empty — it does not exist at bottom (il n’existe pas dans le fond)’ (266). Blanchot’s essay ‘Reading’ also opens with a consideration of the possibility of the dread of reading, in The Gaze of Orpheus and other Literary Essays, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Station Hill, 1981) 91–8.
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© 1995 Andrew Bennett and Nicholas Royle
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Bennett, A., Royle, N. (1995). Fanatic Immobility. In: Elizabeth Bowen and the Dissolution of the Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230374355_3
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