Quote:
Originally Posted by FlorenceArt
On the other hand, there is nothing that annoys me more, at least in fiction, than a book that lays out everything clearly before me, taking care to leave nothing to my interpretation or imagination. This kind of book is perfectly understandable, and very bad literature. Because literature, and any kind of art, requires two people, a writer and a reader, an artist and a spectator, and the spectator cannot be passive, he has to put some of his own life into the work, otherwise it will stay a dead thing: a bunch of printed pages, or a canvas with some color on it. There has to be some room for the reader/spectator to breathe, to invent the work.
|
I recently wrote my MA thesis on the cognitive processes that might contribute to the reader's construction of a representation of a narrative - the text being seen as something analogous to a "diagram" for such a construction. One of the issues I didn't tackle but I think is really interesting is why we, some of us anyway, actually prefer texts in which the construction of such a representation is both facilitated and, at the same time, blocked or interrupted by the text. We like to have some imaginative work to do and often feel that texts that do not require such work of us are of less literary merit.