3 - Woolf and the theory and pedagogy of reading
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Summary
For the desire to read, like all the other desires which distract our unhappy souls, is capable of analysis.
Virginia Woolf, “Sir Thomas Browne” (Eiii:368)So we reveal some of the prejudices, the instincts and the fallacies out of which what it pleases us to call criticism is made.
Virginia Woolf, “An Essay in Criticism” (Eiv:455)WOOLF AND COMMON READING
The pedagogical history outlined in the last chapter helps to explain the difference between the “English Common Reader” as Altick employs the term and the “Common Reader” as conceived by Virginia Woolf. Altick alternately names his common readers the “mass reading public,” meaning by this term the group of new readers or potential new readers that, in the nineteenth century, emerged from the artisan and laboring classes. The “revolutionary social concept” that he identifies as a belief in the “democracy of print” had, as its object, the extension of cultured reading beyond the upper classes down to what, in 1858, Wilkie Collins referred to as the “Unknown Public” – the great number of people who were then just learning how to read. Defined oppositionally, the nineteenth-century common reader is thus “not the relatively small, intellectually and socially superior audience for which most of the great nineteenth-century authors wrote.” In contrast, Virginia Woolf distinguishes her common readers from the “mass” audience and does not tie them to identifiers of class.
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- Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere , pp. 117 - 193Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003