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CREATIVE READING
WEEK 2:
THE COMMON READER
 WHAT IS CREATIVE READING?

• engaging with the text in a deep, personal, reflective way

• allowing the imagination and the intellect freedom

• reading to inspire your own creativity

• reading with an open mind (and heart)

• inclusive, not exclusive

E. L. JAMES
CREATIVE READING ALLOWS US TO…

• Discover sympathy (and empathy)

• Surmount prejudice

• Embrace the identities of others

• Put aside ourselves momentarily

• See the text as fluid, changing

• Discover new things in subsequent re-readings

KAFKA’S METAMORPHOSIS
OVID’S METAMORPHOSES
ADAPTATION
VIRGINIA WOOLF
 CREATIVE READING LECTURES

• Context and background

• Raising questions / topics for tutorial discussion

• Note books / authors / etc to read later

• Use your reading diaries

 THE SIMPLE ACT OF READING

‘Reading is dangerous’ — Kate Forsyth

READERS’ DIGEST CONDENSED BOOKS
• Jonathan Franzen ‘Why Bother?’ (Harper’s 2002)

• Anne Fadiman Ex Libris: confessions of a common reader (Farrar Straus

Giroux 1998)

• Will Schwalbe Books for Living: a reader‘s guide to life (Two Roads
2017)

• Ramona Koval By the Book: a reader‘s guide to life (Text Publishing

2012

• The Simple Act of Reading (Penguin Random House 2015)

 THE ORDINARY READER: A LEGAL
DEFINITION
• A person of ‘ordinary intelligence, experience and education,
who is neither perverse, nor morbid, nor suspicious of mind,
nor avid for scandal’

• Does not ‘engage in over-elaborate analysis in search of

hidden meanings’

• Is a more ‘cautious and critical reader’ of a serious publication

• Is less inclined to draw ‘far-fetched inferences’

 PUBLIC OWNERSHIP OF READING

• English / literature departments disappearing

•
Book clubs / reading groups flourishing

• Writers’ (readers’) festivals proliferating

• Libraries more friendly and interactive

 ALBERTO MANGUEL
A HISTORY OF READING (1996)
 NEILSON BOOKSCAN 27 JULY 2017
• http://www.nielsenbookscan.com.au/topsellers.php?country=aus&chart_name=hot10 
•     

1 The CSIRO Low-Carb Diet Grant Brinkworth & Dr Pennie Taylor

Macmillan $34.99 
2 The Barefoot Investor Scott Pape Wrightbooks $29.95 
3 Big Little Lies:TV Tie-in Liane Moriarty Pan $14.99 
4 First, We Make the Beast Beautiful Sarah Wilson Macmillan $34.99 
5 Frankie Fish and the Sonic Suitcase Peter Helliar Hardie Grant Egmont
$14.99 
6 Dangerous Games Danielle Steel Macmillan $29.99 
7 Truly Madly Guilty Liane Moriarty Pan $16.99 
8 Lion: A Long Way Home (film tie-in) Saroo Brierley Penguin $22.99 
9 The Husband's Secret Liane Moriarty Pan $14.99 
10 Big Little Lies Liane Moriarty Pan $14.99 
 GLEEBOOKS CURRENT BESTSELLERS

4321 Paul Auster

My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment Yanis Varoufakis
All the Light We Cannot See Anthony Doerr
Anything is Possible Elizabeth Strout
The Australian Bird Guide Peter Menkhorst
Big Little Lies Liane Moriarty
Blitzed: Drugs in Nazi Germany Norman Ohler
The Bush Don Watson
Cardinal: The Rise and Rise of George Pell Lousie Milligan
The Case Against Fragrance Kate Grenville
 LAURA MULVEY

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975)

• Challenges the idea of the homogenous audience

• Argues for infinite variations of looking and identification
• Argues for subjectivity in the construction of narrative
• The way we read constitutes the story
• The meaning of the story is infinite
CARPACCIO’S ST AUGUSTINE IN HIS
STUDY
DEVOURING BOOKS
 SHAKESPEARE SONNET XXX
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor'd and sorrows end. (1609)
 
ROLAND BARTHES, FROM THE DEATH OF
THE AUTHOR

‘The reader is the space on which all the

quotations that make up a writing are
inscribed without any of them being lost; a
text’s unity lies not in its origin, but its
destination.’