Reading is an activity of the imagination, and the imagination in question is not the writer's alone.
we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.
How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World__ Favorite Literary Form
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we accept fictions as fictions, as things that might be true in their world, if not quite in ours.
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It is one thing to be clever and another to be wise.
Literary works are not democracies. We hold this truth to be self-evident, that all men and women are created equal. We may, but the country of Novels, Etc., doesn't. In that faraway place, no character is created equal. One or two of them get all the breaks; the rest exist to get them to the finish line.
Every language has a grammar, a set of rules that govern usage and meaning, and literary language is no different. It__ all more or less arbitrary of course, just like language itself.
We sometimes hear of the death of literature or of this or that genre, but literature doesn't die, just as it doesn't 'progress' or 'decay.' It expands, it increases. When we feel that it has become stagnant or stale, that usually just means we ourselves are not paying sufficient attention.
The real reason for quest is always self-knowledge.