Robert Alter
In The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age, Robert Alter distinguishes imaginative literature from other types of writing by showing how literature works. He begins by decrying the general decline in reading literature and argues critics who analyze literature from their ideological perspective to the exclusion of alternative readings perform a great disservice to the literary work.
Alter’s approach is systematic. He demonstrates how the strategies of character, style, allusions, structure, perspective, and multiple meanings work in literature. He illustrates his argument with selections from literary works, providing context to the selection. His close textual analysis of the selections is inspiring and opens up new ways of reading already familiar works. He defines his terms and avoids academic jargon. His tone throughout is measured, respectful, and inclusive.
While any give literary text can support a variety of readings with never one that is “correct” to the exclusion of all others, Alter convincingly demonstrates a reading is not simply weak but wrong when a reader . . .
proposes implications of social institutions invoked in the text that they never had in their historical setting, and when details provided by the narrator or by the character in their dialogue are ignored or misrepresented
All readings must be grounded in the words of the text. Approaching a reading with an ideological bias may open it up, but it should never do so by excluding all other approaches. In fact, one of the pleasures of reading literature is its very open endedness:
The open-endedness of the text plays a key role in this pleasure because the reader is the recipient of a kind of communication that, unlike graffiti or bumper stickers or telegrams, offers a rich multiplicity of messages in which the mind may delight.
Alter offers an erudite, eloquent, and systematic explication of the value of and pleasures in reading literature while arguing for a slow, attentive reading of the literary text.