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If, by some chance, you happen to find yourself as Minister for the Arts and your introduction to poetry has consisted of being forced to scan Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ at the age of six when you ached only to kick a ball around a park, you are not likely to be greatly resistant to a cut in funding for the teaching of literature in primary schools proposed by cabinet colleagues over a long lunch in a good restaurant.
As part of a move to restore the reading of literature to the central position I believe it should occupy in any civil society, I propose a sustained focusing upon the act of reading intended to help restore command of that process to the individual operating outside any pre-existing allegiance, however limited his or her competence. Though suggestions are offered for incorporating theories and theorists into this process, the basis throughout is a straightforward three-part model which is designed to enable the reader to attend to how he or she situates himself or herself at the moment of reading, according to his or her current understanding.
Part of the recuperation of the right to read as one chooses involves lifting the weight of received opinion from the reader’s shoulders and restoring the sense that discovery is not only possible, but likely. Whatever else it becomes, reading should always be more than a discipline of committing to memory the echoes of absent voices.
Before giving an account of the movement of the book through its chapters, a brief explanation of what I intend by its title will be useful. Though deconstruction is brought front and centre on a number of occasions, especially in the latter part of chapter 6, where Derrida’s notion of the trace is approached in relation to what Eliot called ‘the substantial unity of the soul’, and in chapter 7, where I consider some of the possibilities hovering about the word ‘translation’, no résumé is offered of it as a movement, nor is there a comprehensive description of its literary or philosophic antecedents, nor of its influence on subsequent movements in literary criticism. The emphasis throughout rests with how literature might be read after deconstruction’s passing, after the terrors associated with its sometimes overbearing requirements have been surmounted.