Introduction

What has become of the experience of reading? Transformative as it can be, we have for it a sparse vocabulary and pay it little regard. In academic or para-academic settings, our reading always seems to take place in the past or in the future; the only temporality we are willing to admit is that we have read, or soon will (re-)read, Invisible Man. The rules of the language game “literary scholarship” do not readily accommodate a reader’s reflections on the circumstances and vagaries of their reading, and these rules are often used to separate the objective judgments of the scholar from the subjective opinion of the critic or the connoisseur. What prompted my choice of this book over others? How long did it take me to read, what initial feelings did it elicit, how did these feelings change, how did the reading connect with other lived or read experiences? What reactions did the fictional characters, the length of the chapters, of the book, provoke in me? How do I communicate my reading experience to others, how do I account for it myself?

By brushing these and similar questions aside, we implicitly agree that reading isn’t really an experience at all, but a disembodied, instantaneous mental absorption like “knowing,” “understanding,” or any other atemporal philosophical concept in which neither the object that is being understood nor the body that does the understanding has an essential role to play. In the pedagogy of literature, we actively discourage students from lingering on their reading experiences, guiding them instead to more “mature,” abstract judgments.

Marginalized readers have always tried to break through the silence on experience; for them the discrepancy between their reading experience and the expectations of dispassionate scholarly assessment seemed too great to pass over quietly. W. E. B. Du Bois reading Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as a Black man, Leo Bersani reading Samuel Beckett as a gay man, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick reading Henry James as a lesbian—they all disturbed the scholarly consensus that the experience of reading is not essentially linked to our reading of experience. Disruptive though their accounts were in the history of literary scholarship, the academic focus on knowledge soon turned these singular reading experiences into new scholarly paradigms or modes of “reading.” This transformation of singularity into generality is the modus operandi of most academic disciplines, especially of those that, like literary studies, are asked to reflect on, or even justify, their place in the university of knowledge. In what follows, I will examine the history and philosophy of this transformation and offer a plea to give experience its proper space in the scholarship and pedagogy of literature.

There are several reasons why the reading experience has been marginalized in our engagement with literature. Most stem from two interconnected beliefs: first, that experiencing—compared to better defined activities such as judging, learning, or knowing—is too vague, too subjective, too tied to bodily presence to be effectively articulated and communicated. Second, that the primary aim of academic reading and writing about literature is not to deepen and enrich personal experience but to extract the knowledge it ostensibly contains. These beliefs, rooted in distinct theological and philosophical traditions, have deeply informed literary studies; disguising and forgetting them, and banishing the murkiness of experience in favor of knowledge and truth, were the price the modern research university demanded from literary studies for its admission to the scientific community.

This price, I will argue, was too steep and paid in the wrong currency: literary studies can never—and should never—compete in delivering the most precise or valuable knowledge. Instead, its relevance within the university curriculum should rest on its unique ability to provide access to the irreducible singularity and depth of human experiences. This access is essential for the responsible acquisition and the social practice of knowledge. Placing the reading experience at the beginning of our reflection on literature and learning to accept the validity of these diverse experiences honor our actual encounter with literature and cultivate an invaluable skill: the ability to articulate, share, and shape our experiences, and to recognize this effort in others.

One defining feature of experience is its singularity. While we can, and should, strive to articulate and communicate our experiences, they remain our own and cannot literally be “shared.” In every conversation about experience, therefore, we must recognize the uniqueness of another’s experience and, just as critically, the incompleteness, the transitoriness, the fragility of our own. The invisibility of another’s experience and the provisional nature of our own are brought into communication in the reading of literary works that narrate experiences—for example, in novels like Invisible Man. The reason why, I will argue (most insistently in chapter 5), that novels not only recount, but are experiences is to remind us that each is a singular work as well, and to show this without having to resort to the vocabulary of traditional aesthetics and narratology. Reading and discussing such works prepare us to encounter and appreciate, to experience singularity, as we accept the experience of a novel’s protagonist, of a play’s hero, of a poet’s voice as singular and yet communicable.

In our eagerness to participate in the race for knowledge, we scholars, teachers, and lovers of literature missed the opportunity to host conversations about experiences. In colleges and universities, we frequently neglect to help undergraduates express their experiences, we fail to encourage graduate students to reflect on them, and we present ourselves, to students and colleagues, as having already read everything. We often dismiss the value of reading experiences shared in book clubs, blogs, or vlogs, and rarely incorporate in our research and teaching the rich tradition of literary reviews in newspapers and journals. With our focus on disembodied knowledge, we have maneuvered the study of literature into fragmented debates over critical positions while lamenting the precarious state of the field.

We have also deprived literary studies—especially the pedagogy of literature—of all defenses against the encroaching wave of AI tools capable of summarizing vast corpora and generating “critical” positions literally in the blink of an eye. The expansive conception of experience the following pages will unfold is contrary both to the notion of disembodied artificiality and to the privileging of intelligence in the approach to literature. AI may reason, even reflect, but it neither meditates nor experiences. On the positive side, probed and prompted in the right way AI may show us how to access and formulate our experiences as they lay buried under the weight of habit and judgment.

The marginalization of experience in literary studies stems largely from its portrayal as a flawed and unreliable way of engaging with the world. This perspective has deep roots in Western culture, reaching far back to ancient Greek metaphysics and its self-imposed mission to “save the phenomena”: to give foundational reasons why the world is a well-ordered whole and not a chaotic tangle of events. Finite human experience was seen as inadequate for this mission, and the task delegated to the project of first philosophy—to the project of finding principles of explanation that precede, or transcend, experience. In the fusion of metaphysics and Christian theology, these principles were embodied in the omnipotent creator God. When at the dawn of Western modernity scholars and scientists—Galileo Galilei, René Descartes, and Joseph Justus Scaliger, to name a few from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—wanted to disentangle theology from the discourses of knowledge, it was again experience that was sacrificed, this time on the altar of a priori certainty and the demands of experimental measurability.

In my first chapter, I will briefly trace the logic and consequences of this sacrifice and show how the problem of experience persisted in the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and G. W. F. Hegel—systems of thought that still hold sway over contemporary theories of science, literature, and pedagogy. In their ambitious attempts to find philosophical foundations for the natural sciences, Kant and Hegel no longer excluded experience yet did not accept it as a self-standing source of insight either. Experience became tethered to conceptual classification and to the powers of judgment, retaining limited independence only in aesthetics and in religious dissent.

To reclaim the full scope of experience in general and the experience of reading literature in particular from these implicit restraints, we must look beyond the confines of Western traditions of thought. In the second chapter, I introduce the Buddhist philosopher Nāgārjuna, one of the most incisive thinkers of experience in the Eastern tradition. Writing and teaching in second-century Northern India, Nāgārjuna’s Root Verses of the Middle Way (Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, hereafter as MMK) offers a perspective on experience unbound by the justificatory demands and ontological commitments of Western metaphysics. His radical, strikingly concise arguments are matched in the Western world only much later by two nineteenth-century philosophers, Friedrich Nietzsche and William James. Chapters three and four explore how these two unlikely contemporaries—unaware of Nāgārjuna and of each other—arrive at equally profound visions of the novelty and the purity of experience.

Fictional literature, particularly the novel, became a sanctuary for experience during the ice age of rational knowledge. In the fifth chapter, I show how the rise of the novel is linked to the survival and complexification of discourses of experience. Certain formal features of the novel—what I will later call its seriability—not only allow for the fictional record of unsanctioned experiences but also enable readers to enjoy reading as an experiential process. This interplay between the experiences in the text and the experiences we undergo in this reading reaches its zenith in the realistic novel of the nineteenth century. Here, the omniscient narrator presents experiences that, akin to those described by Nāgārjuna, Nietzsche, and James, defy division into subjects that have the experience and the events that constitute it.

The sixth chapter briefly examines the metaphysics of reading that for centuries has diminished the unbounded and novel experience of reading in favor of the need to decipher, to explain, to “lay out.” Behind this need for explanation is the Christian dogma of divine revelation through the Bible such that salvation hinges on correctly understanding God’s written word. These testamentary, recognitive, and salvational reading traditions leave no room for the private enjoyment or the singular experience of an individual reader. Even as contemporary literary theory shows the pitfalls of Christian and post-Christian hermeneutics, it often remains tethered to the project of extracting knowledge from fictional narratives.

In the seventh chapter I trace the outlines of a practice of reading novels experientially. Novels in the tradition of the West are almost universally concerned with fictional accounts of experiences. The reciprocal relationship between the experience of reading and the reading of experiences frees experience from the need to speak in the tongues of knowledge, allows it to find a language of its own.

The coda offers a few practical suggestions for guiding students and “lay readers” in the articulation of reading experiences and in the practice of accepting another’s experience. It indicates that the encounter with Artificial Intelligence may help us to crystallize the quality of our experiences. It also extends an invitation to readers to contribute their own experiences—as readers and as teachers—to the collaborative platform thenovelexperience.org.