Literary reading is a team game: exercices with Carroll and Carle.

Abstract

This paper will focus on the issue of training future literary reading mediators or promoters. It will propose a practical exercise on playing with intertextuality with the aid of two children literature classics and masterpieces—The Adventures of Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865) and The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle (1969). This exercise is not designed to be a pedagogical or didactic tool used with children (that could alternatively be done with the same corpora), but it is designed to focus on issues of literary studies and contemporary culture. The aim of this practical exercise with future reading promoters is to enable graduate students or trainees to be able to recognize that literary reading can be a team game. However, before arriving at the agan stage, where the rules get simplified and attainable by young readers, hard and solitary work of the mediator is required. The rules of this solitary game of preparing the reading of classical texts are not always evident. On the other hand, the reason why literary reading could be (and perhaps should be) defined as a new team game in our contemporary and globalized world derives directly from the fact that we now live in a world where mass culture is definitely installed. We should be pragmatic on evaluating the conditions of communication between people (not only young adults or children) and we should look the way people read the signs on everyday life and consequently behave in contemporary society, and then apply the same rules or procedures to introduce old players such as the classical books in the game. We are talking about adult mediators and native digital readers. In the contemporary democratic social context, cultural producers and consumers are two very important elements (as the book itself) of the literary polissystem. So, teaching literature is more than ever to be aware that the literary reader meaning of a text does not reside only in the text and in its solitary relationship with the quiet and comfortably installed reader. Meaning is produced by the reader in relation both to the text in question and to the complex network of texts invoked in the reading process and plural connections provided by the world of a new media environment.