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Brian
Stock.
After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text.
Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001.
Material Texts series.
132pp.
Hardback ISBN
0812236025.
Publisher's
recommended price £23.00
Augustine
of Hippo
was the most prolific and influential writer on reading between
antiquity
and the Renaissance, though he left no systematic treatise on the
subject.
His reluctance to synthesize his views on other important themes such
as
the sacraments suggests that he would have been skeptical of any
attempt
to bring his statements on reading into a formal theory. Yet Augustine
has remained the point of reference to which all later writers
invariably
return in their search for the roots of problems concerning reading and
interpretation in the West.
Using
Augustine
as his touchstone, Brian Stock considers the evolution of the Western
reader
and of Western reading practices from antiquity to the Renaissance. He
looks to the problem of self-knowledge in the reading culture of late
antiquity;
engages the related question of ethical values and literary experience
in the same period; and reconsiders Erich Auerbach's interpretation of
ancient literary realism. In subsequent chapters, Stock moves forward
to
the Middle Ages to explore the attitude of medieval Latin authors
toward
the genre of autobiography as a model for self-representation and takes
up the problem of reading, writing, and the self in Petrarch. He
compares
the role of the reader in Augustine's City of God and Thomas
More's Utopia
and, in a final important move, reframes the problem of European
cultural
identity by shifting attention from continuity and change in spoken
language
to significant shifts in the practice of spiritual, silent reading in
the
Middle Ages and Renaissance. A richly rewarding reflection on the
history
and nature of reading, After Augustine promises to be a
centerpiece
of discussions about the discovery of the self through literature.
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