Los placeres de la buena literatura

Leímos y discutimos este artículo en clase, y la verdad es que no puedo estar más de acuerdo. Creo además que se puede aplicar a toda buena literatura, no sólo a la infantil.
Aunque por supuesto, sobre todo a la infantil, teniendo en cuenta que hoy en día se cuela como "infantil" un montón de historias edulcoradas y sin pies ni cabeza, donde los buenos sólo ganan porque los malos son tontos, o porque tienen mala suerte, y es todo tan simple que deja de ser coherente...

En fin, ¿disfrutáis de estos placeres a la hora de leer un buen libro? ¿Qué libro os ha hecho disfrutar de todas estas cosas?

El autor de este texto sugiere que al leer esta lista se tenga en mente una (o más de una) lectura que haya sido especialmente placentera.

• The pleasure of experiencing sounds and images in and for themselves - as pure sensory activity outside and beyond the realm of shared meanings and patterns. 

This is the essence of jouissance—bodily pleasure.

• The pleasure of words themselves - the patterns their sounds can make, the interesting ways in which they combine with one another, their ability to express revealing, frightening, or beautiful pictures or ideas. 

This is the point at which jouissance begins to shift into plaisir. There are a variety of ways in which texts work to provide readers with plaisir:

• The pleasure of having one’s emotions evoked: laughing at a comic situation, being made to feel the pain or the joy a character experiences. 
• The pleasure of making use of a repertoire of knowledge and strategies of comprehension - of experiencing mastery of what the text expects of its readers. 
• The pleasure of recognizing gaps in repertoire and learning the information or the strategy needed to fill them, thereby developing further mastery. (“Gaps” is another term used by theorists of reader response, which we discuss in more detail in chapter 4.) 
• The pleasure of the pictures and ideas that the words of texts evoke - the ways in which they allow one to visualize people and places one has never actually seen or think about ideas one hasn’t considered before. 
• The pleasure of finding a mirror for oneself - of identifying with fictional characters. 
• The pleasure of escape - of stepping outside oneself at least imaginatively and experiencing the lives and thoughts of different people. 
• The pleasure of story - the organized patterns of emotional involvement and detachment, the delays of suspense, the climaxes and resolutions, the intricate patterns of chance and coincidence that make up a plot.
• The pleasure of storytelling — the consciousness of how a writer’s point of view or emphasis on particular elements shapes one’s response. 
• The pleasure of structure — the consciousness of how words, pictures, or events form cohesive and meaningful patterns. 
• The pleasure of one’s awareness of the ways in which all the elements of a literary work seem to fit together to form a whole. 
• The pleasure of understanding — of seeing how literature not only mirrors life but also comments on it and encourages readers to consider the meaning of their own existence. 
• The pleasure of gaining insight into history and culture through literature. 
• The pleasure of recognizing forms and genres — of seeing similarities between works of literature. 
• The pleasure of formula — of repeating the comfortably familiar experience of kinds of stories one has enjoyed before. 

The last of these is obviously a concentrated experience of plaisir. There is also a pleasure opposite to that of formula—something more a matter of jouissance:

• The pleasure of newness — of experiencing startlingly different kinds of stories and poems.But remember that even formulaic texts have the potential of offering a form of jouissance for a reader who chooses consciously or unconsciously to resist them or even simply to be aware of how the texts go about inviting specific forms of response: 
• The pleasure of seeing through literature — of realizing how poems or stories attempt to manipulate one’s emotions and influence one’s understanding and moral judgments in ways one may or may not be prepared to accept. (There is more about this process, sometimes called “reading against a text,” in chapter 8, and in the discussion of negotiated and oppositional readings in chapter 10.) 

• The pleasure of exploring the ways in which texts sometimes undermine or even deny their own apparent meanings. (Reading for this kind of pleasure is the basis of the kind of literary theory called deconstruction. We say more about it in chapter 10.) 
• The pleasure of developing a deeper understanding of one’s responses and of relating them to one’s responses to other texts and to one’s understanding of literature in general.

Finally, there is the social pleasure literature offers:

• The pleasure of sharing experiences of literature with others (reading to others, for instance). 
• The pleasure of discussing with others their responses to texts one has read. 

From Nodelman, Perry and Reimer, Mavis (2003) "The Pleasures og Children's Literature" (3rd edn). Boston: Allyn and Bacon.