Heavy Versus Light Reading: The Decipherment of Literary and Non-Liter

Heavy Versus Light Reading The Decipherment of Literary and Non-Literary TextsIn attempting to discriminate between the nature of a literary text and a non-literary text, a metaphor from Milan Kunderas The Unbearable Lightness of Being comes to mind. Especially in considering this same apologue in contrast with a novel such as Danielle Steeles Vanished, the idea of lightness versus heaviness presents itself, and with it, a new charge of approaching the decipherment of any higher(prenominal)/low dichotomy of literariness. When the literary text is imagined as heavy and the non-literary as light, an interesting luminosity is cast upon the scene, and parallels emerge alongside ideas originally presented in the writings of A. Easthope and Wolfgang Iser. In the novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Kundera (in writing a weighty novel himself), presents a distinction between the light and the heavy. The lightness of human humankind resides in the idea of a vivification being liv ed only erstwhile - decisions being made only once. The singularity of such an existence seems to indicate it unbearably light, or insignificant. An existence which is eternally repeated has, on the contrary, more weight to it in its substantive inexhaustibility. There is a plainly infinite array of different possible extracts to be made - manifold paths which could be followed. This plural brand of existence seems to carry more significance in its heaviness. Easthope, in Literary into Cultural Studies, suggests that a high cultural (literary) text such as Heart of dark (or The Unbearable Lightness of Being) possesses certain characteristics whose antitheses are found in a popular (non-literary) text such as Tarzan (or a novel care Vanished).... ...eaning. Repetition of this kind of heavy reading of a light, insubstantial text, is no more than the repetition of a particular existence - the same life and the same death each time. A reader has one choice to make in experienci ng the non-literary work to either read it once (to baffle the set lifetime once), or to read it multiple times (to do reincarnated into the same body and destiny time after time). This could very comfortably be the reason that a text which is considered to be literary is and so thought of as better or more fulfilling than a non-literary text. It is the literary text with all of its afore-mentioned characteristics which makes possible the reincarnation of the reader - which carries the potential for a reader to enjoy countless different experiences of lightness, no longer insufferable in such lightness, because of their plurality.