Ler e usar a literatura: alguns artifícios para o envolvimento do leitor

Abstract

In this dissertation we investigate how fiction involves the reader. Starting Callimachus s rejection of Homer, we note that the supposed diference between the literature favoured by the public at large and the literature preferred by critics is actually twofold. First, critics read for business and the public reads for pleasure. Second, as proposed by C.S. Lewis, there is a distinction between the reception and use of literature. In reception, a work tends to be admired in itself, whereas in use it becomes a mere support for a sort of daydreaming in which the reader s own desires are vicariously satisfied. We discuss this daydreaming called egotistic castle-building by Lewis, highlighting its morbid variant, which finds a parallel in the Girardian notion of the angelic double , developed from a reading of Proust. Now, as egotistic castle-building in its turn depends on sympathy as defined by Adam Smith, a concept which includes moral approval, we investigate the types of characters who obtain the moral approval of readers, contrasting the warriors from Homer s poems with Christian knights in order to show that Christianity directs moral approval towards the victims. In a Christian society, fictional heroes must be people who are persecuted or at least marginalised.