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Merav Roth’s (2020) unique book, A Psychoanalytic Perspective on Reading Literature: Reading the Reader, looks at the psychic processes, both unconscious and conscious, that come into play in the internal world of a reader during the course of reading literary texts. Come into play, meaning that these processes don’t merely serve as the inner environment that facilitates the reading of literature but are, also, the very result of that reading itself.
This book is a textbook in a very literal (text-book) and profound sense. In addition to uncovering the maps of reader and reading, it succeeds in laying bare a map of the psyche itself, including the infinite ways in which it collapses and reconstitutes itself. While the literary reader is its formal subject, the book extends beyond her or him. It is, in fact, an exemplary book on psychoanalysis which can variously be read as dealing with what happens to the analyst facing the patient’s text, or what happens to the patient facing the analyst’s text—or as dealing with what we all experience in the presence of not only printed texts but the complex text of our own reality—both external and internal.
Looking into close accounts that touch on the unconscious aspect of literary reading (as she describes in the preface), Roth had an idea that came to be the central focus of her doctoral dissertation on which this book is based. She extracted and studied testimonies about reading experiences from 17 literary works, which differed in terms of genre, style, and content (two novels, two essays, two short stories, a play, and five poems), sharing one thing in common: they carried references—direct and indirect, explicit and implicit—
to their protagonist’s, speaker’s, or author’s reading experience. Wherever such expressions appeared, Roth analyzed the protagonists’ or speakers’ reading experience from a psychoanalytic perspective, casting a light, in that way, on the unconscious psychic processes of literary readers and the way