Episode Details

Is your reading just an “escape”??

Your favorite “escape” read might be a gated community for your conscience. Today, we interrogate the “Catharsis Commodity” and ask if our reading habits are just another layer of the Hideous Bargain. Explore the ethics of reading and the “Empathy Trap” in this look at the arguments of Suzanne Keen and Louise Rosenblatt.

We expand the “Hideous Bargain” to include the very act of consuming this podcast and the literature it discusses. We ask if we are truly “walking away” from the bargain, or if we are merely co-authoring the child’s abuse through passive, frictionless consumption.

Episode 6.34 –

The Ethics of Reading: Frictional Thoughts

Readings & Resources:

• Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique, 2015.
• Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel, 2007.
• Nussbaum, Martha C. Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, 1992.
• Rosenblatt, Louise M. The Reader, The Text, The Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, 1978.
• Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays, 1989.
• Kutz, Eleanor, and Hephzibah Roskelly. An Unquiet Pedagogy: Transforming Practice in the English Classroom, 1991.
• Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Writers in Politics: Essays, 1981.
• Suvin, Darko. “Estrangement and Cognition.” Strange Horizons, 2014. https://strangehorizons.com/wordpress/non-fiction/articles/estrangement-and-cognition/

Some Key Terms from this episode:

• Cognitive Estrangement: Intellectualizing emotional experience using new or unfamiliar concepts to force readers to critically examine and make connections to their lived reality. 
• Unquiet Pedagogy: An educational philosophy and practice that deliberately disrupts reader comfort by compelling learners to engage difference and to recognize the non-neutral nature of their learning.
• Transaction (Aesthetic Transaction): For Rosenblatt, the messy, active dialogue between the reader and the text where meaning is not passively received, but frictionally constructed by the reader.
• Frictional Reading: From Steve Chisnell, the act of slowing our reading to examine difference, to consider significance, and to carry that meaning-making to the larger world. 

Listener’s Guide Reflection Questions

1. The Nature of the Escape: When you reach for a book to “hide from the world,” what specific “outside” noise or responsibility are you most afraid will follow you into the garden?
2. The Transaction of Tears: If you could no longer use a character’s suffering as a “pressure-release valve” for your own emotions, how would your choice of what to read change?
3. The Cognitive Friction: Why does the prospect of “not thinking”—even for a moment during a leisure activity—feel like a luxury rather than a surrender of your humanity?
4. The Path to Praxis: If the energy from your next “frictional” read had to