Quotes from Pope Francis’s recent letter about the importance of reading literature:
Difference from AV
“Unlike audiovisual media, where the product is more self-contained, and the time allowed for ‘enriching’ the narrative or exploring its significance is restricted, a book demands greater personal engagement on the part of its reader.
“Readers in some sense rewrite a text, enlarging its scope through their imagination, creating a whole world by bringing into play their skills, their memory, their dreams and their personal history, with all its drama and symbolism. In this way, what emerges is a text quite different from the one the author intended to write.”
It helps the reader
“Literature helps readers to topple the idols of a self-referential, falsely self-sufficient and statically conventional language that at times also risks polluting our ecclesial discourse, imprisoning the freedom of the Word.
“The literary word is a word that sets language in motion, liberates and purifies it. Ultimately, it opens that word to even greater expressive and expansive vistas. It opens our human words to welcome the Word that is already present in human speech, not when it sees itself as knowledge that is already full, definitive and complete, but when it becomes a listening and expectation of the one who comes to make all things new (cf. Rev 21:5).”
Reader not simply a recipient
“The reader is not simply the recipient of an edifying message, but a person challenged to press forward on a shifting terrain where the boundaries between salvation and perdition are not a priori obvious and distinct. Reading directly involves the reader as both the 'subject' who reads and as the 'object' of what is being read.
“In reading a novel or a work of poetry, the reader actually experiences ‘being read’ by the words that he or she is reading. Readers can thus be compared to players on a field: they play the game, but the game is also played through them, in the sense that they are totally caught up in the action.”
(Compiled by Fr Joe Borg)