Power of Reading by Frank Furedi

Author:Frank Furedi
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Published: 2019-11-24T00:00:00+00:00

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READING AND HEALTH: AN ENDURING DILEMMA

The controversy surrounding Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther illustrates the ease with which the rhetoric used to depict the impact and experience of reading leaps from the sphere of the moral to that of physical and mental health. It was frequently reported that readers were infected by the sentiments that they absorbed through the reading of the novel. From this perspective, sentiment could be caught like a common cold and, in the case of Werther, lead to a moral disease or even a condition that terminated with the physical act of self-destruction. Reviews of the reception of best-selling novels in the eighteenth century propose the ‘idea of literary contagion’ as a ‘useful descriptive model’ to account for their popularity.1

More than two centuries later, the language of toxicity, physical harm and contagion continues to be used to portray the risks accompanying the consumption of different forms of media. Moral and physical categories have frequently been combined or used interchangeably to express the risks of reading. The description of romantic fiction in the nineteenth century as ‘moral poison’ is paradigmatic in this respect. Although the poison contaminating the reader is used as a metaphor, the illness inflicted on the person is no less serious than that of a physical disease:2 moral contamination is experienced as a physical condition expressed through medical symptoms.

Throughout history, the relationship between morality and health has been ambiguous. Moral virtue is frequently expressed through physical attributes that radiate its qualities, and moral corruption is signified through physically repulsive symptoms. In the Old Testament leprosy was diagnosed as a disease inflicted by the Almighty against those who deserved such punishment. Health warnings about the dangers of reading have historically highlighted such conditions as mental gluttony, insanity, going mad, hysteria, addictive behaviour, moral corruption and self-destruction.

The diseasing of media consumption continues to the present day. Online addiction, psychological trauma, a proclivity for antisocial and violent behaviour, and damage inflicted on the cognitive functioning of the brain are some of the conditions connected with the media in the twenty-first century. Medicalization – the process through which everyday life has come under the purview of medical authority – has gained unprecedented influence in the modern era, when an expanding range of human experiences have become redefined as issues requiring medical intervention.

Since the rise of secularism and science, moral and cultural concerns have been increasingly depicted through the narrative of mental or physical illness. For example, in recent decades, objections to excessive use of media or undisciplined reading have often been framed through warnings about their effects on cognition. This was the intention of the Cambridge literary critic I. A. Richards, the father of New Criticism, when in 1929 he tried to establish a link between the problem of reading and ‘the sudden diffusion of indigestible ideas’, which ‘are disturbing throughout the world the whole order of human mentality, that our minds are, as it were, becoming of an inferior shape – thin, brittle and patchy, rather than controllable and coherent’.

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