Reading and Our Life Stories
In: Open cultural studies, Band 2, Heft 1, S. 591-597
ISSN: 2451-3474
Abstract
This article addresses the topic of reading in the course of life. Its point of departure is the oral-history research carried out between 2009 and 2015 among 138 narrators (informants, respondents, interviewees) across the Czech Republic. The author presents its background, parameters as well as one of its general achievements-four moments of initiations on an axis of our reading life. The first of these takes the form of sociability (being accepted); the second-autonomy (mastering the skill); the third- maturity (being independent), the fourth-reflection (mirroring). What follows from this is the finding that reading undergoes continual development, whether a long continuity or a meandering chain of partial discontinuities. Thus, our oral history-based research shows that being open to the lifetime span provides us with a specific sensitivity towards reading, stressing mainly the fact of its being rooted in particular time-conditioned, life-motivated and purposive situations.