From intro to Literary Seductions

Though i don't agree with many of ideas presented in chapters following the intro, there are some good references and quotes in Frances Wilson's opening. She is obviously a good researcher, though I think somewhat narrow in her analyses.

Anyway, some of the good bits:

"Reading, Barthes observes, is like those other solitary acts, praying and masturbation. ...We all indulge in the psychic dissolution of space when we read, the experience of being neither 'here or there', as Michele de Certeau says of the reader straddled between the inside of the book and the outside of the other world, 'one or the other...simultaneously inside and outside, dissolving both by mixing them together'. ...Freud felt hysteria was a loss of one's place in one's story, the letting-go of a narrative structure vital to one's sense of self. The task of the psychoanalyst is to enable the patient not to distinguish between fiction and reality but to recognize - and to read - the shape of the fiction she gives to experience. ...Laura Riding said 'poems are born of the tension between saying everything and saying nothing.'"