Changing Lives through Literature

Waxler, Robert P.. “Changing Lives through Literature.” PMLA 123.3 ( 2008 May), 678-683.

680 Each reader has read the same story differently. A series of shifting voices emanates from the story and continues around the table, an ongoing and expanding conversation that reveals surprises, opening us to new possibilities just as it resists and conceals the unnamed ghost that we cannot fully grasp but that also calls to us, to our shared vulnerability. We all begin to position ourselves in the world through such multilayered exchange and negotiation, glimpsing, for a moment at least, the rich and strange complexity of other mortal lives as well as our own. Literature offers all of us this—the opportunity to let the rigid roles melt away for a moment, the pleasure of finding another voice, a voice that names us and calls us home.