Thinking with Metaphors in Medicine: The State of the Art by Alan Bleakley (review)

Abstract

that will follow. The professionalization of literary criticism, a story told in part by Moi, was necessary in its time. In historical cycles, however, what begins by liberating something ends up suppressing something else. The metaphor of the Protestant Reformation took over my thinking as I held these books together. What they offer is nothing less than a new dispensation of readership that has no need for priestly mediation. What counts is that literature connect to the life of the reader; more exactly, the moment when a reader feels that connection, moments that seem, as Davis describes them, to be a form of secular grace. The connections of reading to life should remain multiple and unstable, never settling into another fixed narrative that sets boundaries around a life’s possibilities. What counts is how companionship, both with what is read and within communities of shared reading, enables confronting fears, being able to see through them to what Georgina, with whom I started, calls “what’s really going on.” Although if you asked her what that is, she would probably reread to you, aloud, a passage from Conrad; that’s the circularity of it. This new dispensation for reading does not put critics or teachers of literature out into the cold. Davis’s research and The Reader’s practices both emphasize that reading needs dialogue with other readers, and dialogue needs facilitation—but facilitation is not mediation. Davis’s continuing work as a literary biographer shows how scholarship still has a vital role. But these books mark a shift in locus of authority and in purpose. Reading is for life.