Representing the view of those who aren’t neurostimulated by text, Pierre Bayard, professor of literature at the University of Paris and author of a dozen books himself, has made the case persuasively for meaning separated from text in his cheekily-titled book, How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read. Bayard presents all the ways we can encounter texts and derive what we need from them without reading the first word, the second word, the third word, and so forth until the last word.
Bayard has upended the academic world by disclosing he teaches books he hasn’t read from first word to last word to his undergraduate students in literature. He makes the case that he knows the plots, characters, important passages, the place of the book in the author’s oeuvre, the author’s place in the literary canon. He knows the reviews. He’s engaged in the discourse of the literary and academic community regarding the book. In short, he knows everything he should know to teach the book.
What’s more, he argues that those of us who have read the book from the first word to the second word to the third word and so on to the last word are doing what Bayard calls, unreading, which is to say, forgetting. Scholars aren’t required to memorize every word of every book they teach. Invariable they lose huge portion of the works they read and studied to the inevitable decay of memory. He recounts with some poignancy, authors inability to remember significant portions of book they written themselves.
He makes the case for himself to Deborah Solomon at the NYTimes here: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/magazine/28wwln-Q4-t.html
Best to read it yourself because maybe I’m not remembering it accurately.