Edmundon: Transforming students like lvl 23 Pikachu's

I guess after reading Bayard’s work, Edmundson’s Against Readings seemed to initially provide a less dim perspective on the merits of reading texts in depth. However if Bayard represented literary detachment to its extremity, then Edmundson perhaps leans too far in the opposite direction in asking us to “befriend” our reading. The article works as a critique of contemporary critical literature both in terms of its misguided content and the detrimental effects it has on individualism. Viewing texts through a predefined framework (Edmundson uses Marxism as one example) promotes a distancing scepticism that undermines the true essence of what we should receive from a text, that being a more intimate transformative relationship. At its core this argument is based on the assumption that the value of a text arises from its ability to initiate the “experience of change” in the reader, through which ones morality is in some way influenced for the nourishment of the mind and soul. I can find no reason to disagree with Edmundson’s conceptual link between reading and morality, as even the most morally desolate texts inspire some form of reaction, even in retaliation to the suggestions of a novel. However it seems nearly impossible to separate morality from rationality, rendering Edmundson’s suggestion that the primary role of education is to inspire morality fairly narrow. As readers is it not in our nature to discover why we respond the way we do to certain texts? And in many cases, critical literature about texts can provide insights into the mechanism behind the moral transformations that we are said to experience on some level. I also wonder then, if readers can become inspired and transformed by critical literature. A reader who felt a connected relationship to certain feminine aspects of a “befriended” text, would surely emerge from exploring a feminist reading of that text with a stronger understanding and stronger connection than before. So I guess I feel as though there ought to be a middle-ground between the morale and the rational. In becoming emotionally invested in our reading as Edmundson suggests, I agree that we as readers benefit from the closer relationship. Yet if our reading is distanced from skepticism and rationale, how are we to understand why we respond they way we do?, and how do we further these responses?.  So in turn, perhaps the strongest relationship we can form to a text emerges from the reader being morally reflexive to each reading, whilst simultaneously seeking out the reasons why such reactions are so, through a deep and skeptical review of the critical literature.