Plurality in Literary Reading: A Comparative Study of the ‘Goodreads’ Reviews of Moustache and Mama Africa

Abstract

The paper tries to address the plurality of ‘literary reading’ through a comparative analysis of the Goodreads reviews of Mous-tache. Inspired by Derek Attridge's idea of the 'event of literature', the paper considers a literary 'work' as an event performed in a reader's relation with the 'text'. The same 'text' can be read as diffe-rent 'works', and each review is about a particular reading which is a 'work'. The differences among these works attest to the plurality of literary reading. Additionally, the paper refers to Attridge's type/ token distinction to elaborate on the plurality of the reviews. Also, Maurice Natanson's idea of the 'temporal horizon' of reading helps to explain the commonalities and differences among the reviews. Similarly, each reading is singular as it happens through the 'com-plicity of a background' (Merleau-Ponty). Apart from the reviews, the paper also analyses the interviews of the author and the trans-lator to see how the understandings about the same 'text' can vary considerably according to the differences in the 'works'. The larger scope of the paper is to present the platform of Goodreads as a nostalgic space that reminds the academics in literary studies about the 'joy of reading literature' which stands in contrast to the 'pleasu-re of analysing literature'. The openness to pluralities embodies the joy of reading, and then the reader transcends the theoretical en-deavours to decode 'a fixed meaning'.