For another class I had to read Vladimir Nabokov's "Good Readers and Good Writers," and I thought it pertained to what we are talking about in lit. crit. Nabokov has certain ideas about reading and how one should approach reading. He thinks that to fully appreciate the text and to get the most out of it you should leave all preconceived notions about the text at the door before you read it.

One shouldn't come to a book and only focus on its elements of social commentary because you'll miss other aspects of it. Nabokov says you should "fondle [the] details" of a work. We should enter into the world of the book or novel and forget our world, and we shouldn't rely on those works to give us a complete picture of the real world.

Nabokov says a good reader should have "imagination, memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense." Both Nabokov and Percy Shelley place importance on imagination. Similar to the romantics Nabokov thinks the reader should bring his or her imagination to the work. Reading shouldn't just be a passive activity. It's an active activity that should engage the mind.

But I think Nabokov has more elements of Modernism in his theory. He places a lot of emphasis on the artistic sense and seems to detatch the author from the work. The reader has to detatch themselves from their world and use an "impersonal imagination" to read the text with.