Wiki – Laboratoire Ex situ / René Audet

Référence : WOLF, Maryanne, Proust and the Squid, The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Harper, 2007, 336 p.

Synthèse : Fruit d’une recherche interdisciplinaire (entre linguistique, archéologie, littérature et neuroscience), un ouvrage qui aurait fait un certain bruit à sa sortie (il a été réédité), et qui semble particulièrement pertinent pour nourrir la question de l’expérientialité de la lecture en contexte numérique. Il traite aussi toutefois des troubles de lecture et pourra ainsi paraître plus pertinent pour la périphérie du projet. Sa conclusion semble pointer sur le fait que la lecture web est « skimmed and filleted », soit une lecture écrémée et utilitariste, au contraire de la lecture classique qui autorise plus facilement l’abstraction et la constitution d’idées nouvelles.

Mots-clés : Expérientialité, History of Reading, Linguistic, Literature, Archeology, Neuroscience

Langue : Anglais

Format : Papier

Description existante : « “Human beings were never born to read,” writes Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and child development expert Maryanne Wolf. Reading is a human invention that reflects how the brain rearranges itself to learn something new. In this ambitious, provocative book, Wolf chronicles the remarkable journey of the reading brain not only over the past five thousand years, since writing began, but also over the course of a single child's life, showing in the process why children with dyslexia have reading difficulties and singular gifts. Lively, erudite, and rich with examples, Proust and the Squid asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians was a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today's technology-driven literacy. The potential transformations in this changed reading brain, Wolf argues, have profound implications for every child and for the intellectual development of our species. », trouvé sur https://www.harpercollins.com/9780060933845/proust-and-the-squid, consulté le 14 juin 2017.

Compte rendu existant : SMITH, PD, « Proust and the Squid is an inspiring celebration of the science of reading. In evolutionary terms, reading is a recently acquired cultural invention that uses existing brain structures for a radically new skill. Unlike vision or speech, there is no direct genetic programme passing reading on to future generations. It is an unnatural process that has to be learnt by each individual. As director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in Boston, Wolf works with readers of all ages, but particularly those with dyslexia, a condition that proves “our brains were never wired to read”. Wolf therefore has much of practical value to say about why some people have difficulty reading and how to overcome this. Reading stories to pre-school children is crucial, she says, as it encourages the formation of circuits in the brain, as well as imparting essential information about fighting dragons and marrying princes. Wolf's story of the development of the reading brain encompasses many fields, from linguistics, archaeology and education to history, literature and neuroscience. The cultural centrality of reading has already been expertly explored, for example in Alberto Manguel's A History of Reading. However, Wolf shows how evolutionary history and cognitive neuroscience are casting new light on “the complex beauty of the reading process”. In particular, she highlights the brain's astonishing plasticity, its “protean capacity” to forge new links and reorganise itself to learn new skills: we are all born with the “capacity to change what is given to us by nature … We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs”. Different languages put their own unique stamp on the brain, creating distinctive brain networks. Reading Chinese requires a different set of neuronal connections from those needed to read English. As the writer Joseph Epstein has said, “we are what we read”. Doctors treating a bilingual person who developed alexia (inability to read) after a stroke found remarkable evidence of this. Although he could no longer read English, the patient was still able to read Chinese. (…) But in the “Google universe”, with its instant over-abundance of information, how we read is being changed fundamentally. On-screen texts are not read “inferentially, analytically and critically”; they are skimmed and filleted, cherry-picked for half-grasped truths. By doing this we risk losing the “associative dimension” to reading, those precious moments when you venture beyond the words of a text and glimpse new intellectual horizons. Although not opposed to the internet, Wolf concludes on a cautionary note: we need to be “vigilant” in order to preserve “the profound generativity of the reading brain”.», trouvé sur https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/apr/12/featuresreviews.guardianreview21, consulté le 14 juin 2017.