We Learn Through feelings

“ We Learn Through feelings.” This quote by Virginia Woolf, is fairly demonstrative of the focus maintained in her piece “ How one should read a book.” Virginia Woolf strongly suggests making reading personal and sacred among individuals.

In this piece she makes use of the following rhetorical devices possible, division, and greater, in order to express the importance of the relationship between reader and author, and how the exploration of this relationship, is crucial to one’s reading experience.

First, Virginia Woolf portrays her point of view as accessible, with the use of the Possible Mindset. She suggests taking down all your preconceptions of literature, and to commence reading with a flexible mind. “ If you hang back, and reserve and criticise at first, you are preventing yourself from getting the fullest possible value from what you read.” She chose her words carefully, she makes it extremely obvious how imperative it is to be capable of taking your own perception of each reading, and in time, transform it according to personal perspective. She advises at first though, to observe without any bias, and to exercise judgment second. Despite the gravity of this responsibility, she makes it known, that it is competent of all readers.

Virginia Woolf also suggests writing as a tool to understand and appreciate the gift of a writer. “ Then turn from your blurred and littered pages to the opening pages of some great novelist…Now you will be better able to appreciate their mastery. It is not merely that we are in the presence of a different person, but in a different world.” Woolf introduces to us again the Possible Concept, while making us better able to appreciate authors and the situations they present to us in their novels in the Greater Concept. She employs the use of metaphor by comparing literature as windows into the past, bringing two worlds together, the past, and the present, as well as the future. This advises the reader, to once again keep an open mind in their perceptions of novels, and to introduce old concepts to new concepts. She suggests that mystery may reveal itself through novels, and that authors exist as guides through the oblique mystery of reading.

Virginia Woolf also makes use of Division, by carefully analyzing the stylistic qualities of different pieces of writing, and suggesting ways on how to interpret them appropriately. For instance, when speaking of poetry Woolf makes it clear, that there is no prepared perception of poetry, the reaction is unique from one individual to the next. “Thus we create the mood, intense and generalized, unaware of detail, but stressed by some regular, recurrent beat, whose natural expression is poetry; and that is the time to read poetry when we are most able to write it.” She once again, makes it seem possible and accessible to all readers, demonstrating how poetry unfurls itself by first writing it, and appreciating it. She also exhibits how poetry is personal, that there is signifigance without perceiving it’s understood meaning, it reveals it’s own purpose within each individual reader. She Also then makes a division and explains fiction. “ The illusion of fiction is gradual;it’s effects are prepared.” She also characterizes biographies as roadmaps into people’s lives, as well as past events. Each class of writing is classified by their reader’s reaction.

Virginia Woolf wishes to introduce to each reader, the acknowledgeable gift of judging the values behind each method of writing. The most important value expressed by Virginia Woolf is the personalization of each piece of writing, and how it received differently and exclusively from each individual. She demonstrates ways to adapt and challenge your mind to conform to different techniques of writing, and shows how being a reader, is the ultimate reward.