Reading Imaginative Literature
Reading imaginative literature requires a different posture from reading expository works. Fiction and poetry do not mainly proceed by terms, propositions, and arguments. They teach through form, image, character, movement, and experience.
Adler's negative advice is memorable. Do not resist the experience. Do not look for propositions where the work is operating poetically. Do not read a novel as if it were a disguised treatise. The reader's job is to let the work act on the imagination while still remaining alert enough to see its unity, key movements, and implied truth.
This makes imaginative reading unexpectedly demanding. It is easier to fake understanding of nonfiction by repeating propositions than it is to explain why a story or poem moved, convinced, or satisfied you.
The concept belongs near figurative language and inferencing, because much of the meaning in imaginative work is carried by implication rather than explicit statement.