by Leire Escalada
Many readers fondly remember the book that turned them into readers. It may have been a Grimm brothers’ fairy tale that their mother told them before bedtime. Perhaps it was the adventures of Harry Potter. Or maybe it was the hilarious escapades of Alice in Wonderland that worked their magic. Every reader keeps in their memory that book that turned them into readers during childhood. However, upon reaching adolescence, many young people gradually replace books with screens, and those adventures contained within the pages become nothing more than an old memory. The Reading for Life course, taught at the University of Navarra by professors Rosalía Baena and Álvaro Sánchez-Ostiz, researchers on the REMAP project, seeks precisely to create long-life readers: people for whom reading is part of their everyday lives and who find in it a truly transformative experience.
Students from any degree program on campus can choose this elective course, offered within the academic center’s Core Curriculum Institute, where they can discover or rediscover works by Leon Tolstoy, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Art Spiegelman, and Gustave Flaubert. In addition to enjoying great classics by discussing and debating them with their professors and classmates, students have the opportunity to experience firsthand what ‘meaningful reading’ means.
As Baena explains, “these meaningful reading practices participate in the tradition of the Great Books seminar, but with greater emphasis on the reader’s experience. We analyze this experience in its whole process, before, during and after reading, with special emphasis on shared reading in class.”
Likewise, the professor points out that “this course analyses what is called ‘experiential learning’ that only derives from literary texts, and not from other disciplines. This experiential learning has to do with our actual lives”. In this regard, she recalls that “Classic texts speak to us in very contemporary ways”. Finally, she emphasizes that, through this course, in addition to improving their reading skills, participants have the opportunity to develop “key intellectual skills such as curiosity, open-mindedness and attention, among others.”
Today, in an age of artificial intelligence and hyperconnectivity, perhaps more than ever, literature offers a space for resistance, freedom and critical thinking. A place where we can ask ourselves profound questions and approach human dilemmas from different points of view. In Reading for Life, the reading experience is lived both individually and collectively, analyzing the ethical, emotional, and aesthetic impact of each work. Its professors are convinced that the university needs a Reading Revolution, and this initiative seeks to contribute to this great challenge by training life-long readers.