“They don't Read!”... And We?

This paper focuses on the displacement of students' subjective reading experience that has occurred in the last few decades as a result of the dominance of text-centered analytical literary approaches in school education. In the context of today's alarming disengagement from reading among young people, it makes the case for both overcoming the monopoly of analytical approaches and rehabilitating the inspirational potential of reading literary texts in the classroom. In order to awaken young people's interest in literature and reconcile them to reading, the teacher should at some point undertake the risky enterprise of revealing himself as a reader to his students. For it is through our own passion and enthusiasm that we can achieve that contagious effect through which literature reaches young people. In this way, it seems to us, we would also have more chances to counteract the outflow of reading, to befriend today's young people with books and to show them, as Tz. Todorov, that the great texts of the past speak for them, that they give meaning to their inner lives and help them to live better.