I draw these two reading approaches together by understanding them as activities driven by simulation. What I mean by ‘simulation’ really, is empathy. Empathy is a word with endless definitions. In fact, the field of empathy studies has only ever settled on one thing, and that is the problem of defining what is meant by the term. For the purpose of this essay, I understand empathy as a form of imaginative simulation and fantasy projection. The empathiser is the simulator, and the subject of empathy is the simulative target. The result of knowledge about another person or thing is a potential result of empathy, but it is not a given. The same goes for altruism. Empathy may not necessarily lead to a positive moral or ethical outcome. Effects depend on the user(s) and how they enter the empathic game being played. There are no guarantees or certainties, only the invitation to play.

The framework of the game is a helpful tool for thinking about these questions because of the relation games have with pleasure, simulation, and a perceived lack of seriousness. Like empathy, defining the term ‘game’ is an evolving event which grants it a flexibility and capacity for experimentation. In this exercise, I consider a game to involve an interaction between a player or players and a selected fictional object. The question of the outcome or the object of the game is something I tease out by reconsidering literary education’s simulative value. What I hope to show by drawing these seemingly disparate qualities together is that the game of reading for pleasure offers a valuable lesson for education. This lesson is the importance of remaining open to textuality and resisting the demands of pre-determined outcomes.

Education is facing a crisis in the way it values learning. In the context of secondary school in New South Wales, teachers and students are subject to the rigidity of the Higher School Certificate exam. Students often practice a primarily Leavisite approach to reading in HSC English, where their work is valued by the number of textual ‘techniques’ they identify and their ability to argue on behalf of outdated claims about literature like its universality, or unquestioned capacity for moral change. It is not lost on me that students in HSC English use the exam specific discourse of composer and responder, for author and reader. Students must respond to a larger marketised system that operates beyond the composition of the text, even though the HSC positions itself as an objective measurement of value, à la Leavis and Richards. Too often, student responses to literature in this context are pre-determined by a powerful and faceless system. Worse yet, these results are converted into metrics that claim the ability to value a human individual’s intellectual capabilities.

In university education, pre-determined outcomes are increasingly becoming fashionable. For example, at the University of Sydney, there are a series of new Graduate Qualities students are said to emerge from their courses with. These range from innocuous values like ‘Depth of disciplinary expertise’ to clearly neoliberal concepts like ‘Influence’. These qualities are problematic because they make assumptions about learners and the nuances of learning that take place in classrooms. While the result of learning may very well achieve some or all of these qualities, the idea that abstract personal attributes can be reduced to a checklist is cause for concern. This signals the dilemma education faces as late capitalist logics close in on how we teach and learn.

I do not have an issue with outcomes on the whole. Surely some understanding of how students are learning is necessary in an educational setting, and that is what assessment is for. Outcomes can be helpful because they shape the scope of an educational act. What I want to resist is the tyranny of the pre-determined outcome. A pre-determined outcome is distinct from an outcome because a pre-determined outcome assumes what the student is yet to learn. It obscures their unique approach to learning in favour of a pre-packaged version of the future. Pre-determined outcomes, in literary studies especially, have the potential to shut-down the nexus between the open-ended, immersive, simulative reading associated with pleasure reading and the social, political, and cultural necessity of reading critically. This collaborative effort between pleasure and criticism seems to present the possibility for something like Barthes’s bliss. And if learning literature is an act of collaborative empathy, how could we possibly claim to know the result before we begin? Where is the fun or potential in knowing how the game will end?

Reading for pleasure is a valuable concept to critically align with literary education because of its ability to resist pre-determined outcomes. To read for pleasure is to begin a playful, empathic event without a rigid notion of the result. It presents an opportunity to reject pre-determined outcomes and the encroachment of neoliberal logics on education. However, pleasure alone may obscure the social, gendered, historical, political, and racial reality of a text. As Barthes points out, pleasurable reading may only reinforce the perception of the reader and limit their capacity for intellectual disruption. Critical reading is essential, especially for education, because mindless simulative enjoyment has the potential for harm. To make matters even more complex, the game of reading in education is a paradox because it is a subjectively simulative, yet collaborative act. However, I would like to posit that when we simulate a text without anticipating the end goal, possible outcomes merge to form a new horizon. The opportunity for fusion offers its own reward, and a state of bliss emerges as a possibility.