Reading as Inhabiting

After reading this blog entry about the notion of the 'literary artifact',  I was inspired to write the following:

Maurice Merleau-Ponty somewhere mentions that a novelist creates a world that beckons to the reader, who then comes to inhabit it. While there is, of course, something that sounds suspiciously like an assumption that the reader can somehow access the writer's consciousness in this claim, Merleau-Ponty is on to something. The architectural metaphor helps us to think about reading in a way more profitable than considering it simply as the perusal of an "artifact." In my next entry on this topic, I will explore how a novel is like a house(s), a short story like a room(s), a poem like a hallway(s), and so on. (And you can find out why they are sort of plurals.)