In a 1964 piece published in The Times Literary Supplement entitled “Jasmine,” Naipaul succinctly charts the transformations in perceptions of literature that he underwent from his schooling in Trinidad through his university years at Oxford. Offered as an insight into the ways in which a reader is affected by his or her cultural environment, the essay also provides a critique of the formal practices of studying literature, and the alienating effects he believes they achieve. Rather than attribute a Brechtian result, Naipaul faults the “scientific” study of “texts” because it divorces a reader from “wandering among large tracts of writing,” and from relating “literature to life” (The Overcrowded Barracoon, pp. 26–27). Since part of the essay's objective is to try and explain the built-in alienation that a writer from a colony must overcome in order to bridge the experiential separation bred by colonial marginality, his antipathy towards literary scholarship offers itself as an interesting analogy. In his insistence that literary criticism is only an alienating activity, he refuses to acknowledge that the textual universe established by codifying “reading,” or hermeneutics, contains in its exercises the bridges and trajectories that contribute to dialogical exchange.