Comments on: Reading is FUNdamental?

By: abstractart

abstractart — Mon, 21 May 2007 21:28:14 +0000

Swarthmore was never at all successful at touching my love of reading.

My love of writing, however, has died a painful and seemingly irreversible death.

By: texter

texter — Sat, 19 May 2007 05:08:35 +0000

To jpool. Sorry, I just read the rest of this thread…

Here is the Nuttall citation:

Reading in the lives and writing of black South African Women. By: Nuttall, Sarah. Journal of Southern African Studies, Mar94, Vol. 20 Issue 1, p85, 14p; (AN 9601120361)
Times Cited in this Database(1)
HTML Full Text

By: Gavin Weaire

Gavin Weaire — Tue, 15 May 2007 18:32:50 +0000

I’m guiltily aware that much of what I do in class could certainly fall into that trap. (I’d like to think that I manage to shade a little towards the more investigatory side. I certainly don’t always know what I’m going to find in a text before I teach it, whether or not I’ve taught it before.)

I wonder if this is more of a problem for, say, a class in modern American literature than it is for mine. In classics, unless I’m deceiving myself, delineating the social landscape through texts (and fortunately, we’re not much burdened with the notion of “literary texts”) has a kind of exotic appeal for many students (and more capacity to surprise?)

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Tue, 15 May 2007 01:35:01 +0000

Yes, that’s another thing that cropped up a lot in the class: the book (and novel) as icon versus the phenomenology of reading. If you think more about the latter, you’re likely aware of the other kinds of reading that do deliver another kind of engagement and pleasure that may not be “sacred” in the same way as fiction. One thing we talked about a lot is habitual reading in public spaces–reading advertisements, reading over the shoulders of strangers, and so on.

By: k8

k8 — Tue, 15 May 2007 00:24:02 +0000

A late return, but what you said about the Goody texts sounds good. Every now and then, I run across recent work from outside literacy studies citing Goody as “the” word on literacy. Frightening, really.

I do think it is interesting that most people associate English with literature. Some of us study writing and rhetoric:-) I do see advantages and disadvantages to Great Books-type approaches. But when it comes to discussions of the loss of pleasure reading/time to read, I wonder how much of this is rooted in the idea that this reading should involve a novel. I’ve run across students who claim they don’t have time to read for pleasure (that is, read novels), but they do read essays, nonfiction, online materials, graphic novels, comics, and other genres not typically associated with school.

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Mon, 14 May 2007 20:48:34 +0000

No, in the cases I read about, it seems to me it’s a problem in the humanities and in some social sciences courses. I think to some extent it’s a specific issue with a certain kind of historicism, a use of texts-as-evidence, especially using literary works as a documentation of some external social terrain, and not so much as investigatory tool as a tool for repeating a kind of orthodox reading of that social landscape. So not really that texts get read historically, but that they get read ritualistically as affirmation of some already-known and somewhat ideological proposition about their contexts.

By: Gavin Weaire

Gavin Weaire — Mon, 14 May 2007 17:57:22 +0000

There’s not much that can be done about the exclusion of the type of reading I brought up from the classroom. I suppose that one can emphasize that reading is not a monolith, and reading for classroom purposes does not invalidate other types of reading in other contexts. But this is something that I would think that most students already know.

The second type of objection seems to me to indicate a much more serious problem, because reading for the classroom shouldn’t be monolithic, either. What particular points are so predictable, and is this a genuinely cross-disciplinary thing?

By: Timothy Burke

Timothy Burke — Mon, 14 May 2007 17:02:15 +0000

At that level, it’s actually pretty complex, Gavin. I have a hard time easily typifying the dissatisfactions that popped up in the papers. Some of it is just as you describe, a loss of reading as private, absorbing and emotionally meaningful. Some were more frustrated by the specific kind of text-work being done in some of their classes. I don’t know that the instructors are joyless, exactly, but I do think there is a kind of predictability in the sorts of interpretative work that some of us do in the classroom that can shade into a sort of ennui.

By: Gavin Weaire

Gavin Weaire — Mon, 14 May 2007 16:11:06 +0000

I’d like to get a better handle on the problem. When students write about losing the joy of reading, do they describe that earlier joy in terms of the type of an immersive, empathic, all-absorbing, and rather private experience, a very close subjective identification with what is going on in the text? (This is what I associate with my own early childhood and adolescence.)

If these aren’t the terms in which they describe the lost paradise, how do they describe it?

I ask this because I’d be surprised if the joyless production of interpretations is actually joyless from the perspective of the instructor. S/he is probably pretty enthused.

By: finlay

finlay — Sat, 12 May 2007 19:15:14 +0000

My solution to this problem recently has been to flee the land of pure history and head towards religious studies. It’s very easy to know why you’re reading such a very technical, dry text when it has to do with beliefs on the level of, you know, salvation and sin and those other big topics. I sort of wish I’d taken Production of History – that seems like a good framework in which to think about history as something that really matters to people. That’s what usually causes me to throw a book away in disgust – I’m a chapter in, and the author is name-dropping theorists like there’s no tomorrow, and I find myself asking “why do I care about this?” and not having an answer.