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Engaged Reading

You know how to read, but reading, like any act, can be performed in a multitude of ways. Let's talk about engaged reading. Sometimes reading is presented as a kind of riddle wherein texts are separated into two levels:
  1. The plot, which is what literally occurs in the text
  2. A coded, secret meaning that the author attempts to communicate to smart people through abstruse symbols
This is a limited way to frame reading, and it's definitely not our approach in this class. It's also a straw man; it's what some people claim happens in English classes rather than what actually does (with rare exception).

So how will we read in this class (and, hopefully, beyond)? We will be fully engaged. We will view a text as a kind of artifact. If you found something one day that you didn't recognize, how might you learn more about it? 
  • You could figure out what it does.
  • You could see if it's unique or if there are others like it.
  • You could find out if it's related to some category of things.
  • You could see how it interacts with other stuff. 
  • You could take it apart and find out how it works. 
  • You could evaluate what others have said about it. 
  • You could ascertain something about the people who made and use it, and gain insight into their lives and culture.
  • etc.
We can do this with texts just as we can with any object. This is being engaged. This is exploring not just what a text says but what it does, how it does it, and what that might mean.

There will always be multiple, even conflicting, results from these explorations. Remember that there is not a single real, true, hidden answer to uncover; there is an infinite amount of relevant data that can be found. However, this doesn't mean that all perspectives on things are equally valuable; BS and shower thoughts aren't what we seek. What we want are the strongest, most evidenced cases we can assemble. This will give us productive insight. We want to be able to prove that what we claim about a text is valid. Assertions with good evidence are stronger than those without it.

So how do we collect evidence and build a case? We can look at things inside the text itself:

  • plot
  • characters
  • themes
  • settings
  • language
  • structure
  • etc.
We also can look at things outside of the text:
  • other texts that seem to connect with it
  • what others have said about the text
  • the author
  • the historical and cultural circumstances present when the text was produced
  • etc.
By looking thoroughly we can start to see patterns and contrasts. We can find out more about how the text is a result of some things and a cause of others. We can learn about the many ways it functions. This practice is called literary criticism. Notice that this is a different kind of criticism than watching a movie (or going to a restaurant, or hearing a song, or reading a book) and stating an opinion about whether it was good or not. As we now can see clearly, that would be a very different task.

Luckily, we're not starting from scratch when we do literary criticism. You already know lots of stuff, and you've been exposed to countless texts. You've also explicitly and implicitly honed your ability to engage. Additionally, people have already done explorations into our and other texts. This means that we can evaluate what they have said, which will help us determine what we want to add. We also can see the methods others have used to look at texts, and learn from their processes.

When you do literary criticism extensively, the kinds of questions you tend to ask about texts start to fit into categories. These different categories can be called critical approaches or schools of criticism. For example, if you tend to ask questions about how gender was represented in texts, you might be interested in Feminist Criticism. If you find yourself curious about how texts reflect the author's or a culture's state of mind, you might be interested in Psychoanalytic Criticism. If you are drawn to how financial or political issues show up in texts or how they surround their production, you might be interested in Marxist Criticism. If you're interested in the different ways texts use language to make meaning you might be interested in Rhetoric, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, or Semiotics. There are many, many other approaches. You can get a general overview of some historically popular ones from Purdue University's Online Writing Lab (OWL) here or from English professor Samantha Blackmon here. 

Ultimately, approaches are tools; they are bundles of relevant issues that can be classified into categories, but they are not magical nor written in stone. All approaches provide certain kinds of questions to ask about texts and certain lines of thought to pursue, but no approach is objectively correct or true. This seems weird, because shouldn't there finally be a right answer here? At the end, can't we say what a text is really about? Well, maybe not. 

Imagine if everyone were observing the same building from different perspectives: tourist walking around it in winter; employees working inside it in spring; a cartographer looking down at it through a camera in an airplane at night; a city planer examining its blueprints; a developer looking up its costs and revenues in a spreadsheet; a skateboarder finding the best lines through its outdoor plaza; birds seeking the best spot to build a nest; rain running down its surface; a homeless person seeking a warm, hidden spot by its HVAC exhaust. Ask yourself: which of these perspectives is the real, "true" one? They all give us valid information, but no single one, or even all of them together, can really claim that the whole of the building is known. We can't walk away saying that we know what the building is about. 

And there's the catch: there doesn't seem to be a way to stand outside of the universe and view things as they truly are. We're always standing somewhere, looking with something and through something. We always have our own subjectivities that may not be universally shared. So, we do our best to present evidence showing that our perspectives are valid, knowing that other perspectives, even ones that contradict us, might be equally valid. This doesn't mean that all observations are equivalent. Without evidence, we wouldn't believe someone who claimed that the building was really a tree, or that it was made of cheese, or that it was in a different city, or that is was put there by aliens.

So it is with texts. There will always be another case that can be made, but not every case will be equally evidenced, and, thus, equally valuable. In this course, we will work toward strong, evidenced positions about particular texts. We'll take them apart and see how they work; we'll connect them with other texts, people, and cultures. That's engaged reading. That's what we'll do.