Rereading and Teaching

Reading these secondary readings and through our class discussions, I'm starting to think about these issues not so much as how we understand them in relation to literary history, but rather how we decide to communicate them-simply, how we choose to teach these issues. Many of us are in graduate school hoping to achieve the same goal: to teach in a post-secondary institution. It is impossible to deny that we are incredibly indebted and influenced in our way of thinking through novels and rating their artistic merit by early literary critics. While our criteria of what makes good literature may have changed throughout the years, we still are in the tradition of rating, judging, critiquing literature, of expecting good literature to do certain things, to produce certain feelings in the reader.

I was interested in the emphasis on re-reading that Lynch finds in eighteenth and nineteenth novels. Lynch argues that with a burgeoning publishing market, readers needed to distinguish themselves as intelligent pursuers of art rather than vapid consumers. Lynch writes that there was "the new insistence on making reading itself an object of observation--on devising criteria that might distinguish good uses of 'every person's property' from bad and that would make some persons' relations to their properties more personalized" (130).
Lynch goes on to argue that it is both the restriction of certain books from one's reading and the rereading of others that make for a cultured reader.

Lynch uses Pride and Prejudice as an example of the importance that was inscribed in the practice of rereading. Lynch writes, "Austen identifies to her readers the proper means of and motives for literary experiences when she demonstrates that the truth of a letter is situated beneath or beyond the face of the page and when she demonstrates that character cannot be known at first sight" (131). The need for rereading suggests that literature is, using the same language Lynch uses to describe characters, round rather than flat. Literature has dimensions that require deep thought, intense attention, and rereadings and one will not acquire all that literature has to offer with just a fast reading.

So, what does this have to do with teaching? A lot. I think we have to keep in mind that one does have to be taught how to read in a certain way and that students, especially outside of our discipline, might be resistant to this idea. There were a couple of posts this week on academic blogs dealing with the issues of undergraduate students in the sciences who resent having to work in English classes. The authors of the posts summarize stories of such students who complain of certain novels making them "feel stupid," or of novels that aren't realistic or that don't somehow relate to that student's own life.

The author of the blog writes,

When I am feeling ungenerous, I think this sort of response is about the very
real lack of respect that people in the world have for my discipline. I think
that such people would never question feeling challenged or in over their heads
in a science or math class - those are "real" disciplines don't you know - but
anybody who is moderately literate and has a library card is totally as
qualified as a reader of literature as any Ph.D. Because that's the thing: this
student's antipathy to the course material and to the course itself is about the
fact that the student feels affronted by the fact that ze can't just coast
through. Ze can't fathom that there are ways of thinking about literature that
go beyond "I connect with this character" or "it's a good story." And so yeah,
ze may be expressing that as "this stuff treats me like I'm stupid and hurts my
feelings," but I think that the underlying thing is a total lack of respect.

I have been thinking this for awhile, but this blog author hit it on the nail. As long as one is literate, then one can read and to read is to read-to get all there is out of a novel. However, even if one can count, one does not assume that he/she can do advanced calculus. The insistence of reading advocates that reading is more complicated, that one must approach literature as one would approach any other sort of academic endeavour. The issue becomes how do we as educators convince resistant students that they must devote energy to reading?