I am a Reader
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 0 Megha Baikadi
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 985 archives and feelings
Dr Alexis Lothian
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Writing Assignment One, 9/10/2013
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¶ 6 Leave a comment on paragraph 6 0 Why are you here? What are the key contexts for your scholarly work? To whom do you feel responsible? What makes academic labor meaningful to you? [reference at least two of the readings]
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¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 I plan to be a teacher. That’s one of the key contexts for my scholarly work, and the area to which academic labor’s meaning orients for me. It is about showing people something new, getting them to look at and think about things in different ways, about teaching new things or getting others to understand possibilities. Academic work is meaningful because it can show people something new, not just about a work but about the ideas, the world, themselves. It is also meaningful because it is a way of showing students not just what answers we have found in texts, not just how to look for them, but how to look for their own answers, and how that journey isn’t so much dry difficult work as play, being passionate about our world and people, and just having fun with it, reading and writing and finding and sharing.
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 0 Well, actually, maybe I need to start with this: I am a reader. It is what I am, and what I do – I read a lot, and I enjoy reading, and thinking, and finding new and shiny things in the texts I devour. It isn’t that a previous love of reading got me started in literature, that I since learned to analyze my texts or to know certain truths or answers about them. It is the act of reading itself, of enjoying what I read, of finding the places I saw something before, or finding that I no longer see the same thing, but something different. It is just the most fun thing ever to find some hidden text or context, to see the ways all of these partial ideas and facts piece themselves together into something new, to find some new meaning in a known text or find some little known piece with connections just leaping off the page. Being too busy to read is like being too busy to eat – it cannot last, and I’m pretty sure that without storybooks my mind will start to seize up and melt down. That’s why I’m here.
¶ 10 Leave a comment on paragraph 10 0 When I see people so busy analyzing texts they forget to enjoy them, it makes me sad. When I see classrooms and teachers (with, always with the best of intentions) it makes me unhappy. As a teacher, I should first be responsible to my students, to the things I’m trying to teach them and that I hope they will find. It is, perhaps, the same kind of thing Gramsci sees his ‘organic intellectuals’ finding (or being found by) – a kind of knowledge that isn’t about the powerplays of academic structure, but people in their lives moving, feeling, and thinking. That means the passion, the joy, the way of looking at things or having them look back at us, finding the places where stories are dreamers and dancers and tricksters and laughing. If I need to know the answers, the consensus based analysis about the great works, I can look them up. If my (future) students need to know, they will look it up. That shouldn’t be the point of teaching or learning literature. Teaching, to me, is about finding those moments (and those texts), or even more than that finding that underlying bouncing sense of I see it, wow, isn’t that so cool and sharing it with others. Of showing other people, students, all of those bright and touching and amusing places where I can see the author has done something clever, or the ideas have connected in some new way, or the definitions have rewritten themselves – or something is happening that the author or text didn’t even intend, and how that might work. And then, after all that, showing them how to look, how to find and enjoy their own version of those places in the works that speak to them. Its about teaching questions, not answers.
¶ 11 Leave a comment on paragraph 11 0 So that is the key context, what I mean when I say I orient my scholarly work around (my) idea of teaching. When I am writing a paper, or making a presentation, basically other academic work, I know I need to look for something that maybe hasn’t been said, or not loudly enough, to look for something with implications beyond just interesting, but most of all I am looking for something that makes me (and others) stop and think, sit up and take notice, just sing with the sheer meaning. I find I completely agree with Sedgewick (123) that knowledge does rather than simply is, that the things we find are performative, and it isn’t a simple case of finding or knowing and remembering a reading, but experiencing it, and each time you experience it, it feels different. Doing the research, finding what other people have written (in the field or out of it) or confirming the facts and figures behind the story are important, but to me this is secondary or even tertiary to the immediate act of reading and understanding.
¶ 12 Leave a comment on paragraph 12 0 Finding things that haven’t been said is really interesting, and can be really difficult (or really not) depending on the work itself and how it is positioned in academic circles. Finding things that have meaning outside the text or outside the field of literature (as the field is imagined to be unconnected to the rest of life). But students generally aren’t on the cutting edge, they are often still at the basics of why does this matter in life. Often, it matters less in a classroom whether the point being made is radical and new to the larger conversation, and matters more that the point is being made by someone so invested in it that they are all but jumping up and down in front of the class in glee. Finding and contributing new readings and understandings helps the field as a whole keep moving, it keeps the teachers in conversation, always discovering new things to talk about and in love with what they do, but I still see it as secondary to teaching.
¶ 13 Leave a comment on paragraph 13 3 A lot of (literary) academic work, it seems to me, is about studying and proving and explaining the stories to they are simplified, so that they make sense, so that they are, like science, reproducible. That someone else can pick up the paper and the book and see the same things the author saw. And that’s good and useful in all kinds of ways, not the least of which is giving people ways in, or ways out, places they can start from in trying to navigate the texts. I think, however, that this kind of mindset is not the only useful way of looking at the world, and that logical isn’t always the thing that we should be being. Science might simplify the world, divide it up and slow it down and logic it out so we can understand how it fits, and we need that… but literature is about throwing things together (especially ones that don’t fit) and complicating everything, about ways in which we are emotional and impulsive and don’t make sense, but also don’t have to. So teaching (and learning) literature is not really the same as the kind of proving and finding answers that academic writing is, not the same skill set as researching at all, and not as disconnected from real life and the world as researching seems to be. For me, hearing and telling stories is all real-world valuable because there is so much in there about different possibilities and looking at the world through different eyes. As Raymond Williams mentions in the introduction to Keywords, language and meaning are not always the same over time, things change and adapt, and words become complex and altered, gain or lose meanings. Texts are the same thing writ large – different texts are intuitive or accessible in different ways to different people, so only focusing in on the ‘great’ works of yesteryear seems to me to be less than helpful. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be taught, we can still find the same things, different things, more than there was, or less than we thought… but they tend to be ‘difficult’ rather than intuitive texts now, and for all that we do need both, we also need to know which is which. Which structures, which feelings and themes (as in William’s Structures of Feeling) are happening now, which are already in the past (and so no longer quite so relevant), and which are just beginning to come forth for our students.
¶ 14 Leave a comment on paragraph 14 1 That is why teaching it is so central and necessary, and why the work done there can be so very meaningful, because it isn’t essentially about high culture or great works or the known consensus based answers by experts. It isn’t really about learning to read so literature analysis skills precede world analysis skills, as if culture was something separate, or even looking at literature as the mirror of culture. Stories are on the inside, reading but also writing the ideas people have and guess and wonder about, it is shaped by ‘the real world’ but also shaping it, in the assumptions people make and the possibilities they consider. Literature is about the past, about the future, about people, and actions, and relationships, it is about psychology and philosophy and political science, it is about ways of putting events together and about taking things apart, it as about concrete objects and abstract symbolisms, it is about exploring bodies and races and gender and historical ways of knowing people and about souls and species and problematizing boundaries and all of the kinds of ways in which we haven’t really known people but might if we tried (except in some story or other we have tried everything, everything) it is cooperatively pulling together a half dozen of these themes and it is desperately tearing off in a dozen directions because they are all, all incompatible. It’s complicated, from the narrowest most purposeful story to the most sprawling inclusive category. But it has to be, because it is about us, about human-people, and what we are and are not and may sometimes be, and we are complicated and running every which way.
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¶ 16 Leave a comment on paragraph 16 0 Antonio Gramsci, “Intellectuals and Education.”
¶ 17 Leave a comment on paragraph 17 0 Eve Kosofsky Sedwick. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading”
¶ 18 Leave a comment on paragraph 18 0 Raymond Williams “Structures of Feeling”
¶ 19 Leave a comment on paragraph 19 0 Raymond Williams “Keywords (Culture)”
All right my dear Megha,
I was attracted by your title. I think this is a witty title. Being a reader means a lot. It means being a critical person, which means, among many things, questioning and analyzing. The cornerstone of change is questioning the status quo, which is the major mission of the modern teachers.
Along these lines, “Finding things that haven’t been said” is illuminating. Still, I would suggest modifying this into “adding to things that have already been said.” This is because, ultimately, there is nothing that has never been shed light on before. As some critics say, all writings are plagiarized by one way or another.
I’m glad you like the title. It really is the heart of what I think is important in the world.
I think you’re right about that line, too, the two go hand in hand. It is finding new things, new ways to say things, and ways to reply to things already said.