Notes on reading and the reading activity

Think about yourself as a reader. How do you read? That is, what do you do when you read? How do you determine "meaning" in a text? How do you decide that such-and-such a text, line, image, or whatever "means" thus-and-so? Think about all the experiences – literary and otherwise – that have prepared you to read the assigned readings in this course. Try to figure out ways in which you have been "conditioned" (as the behavioralist psychologist puts it) or "programmed" (as the sociologist might say) to read in particular ways.

Much of this conditioning is so familiar that we as readers are no longer even aware of it. But it is there nevertheless, and one concern of this course is to explore – even if only just a little bit – how that conditioned mind-set got there: how and why it evolved as a part of the political, social, cultural, economic, religious, and aesthetic history of the 18th and 19th centuries in England.

So you should ask yourself about the various factors and influences that have formed you into who and what you are today – and how you got there as a result of those (and other) forces. When you read, do you read as a woman or as a man? As a person belonging to a particular age-group or otherwise defined peer group? As an American citizen (and is that different from some sort of abstract "international" or non-national position)? What religious views do you bring to your reading? What political views? What philosophical and aesthetic principles? What is your economic status, and how has your family's economic status conditioned you to read in certain ways? What about both negative and positive experiences and influences in your life – how have these affected in advance the way you respond to what you read?

Two quotations for you to consider, both from the “Introduction,” by Thomas McLaughlin, to Critical Terms for Literary Study. Ed. Frank Lentricchia and Thomas McLaughlin. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1990.

Value and meaning [in literature] are the outcomes of an active process, and that process always occurs within a specific cultural and political context. It is the reader who produces meaning, but only by participating in a complex of socially constructed and enforced practices. Value and meaning do not transcend history and culture, just as literature itself does not. Interpretation – the process of producing textual meaning – does not live in a realm of certain truths; it lives in a world where only constructions of truth are possible, where competing interpretations argue for supremacy.

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The production of literature always occurs within a complex cultural condition, and its reception is similarly situated. Authors and readers are constituted by their cultural placement. They are defined inside systems of gender, class, and race. They operate inside specific institutions that shape their practice. They have been brought up inside powerful systems of value, especially powerful because these systems present values as inevitable rather than as ideological. As a result, acts of reading are always culturally placed, angled at the text from a specific point of view. Readers cannot legitimately claim to speak from outside or above the culture in some abstract and objective position that allows access to the hidden but authentic truth. Reading relies too much on the values and habits of mind that culture ratifies to claim an anthropological objectivity.

Stephen C. Behrendt, Fall 2011