Some guideline considerations
         for reading assignments

The following questions will help you to gain a greater sense of some of the ways you can read the texts for this course within various historical and cultural contexts. These questions ask you to think about how you read texts, and also to think about how texts came to be written -- and read -- at various times in history. The questions ask you to consider some of the relationships that have existed over the course of the last several centuries among authors, their various audiences, and the texts of the works those authors wrote, as well as how each of those considerations intersects with our own experiences as readers.

I. Author and Text

1. What is the relationship between the author and the narrator?
—Between the author and the protagonist?
—Between the author and the "milieu" in which the work transpires?

2. What can you learn from history generally (including "history," politics, economics, science, religion, sociology, psychology, and cultural history in general) that helps us better to understand how and why the author wrote what she or he did? How does this information, in other words, help to explain the text?

3. Are there any things about the text that seem to make sense only when you work out (or discover) particular historical facts or other contemporary information?

4. Are there any aspects of the text that seem to be "universal" – things that transcend time, space, and cultural difference?

II. Author and Audience

1. What is the narrator's relationship with her or his audience of readers in terms of the historical moment at which the text was written?
– What values, assumptions, beliefs, and/or prejudices about people, society, and life do they share? How do you know?

2. What is the narrator's relationship with her or his audience of readers in terms of the present historical and cultural scene?
– What values, assumptions, beliefs, and/or prejudices that were held by the author and the audience of the time would not (or might not) be similarly shared today?
– Which ones would be the same, or approximately the same?

3. Is the narrator reliable? That is, can we accept at face value everything the narrator tells us? Are we able to assume the narrator is telling us the "truth"? If so, how do we know? If not, how do we know that?

4. Who was the author's original audience? That is, for whom – for what sort of intended readers – was the text originally intended? How do you know?
– How was the text originally published? That is, in what form(s) did it originally appear in its time? And how was it distributed? How did people get access to the text?

5. Imagine that you are a reader of your present age, but living at the time and place when and where the work first appeared. What might be your reactions and responses to the work, do you suppose? In what ways would those reactions differ from those of your parents? Your teachers? Other people you know? Leaders in public life?

6. In what ways do you suppose that your reactions to the work today – as a contemporary, early 21st-century reader – differ from those of the audience who read the work when it first appeared?
– In what ways do you suppose those reactions are the same?

Stephen C. Behrendt – Fall 2011