The Myth of Readership

Graduate students and I recently began a course together called Critical Approaches to Literature.  It’s one of simplest pleasures I know of: sitting around a table in good, smart company and making sense of something.  We first had to make sense of the course title. “Critical Approaches to Literature” seems to float in the ether as intangible as imagination.  Made up of just four words, there are two words suspiciously missing. Teaching and reading.  How can there be a critical approach to literature without the critical approach-er and the reader of literature?  

As we began our coursework, we read chapters from Literature as Exploration by Louise Rosenblatt.  Rosenblatt wrote this work in the late 1930s when the dominant methods for teaching literature consisted of using books and poems as historical, biographical, or cultural artifacts.  You’d read Hamlet, for example, and psychoanalyze his character, or you’d investigate the politics of Shakespeare’s turbulent England. Less than half a century prior, the teaching of literature wasn’t even done very often in English.  Those who could afford school read Greek and Latin works mostly—with an emphasis on translation and rhetoric.  While some progress had been made, Rosenblatt saw the need for more.  For Rosenblatt, teachers of literature needed to pay more attention to the experiences of the actual students who were reading.  It was by guiding students from their own life experiences into the text that teachers could help students relate to the works, all in the name of personal and cultural growth. 

I asked my own students to pen responses to Rosenblatt’s writings. I read their papers in various places over the past few days: in cafes, on trains, and libraries.  There is something about slowly spreading out such reading over time.  It almost seems that, somehow, as time and places pass by, what might at first seem daunting (the reading and responding to student work) transmutes into delight. Several students raised one idea in particular that I’d like to focus on here: Rosenblatt’s “reader”. Rosenblatt, like many other education scholars, makes an assumption about students and reading that might well have a devastating effect on teaching: they assume that students and readers are the same thing.  My own experiences as both a student and teacher suggest this isn’t necessarily true.  For a teacher to affirm this relationship between a student and a reader, he must account for the student’s engagements in the act of reading: all the historical experiences reading, the memories of reading, the spaces of reading.

Readers read; students read sometimes.

Rosenblatt misses this point often in her book.  Take, for instance, her chapter entitled "What the Student Brings to Literature," in which Rosenblatt unpacks all the experiences that a student draws on or can draw on when interacting with a text.  Throughout the chapter, Rosenblatt strays from her focus on the student (named in the chapter title) and discusses the reader: "It is easy to detect the influence of the reader's preoccupations and past experiences when, as in the preceding instances, they lead to an interpretation unsupported by the text" (81).  No distinction is made between students and readers, which suggests that for Rosenblatt the two are one.  The seemingly innocuous nature of my point is anything but innocent, however.  The assumption that students are readers--whatever an individual teacher decides "reading" means--leads to choices in pedagogy that then run the risk of creating a classroom, not of readers, but of illusive readers who personate precisely what they know the teacher wants: "readers".  Teachers, too, have their own side in this story.  After all, it is they who lead students in critically approaching literature.

In The Literature Workshop (2003), Sheridan Blau describes the "anxiety of the right reading" experienced by teachers of literature.  Blau asserts that English teachers are caught between the desire to encourage students to interpret literature for themselves, in the spirit of Rosenblatt's "admonition that taking somebody else's interpretation as your own" only yields an empty reading (187), and the reality that teachers teach particular books because they themselves have already determined them to be worth teaching--that is, they have already interpreted the work.  It is this latter point that brings the anxiety of the right reading to the surface: Teachers of literature believe deeply that there is in fact a right and a wrong way to read a text insofar as they deem it worthy of teaching in the first place.  For English teachers, while "right ways" of interpreting are myriad, they are not limitless, which makes the anxiety all the more felt. It's for this reason that Blau sets out to show how "some readings can be wrong and many may be inadequate" (190), not due to the reader's foolishness or stupidity, but "ignorance, inattention, lack of experience, or in some cases the vagaries of a momentarily mistaken perspective" (190).   I agree that the reading skills of students are often in need of guidance from a more experienced teacher.  I also think that to only focus on reading strategies and skills overshoots where students are and assumes a certain degree of readership.  Sure, an instructor might work on particular skills of approaching a poem in class--and these skills might be effective for an in-class activity--but when an instructor treats a student like a reader, he might well assume that such skill- or strategy-based instruction is sufficient.  It is not.  If a soccer coach teaches a young person a series of discrete moves to use when attacking goal, and the young person doesn't ever play soccer as part of his life, what good would such instruction do?  Even if this young person goes to weekly or daily practices, if he doesn't play of his own volition, it doesn't matter.  It might, in fact, spark interest in some; but it would be foolish to assume such a spark in all or even many.  We as English teachers must approach our students as students, not as readers.

Reading is something internal.  While we have devised myriad tests, methods, and assessments to have students externalize their reading, what students produce is not itself reading.  Consider whether or not a reading quiz proves conclusively that a student did or did not complete a reading assignment.  Or, that the student who performs poorly on a reading quiz did just that: he performed poorly on a quiz.  It says little about his reading of literature; it speaks only to his reading of a quiz.  So long as teachers avoid engaging their students about their reading practices and histories authentically, the myth of readership will go on.  But another myth also goes on: a myth of teaching.