I’m sitting in on Sara‘s Writing 323: Writing With Style course this summer because she’s heading to the WPA conference in a few weeks, and I’ll be covering the course for her for that week.
Sara’s using Bartholomae and Petrosky’s Ways of Reading, a common writing textbook I’ve been wanting to look at more in-depth and read for a while. I just read the introduction, and I rather like Bartholomae and Petrosky’s take on reading and writing. To quote their very first paragraph:
Reading involves a fair measure of push and shove. You make your mark on a book and it makes its mark on you. Reading is not simply a matter of hanging back and waiting for a piece, or its author, to tell you what the writing has to say. In fact, one of the difficult things about reading is that the pages before you begin to speak only when the authors are silent and you begin to speak in their place, sometimes for them — doing their work, continuing their projects — and sometimes for yourself, following your own agenda. (1)
I try to read this as if I were an undergraduate, as if I didn’t have 4 years of teaching and a graduate degree in rhetoric and writing under my belt. I try to think: would this introduction have helped me as a reader and a writer when I was 18, 19, 20? What Bartholomae and Petrosky write above and in the rest of their introduction I think would have made sense in my personal life (I remember doing this type of stuff — this “speaking for” texts I read, this “tak[ing] responsibility for determining the meaning of a text” [6]), but as a young academic writer, how would this text have affected me in school? Academic writing at that time felt like something I both understood (hey, I could make an argument!) and something I could never get (why am I getting C’s on my papers in first-year writing?). Research as an undergraduate always seemed to be about finding information, about finding what other authorities said so I could find the truth. I don’t think it was until my junior year of college that it became less about “finding the truth” in others and more about what I could do with this information and these texts I read.
Well, let me re-think this. This isn’t entirely true. I remember writing a short analysis paper applying a Frankfurt School-esque cultural critique (I now forget the theorist) to Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times (1936) my sophomore year in my history of pop culture class. Something that term clicked. I began to learn how texts could communicate with each other — what I could do with texts in relation to each other. This wasn’t something I learned in first-year writing. We were then too focused on the compare and contrast essay, the cause and effect essay, all focused solely on literature.
What “caused” that click that term? And would have Ways of Reading facilitated that click sooner? Certainly more than a compare and contrast essay on the characters in E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. At least, I think.
It’s great to see your perspective on this. I always wonder what students are thinking as they read. I wish we had gone deeper with the introduction in class today. Of course we can keep coming back to the whole concept of WAYS of reading and how writing is reading. We definitely got a start on reading for facts versus luxuriating in the company of an author.
OK, I almost said “wallowing” with the author – like wrestling with alligators. Come on – bring it on! Let’s grapple together. Like Jacob wrestling with the angel. I will not let you go until you bless me. Even if I limp for the rest of my life. What authors have made you limp?
Limp… If I remember correctly, Jacob limped for the rest of his life. I love the story of Jacob (as we’ve talked about in person), but I’m not sure if the limping part is really accurate. I surely feel like I have been transformed by some of the authors I’ve read — more accurately, perhaps, the interplay between authors I’ve read and people I’ve talked to about those authors — but do I feel like I am limping? Perhaps for a short while, I was limping, struggling, slowed down by some authors (e.g., Hume, Kant, Adorno, Marcuse, Foucault), but after that stage, while I still struggled with their ideas and texts, I felt more propelled than slowed.
Not that limping necessarily implies one must be slowed. And I’m not even sure what metaphor I would propose in place of “limping.”
It’s funny that you both bring up the concept of difficulty and the figure of Jacob. Of course, difficulty is mentioned explicitly as a key concept in WoR’s introduction, and Bartholomae gets it from his (awesome, brilliant) Pitt colleague Mariolina Salvatori, who’s written considerably about the productive uses of textual difficulty. Interestingly, alleged Bartholomae arch-nemesis (not really, though) Peter Elbow also makes implicit use of the notion of productive difficulty in his concept of “text-wrestling” — in which metaphor he explicitly references Jacob wrestling the angel.