Monday, October 10, 2005

Jordan & Walker

It's interesting that the two pieces our textbook presents for introducing the literary genre of essay are by June Jordan and Alice Walker. These essays, "Many Rivers to Cross" (Jordan) and "In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens" (Walker), and these women connect in so many ways. Besides the fact that both women are African-American, they were close friends, activists, and prolific writers. Peacework Magazine's tribute to Jordan ends with her poetic tribute "For Alice Walker." For her part, Walker believed that Jordan "is as courageous, as rebellious, as compassionate, as she is original. . . an inhabitant of the entire universe."

Both of these essays, interestingly, were originally written as speeches for conferences. And what about the titles?

But as often happens, their similarities simply highlight their differences. "Much writing about literature compares two or more texts," because, as Schilb and Clifford point out, "you can gain many insights into a text by noting how it resembles and differs from others" (p. 70). The focus of Jordan's and Walker's essays are different, as are their tone, diction, and point. And they speak to us in different ways.

What do you think? How did you react to these two essays? Did having them together help or hinder your readings? Why do you think Schilb and Clifford picked them? Do these essays point out the power and/or shortcomings of this literary genre? Please respond to either or both of these pieces.

Wednesday, September 21, 2005

Reading the World


"[R]eading is about worlds before it is about words. It is about how the world teaches each of us to read all the texts we encounter and produce - print and live, looked at and lived."
-Andrea R. Fishman, "Reading, writing, and reality: A cultural coming to terms," 2003
What does it mean to be a reader? We all have a reading history of our own: memories of reading and being read to; of understandings and misunderstanding; of books we loved and those we despised; of reading for class and reading for pleasure.

Reading for me has been the story of an engagement with worlds, lives, and ideas through words and books. It has always been tied to text.

Text, though, is not just words. When we read, we construct meaning out of what is around us -- we make symbols and experience meaningful. We bring the internal into conversation and confrontation with the external. And from that encounter we engage with the other. That other can be visual, auditory, or multisensory. That engagement happens on all sorts of levels. Teachers describe these encounters as: "text to self," "text to text," and "text to the world." If the encounter is deep and meaningful these boundaries blend and overlap.

Reading is hard because to do it well we must give ourselves over to someone else: we bend to another's ideas, patterns, thoughts, and logic. We can't just impose ourselves on what we are reading. We must understand it. We meet it halfway. Then we can come to understand it. Reading seems passive, but behind it we are running desperately in place, trying to orient ourselves in another's words; and behind those words are experiences, memories, associations, cultures, interests which are alien to us. Reading is giving your power over to another and then trying to reclaim it as you (re)construct the meaning of the text.

Reading tries to make their world your world at least for a little while. Reading is empowering because in the end the more worlds you get to experience, the richer, deeper, and more meaningful your own can become.

This space is for our class to reflect on our experiences with literature and reading. I hope it will also be a place for us to read each other.