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.