David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky
Making A Mark
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 will 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.
This is an usual way to talk about reading, we know. We have not mentioned finding information or locating an author’s purpose or identifying main ideas, useful though these skills are, because the purpose of reading in our book is to offer you occasions to imagine other ways of reading. We think of reading as a social interaction sometimes peaceful and polite, sometimes not so peaceful and polite.
We’d like you to imagine that when you read the works we’ve collected here, somebody is saying something to you, and we’d like you to imagine that you are in a position to speak back, to say something of your own in turn. In other words, we are not presenting our book as a miniature library (a place to find information) and we do not think of you, the reader, as a term-paper writers (a person looking for information to write down on three-by-five cards).
When you read, you hear an author’s voice as you move along; you believe a person with something to say is talking to you. You pay attention, even when you don’t completely understand what is being said, , trusting that it will all make sense in the end, relating what the author says to what you already know or expect to hear or learn. Even if you don’t quite grasp everything you are reading at every moment (and you won’t), and even if you don’t remember everything you’ve read (no reader does at least not in long, complex pieces), you begin to see the outlines of the author’s project, the patterns and rhythms of that particular way of seeing and interpreting the world.
When you stop to talk or write about what you’ve read, the author is silent; you take over it is your turn to write, to begin to respond to what the author said. At that point this author and his or her text become something you construct out of what you remember or what you notice as you go back through the text a second time, working from passages or examples but filtering them through your own predisposition to see or read in particular ways.
In “The Achievement of Desire,” one of the essays in Ways of Reading, Richard Rodriguez tells the story of his education, of how he was drawn to imitate his teachers because of his desire to think and speak like them. His is not a simple story of hard work and success, however. In a sense, Rodriguez’s education gave him what he wanted status, knowledge, a way of understanding himself and his position in the world. At the same time, his education made it difficult to talk to his parents, to share their point of view; and to a degree, he felt himself becoming consumed by the powerful ways of seeing and understanding represented by his reading and his education. The essay can be seen as Rodriguez’s attempt to weigh what he had gained against what he had lost.
If ten of us read his essay, each would begin with the same words on the page, but when we discuss the chapter (or write about it), each will retell and interpret Rodriguez’s story differently; we will emphasize different sections some, for instance, might want to discuss the strange way Rodriguez learned to read, others might be taken by his difficult and changing relations to his teachers, and still others might want to think about Rodriguez’s remarks about his mother and father.
Each of us will come to his or her own sense of what is significant, of what the point is, and the odds are good that what each of us makes of the essay will vary from one to another. Each of us will understand Rodriguez’s story in his or her own way, even though we read the same piece. At the same time, if we are working with Rodriguez’s essay (and not putting it aside or ignoring its peculiar way of thinking about education), we will be working within a framework he has established, one that makes education stand, metaphorically, for a complicated interplay between permanence and change, imitation and freedom, loss and achievement.
In “The Achievement of Desire,” Rodriguez tells of reading a book by Richard Hoggart, The Uses of Literacy. He was captivated by a section of this book in which Hoggart defines a particular kind of student, the “scholarship boy.” Here is what Rodriguez says:
Then one day, leafing through Richard Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy, I found, in his description of the scholarship boy, myself. For the first time I realized there were other students like me, and so I was able to frame the meaning of my academic success, its consequent price the loss.
For Rodriguez, this phrase, “scholarship boy,” became the focus of Hoggart’s book. Other people, to be sure, would read that book and take different phrases or sections as the key to what Hoggart has to say. Some might argue that Rodriguez misread the book, that it is really about something else, about British culture, for example, or about the class system in England. The power and value of Rodriguez’s reading, however, are represented by what he is able to do with what he read, and what he was able to do was not record information or summarize main ideas but, as he says, “frame the meaning of my academic success.” Hoggart provided a frame, a way for Rodriguez to think and talk about his own history as a student. As he goes on in his essay, Rodriguez not only uses the frame to talk about his experience, but he resists it, argues with it. He casts his experience in Hoggart’s terms but then makes those terms work for him by seeing both what they can and what they cannot do. This combination of reading, thinking, and writing is what we mean by strong reading, a way of reading we like to encourage in our students.
When we have taught “The Achievement of Desire” to our students, it has been almost impossible for them not to see themselves in Rodriguez’s description of the scholarship boy (and this was true of students who were not minority students and not literally on scholarships). They, too, have found a way of framing (even inventing) their own lives as students students whose histories involve both success and loss. When we have asked students to write about this essay, however, some students have argued, and quite convincingly, that Rodriguez had either to abandon his family and culture or remain ignorant. Other students have argued equally convincingly that Rodriguez’s anguish was destructive and self-serving, that he was trapped into seeing his situation in terms that he might have replaced with others. He did not necessarily have to turn his back on his family. Some have contended that Rodriguez’s problems with his family had nothing to do with what he says about education, that he himself shows how imitation need not blindly lead a person away from his culture, and these student essays, too, have been convincing.
Reading, in other words, can be the occasion for you to put things together, to notice this idea or theme rather than that one, to follow a writer’s announced or secret ends while simultaneously following your own. When this happens, when you forge a reading of a story or an essay, you make your mark on it, casting it in your own terms. But the story makes its mark on you as well, teaching you not only about a subject (Rodriguez’s struggles with his teachers and parents, for example) but about a way of seeing and understanding a subject. The text provides the opportunity for you to see through someone else’s powerful language, to imagine your own familiar settings through the images, metaphors, and ideas of others. Rodriguez’s essay, in other words, can make its mark on readers, but they, too, if they are strong, active readers, can make theirs on it.
Readers learn to put things together by writing. It is not something you can do, at least not to any degree, while you are reading. It requires that you work on what you have read, and that work best takes shape when you sit down to write. We will have more to say about this kind of thinking in a later section of the introduction, but for now let us say that writing gives you a way of going to work on the text you have read. To write about a story or essay, you go back to what you have read to find phrases or passages that define what for you are the key moments, that help you interpret sections that seem difficult or troublesome or mysterious. If you are writing an essay of your own, the work that you are doing gives a purpose and a structure to that rereading.
Writing also, however, gives you a way of going back to work on the text of your own reading. It allows you to be self-critical. You can revise not just to make your essay neat or tidy but to see what kind of reader you have been, to examine the pattern and consequences in the choices you have made. Revision, in other words, gives you the chance to work on your essay, but it also gives you an opportunity to work on your reading to qualify or extend or question your interpretation of, say, “The Achievement of Desire.”
We can describe this process of “re-vision,” or re-seeing, fairly simply. You should not expect to read “The Achievement of Desire” once and completely understand the essay or know what you want to say. You will work out what you have to say while you write. And once you have constructed a reading once you have completed a draft of your essay, in other words you can step back, see what you have done, and go back to work on it. Through this activity writing and rewriting we have seen our students become strong, active, and critical readers.
ที่มา http://www2.english.uiuc.edu/finnegan/Rhetoric%20133/ways_of_reading.htm
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