Deep reading, p.12
Deep Reading, page 12
31. This trend began with HCJB Radio, which began broadcasting from Ecuador in 1931. See Reach Beyond, “About Us,” https://reachbeyond.org/about-us.
32. Bessey and Chu, “Identity, Belonging, and Disability,” 01:24:35.
33. For Postman’s discussion of televangelism, see Amusing Ourselves to Death, 114–24.
34. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 116–17.
35. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 117.
36. Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death, 117. See also Birkerts, Gutenberg Elegies, 6, on how different media alter “the ‘feel’ of the literary engagement” as well as the way reading and writing produce meaning.
37. Yancey et al., “Device. Display. Read,” 38.
38. Yancey et al., “Device. Display. Read,” 33.
39. We discuss adaptations below; see chapter 6 for more on the idea of entertainment and enjoyment in reading.
40. Palumbo-Liu, “Morality of Form,” 174.
41. Bain, What the Best College Students Do, 20.
42. John of the Cross, Collected Works, 362.
43. It is worth noting, of course, that electronic texts in particular can amplify distraction; D. I. Smith et al. note that in the study that produced Digital Life Together, “approximately a third [of students polled] agreed that they were more likely, as a result of technology use, to skim over material when they knew they should be reading it deeply” (128). See chapter 1 for more on this phenomenon. In this chapter, however, we acknowledge that practices surrounding reading can also promote attention independent of the type of text used; we would also point out that access to any text promotes better formation and class discussion than access to no text.
44. In a chapter concerned with equitable access to the text, it is important to notice that the full Oxford English Dictionary is only accessible via paid subscription. Some public and university libraries offer access to The Oxford English Dictionary Online (https://www.oed.com/); others may have print versions which will be older but still have many useful features. Without a subscription, it is possible to view most definitions and some brief facts about word origin and use, which may very well be enough for most readers.
45. Yancey et al., “Device. Display. Read,” 51–53, describe a similar reflection with particular focus on reading and annotating digital vs. print texts, which is an interesting expansion of this practice. We discuss embodiment in chapters 1 and 5; see also Browning, “Reading Basically,” 26–27, who notes the importance of paying attention to bodily “rhythm” and reading environments when at work on reading.
46. See chapter 6 for a discussion about embracing the joy of reading with our students.
47. Some of their strategies for overcoming reading challenges are likewise both creative and heartwarming; one recent student, for instance, motivates herself by placing gummy bears at the end of each page of a difficult reading and eating the candy when the page is complete.
48. D. I. Smith et al., Digital Life Together, 130. This approach to learning is a feature of consumerism, but it also creates issues of attention. Smith et al. note, for instance, that “students openly justified finishing an assignment swiftly in order to use laptops or cell phones during class time to text friends, shop online, watch live sports, finish other homework assignments, and more” (Digital Life Together, 131). While we value leisure activities (see chapter 6), our focus here, as in chapter 1, is on the formative goods that sustained attention to a text can offer.
49. D. I. Smith et al., Digital Life Together, note that reading “repeatedly” and “communally” (234) can foster virtues such as “patience, humility, and charity” (235).
50. As is noted by Sullivan, “‘Deep Reading’ as a Threshold Concept,” 146–47, deep reading and close reading are not equivalent, though Sullivan (147) calls close reading “an important part” of deep reading. In this case, close reading as a practice creates opportunities for deep and attentive reading by slowing down the reader and by offering various opportunities for response to the text.
51. Close reading practices like this one are also a way of deliberately slowing down a reading or discussion of a text. As Song, Restless Devices, 83, notes, we often emphasize “hurrying, moving on to the next thing, accomplishing more.” See also chapter 6 of this book for reflections on reading as rest or leisure.
52. This activity would lend itself well to online tools. A Google document or similar shared file can provide a venue for students to share observations and information. In addition, Hypothesis (https://web.hypothes.is/) is a web tool specifically for the purpose of shared annotations.
3
Beyond the Diverse Reading List
Inclusive Practices to Cultivate Listeners
In the previous part, we discussed how formative practices might create both a reading community and a reading process that subverts distraction. In this chapter, we turn to the ways in which such practices can form a reading community that similarly disrupts hostility through the practice of listening. The vice of hostility has been for some time a major feature of American public life. Those of us who have lived through the 2016 and 2020 election cycles, not to mention the increasingly politicized COVID-19 pandemic, hardly need proof of this claim. Our book clubs, small groups, and churches often, and regrettably, are sucked into this same hostility, and despite the ivory-tower stereotype suggesting that academic institutions are detached from everyday life, places of education also find themselves in the midst of hostile debates. Two recent examples of such hostility are the contentious disputes over whether institutions should require COVID-19 vaccinations of their students and the incredibly polarized conversations regarding the teaching of critical race theory.1 Though the vitriol over these particular topics may fade over time, seasoned educators are hard-pressed to remember a time when hostility over certain hot-button issues did not exist. For example, I (Griffis) spoke recently with a biology professor at a Christian institution who told me that fifteen years ago she received multiple calls a year from parents and board members expressing concern over whether she was teaching evolution in her classes. As of 2021, it had been several years since she received such an inquiry. We suspect that the people compelled to make such calls are now directing their attention toward history and English teachers who assign Frederick Douglass and W. E. B. Du Bois and have come under suspicion as critical race theorists. The reading list is therefore not only the catalyst for hostile dialogue but a practice often employed to maintain the status quo and exclude voices we deem unworthy of our attention.
These hostile disputes touch on a historic and standing reality surrounding reading (and particularly the teaching of reading) that is key to this chapter: building a reading list and curating texts is itself a formative practice that conveys our assumptions about who and what is worthy of preservation, attention, and admiration. Further, the hostility that characterizes conversation about reading lists and the curation of texts reveals deeply disturbing, unchristian perspectives that largely go unquestioned and unchecked in our culture: the insistence that my list and my tradition deserve the place of privilege. A glance at the comments on any online article or blog post shows how so many of us find unbearable the act of listening to someone with whom we disagree or whose experience we do not understand. But these perspectives regarding worthy reading material are deeply opposed to the way of Christ, which John the apostle articulates when he writes, “Anyone who hates a brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life residing in him” (1 John 3:15). In this chapter, then, we propose that as we accept and challenge the canon and build inclusive reading lists, we need to seek out and wrestle with nuanced voices, rather than those filled with passionate intensity but ultimately incapable of tolerating other views. While building a reading list is an activity perhaps most habitually practiced by teachers and leaders in reading spaces, we urge all readers, including students and individual readers, to become familiar with where the reading lists you encounter come from and to consider how they are forming you. We must cultivate practices of reading that aerate soil in both mind and heart that is fertile for the doctrine of self-giving, humble, Christlike neighbor-love, which is at the center of the gospel, to grow. We therefore encourage all members of reading communities to avoid culture wars and to focus on what is important: the intellectual and spiritual formation of our students, our book group members, our fellow congregants, and ourselves. The classroom, the book club discussion, or the small group meeting can, with the judicious and humble application of inclusive practices, become spaces that do not reinforce hostile norms but rather cultivate attitudes of listening, humility, hospitality, and community. As we think beyond the act of choosing the “right” texts and embrace a more holistic approach to reading practices, our reading communities can become training fields wherein all are formed not toward exclusivity, hostility, and combativeness but toward empathy, charity, and humility.
Theological and Cultural Considerations
The Tenuous Practices of Canon-Making
“Why do I have to read this?”
As teachers of text-based courses that make serious demands of students’ willingness to delve into a text, we find this question familiar. It’s a good question. Answering it—and answering it persuasively—is difficult. And our ability to answer it is complicated further by the often polarized, entrenched ways we hear and read others answer this and a related question: “What should we be reading?”
The answer to what is worth reading can seem like a personal one, often made by individuals browsing library shelves or the new offerings of an online bookseller; in fact, however, we are usually choosing from someone else’s curated list of recommendations. Who that someone is can vary. For instance, students read texts that their teachers select; for many teachers, though, the choice of what to read and the definition of what is worth reading are in many ways decided for them, not only by department chairs or division heads or by state or institutional curriculum standards but by the available texts. We write, of course, of the critical editions and textbook anthologies, published by Norton or Oxford or Pearson Longman or others, made readily available to instructors by deals between publishers and campus bookstores, or by departmental fiat, or by the sometimes-startling generosity with which some publishers distribute unsolicited desk copies. It is from books like these that most teachers develop their reading lists. And, just as crafting individual course reading lists is itself a practice in which all teachers participate, so too is the collective effort to curate texts “worthy” of being passed along to the next generation. The centuries-long rituals of readers and scholars to preserve and share what we most commonly call the canon have, all along, been practices. And the practice of canon-making is hardly limited to the classroom and the course syllabus: a book club, for example, may appeal to a bestseller list, to a library or bookstore’s recommendation, or to a Bookstagram or BookTok influencer to choose the text of the month, while the leader of a Bible study is likely influenced by his or her particular church tradition to gravitate toward certain works, old and new. The practice of canon-making is everywhere.
The practices of creating and of questioning a literary canon provide simultaneous stability and instability for members of reading communities who want to cultivate wisdom, deepen their capacity for empathy, and develop a generous and discerning view of history. Indeed, most scholars who take the practice of canon-making seriously are clear-eyed about its potential problems. For example, Susan V. Gallagher and Roger Lundin devote an entire chapter of Literature through the Eyes of Faith to “the value and limits of the classics,” stating that while “studying the canon allows us both to reject our culture’s incorrect ideas and to learn from its wisdom,”2 we must also acknowledge that “we may find some works in the canon to be harmful and discover that other good gifts of literature have been excluded.”3 In the appendices to their seminal How to Read a Book, Mortimer Adler and Charles Van Doren practice canon-making, or perhaps canon-reinforcing, with their own recommended reading list, one that, they acknowledge, “contains only Western authors and books” and “may be charged with being prejudiced against some authors” but that, they argue (with no little boldness; one even might say arrogance), “will not differ very significantly if everyone concurs seriously in the aim of making up a reading program that is worth spending a lifetime on.”4 We should note that their list of 137 writers includes only two women, Jane Austen and George Eliot. Harold Bloom curates a similarly white and Western list in his How to Read and Why, though his includes more diversity of gender as well as both Toni Morrison and Ralph Ellison. Thomas C. Foster, whose book How to Read Literature like a Professor strikes an interesting, and largely successful, balance in tone between staid professor and avuncular book club leader, also ends his book with a reading list, which is the most diverse of the lists mentioned here, containing classic texts as well as books by women and multiethnic authors. He also recognizes that to teach people to read involves telling them what they should read: “What all these works have in common is that a reader can learn a lot from them. . . . You won’t, if you read these, magically acquire culture or education or any of those scary abstractions; nor do I claim for them . . . that they are better than works I have not chosen. . . . All I would claim for these works is that if you read them, you will become more learned. That’s the deal.”5
The rationale Foster provides for his reading-list curation practices brings to light one of the primary goals of canon-making: the texts we select reflect what we envision as the purpose of reading itself. Foster, along with declaring that his list will help readers “become more learned,” also promises that they “will have a good time, mostly.”6 Bloom, in the tradition of the very canonical Socrates, envisions reading as a life of self-examination. Adler and Van Doren’s methods privilege readers seeking to deepen their capacity to understand rather than to simply accumulate facts.7 Gallagher and Lundin’s approach to the canon emphasizes truth and beauty: we should read any text, they state, “to expand our vision of reality, to hear the voices of our neighbors and the truths they speak, to appreciate aesthetic excellence.”8 Alan Jacobs, in Breaking Bread with the Dead, extends the possibility of peace as he recommends the reading of old books. He writes, “To open yourself to [the texts of] the past is to make yourself less vulnerable to the cruelties of descending into tweeted wrath . . . [and to] realize that you need not obey the impulses of this moment—which, it is fair to say, never tend to produce a tranquil mind.”9 We affirm the various purposes for reading put forth by Foster, Bloom, and others, though we want to emphasize another purpose vitally needed in our social context: the subversion of hostility and development of empathy, charity, and humility.
The Hostility of Ideological Purity and the Worldview Approach
Hostility, while endemic to human history, takes a particular form in our age of rapid-fire social media hot takes, when the provocative, hyperbolic, and conspiratorial travels faster and farther than the humane, the measured, and the factual. As we discussed in chapter 1, instead of curating for wisdom, for understanding, for beauty, or even for pleasure, our and our neighbors’ most common reading material is curated by algorithm for what will most quickly and surely grab our attention. Quite often, what most quickly ensnares us is outrage—the feeling that we are misunderstood, maligned, or abused by some heinous other whose position would taint us if we tried to understand it. An example of this ensnaring outrage from the realm of reading-list curation is a provocatively titled article in the Wall Street Journal from late 2020, “Even Homer Gets Mobbed,” which expresses outrage at the efforts of grassroots education organization (and hashtag with significant Twitter activity) Disrupt Texts.10 Disrupt Texts describes itself as “a crowdsourced, grass roots effort by teachers for teachers to challenge the traditional canon in order to create a more inclusive, representative, and equitable language arts curriculum that our students deserve”;11 the Wall Street Journal article characterizes it as “an effort to deny children access to literature” and as having an “ethos [that] holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular,” particularly if those stories espouse various hateful -isms, such as racism, sexism, anti-Semitism, ableism, and so forth.12 The article demands, of course, that we choose a side.
But before we are stirred to outrage in favor of disrupting or clinging to beloved canonical texts, we must recognize that to some extent we engage in similar lines of thinking and that our reading practices may be shaped by a similar orientation toward outrage and reactionary thinking. For all its concern with disruption, Disrupt Texts (not to mention the Wall Street Journal) is also, like Adler and Bloom and W. W. Norton & Company, in the business of recommending what we should be reading. However, their practices of canon-making are noticeably aimed at cultivating a different kind of reader, one motivated not by beauty, enjoyment, the cultivation of understanding, or the possibility of a tranquil mind, but by a desire for purity: to expose oneself only to the right ideas and to think only the right thoughts. And our critiques of either organization’s motivations must recognize the resonances between their purposes and those of persons who practice the kinds of well-meaning but ultimately aesthetically impoverished censorship of the arts common in many Christian circles. A donor may object to a Christian college’s production of Into the Woods because it includes references to adultery; a student may refuse to read the Odyssey not because of its racism, sexism, or violence but because its characters worship—and often are—pagan gods; a Christian college’s library staff may be required to put a special label inside each book whose content is not in keeping with the institution’s definition of the Christian worldview; an instructor may hesitate about teaching a text solely because of the profanities used by its characters, as the likelihood that some of her students’ parents chose which films were “safe” for their children to watch based on similar criteria is high. All of these examples answer the question “Should we read this?” with strenuous objections that have, at their source, a burning, usually well-intentioned desire for ideological purity. They are motivated, in other words, by a desire to produce readers who think the right ideas, who choose texts based on their adherence to an often increasingly narrow set of doctrines about how the world should be.
