Deep reading, p.20
Deep Reading, page 20
Beyond written assignments and formal study, readers can practice and model compassion for characters who may be unlike us or for whom we may not have a lot of sympathy. For example, when I (Roberts) teach Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I confess to my students that I find the protagonist’s husband, John, to be particularly unsympathetic—patronizing, paternalistic, and oppressive. However, when we read the end of the story, where John collapses after seeing his wife’s total dissociation from reality, I talk about my sympathy for this character. However much I would not get along with John if I met him in real life, he is clearly going through an emotional crisis and deserves compassion and sympathy. Such moments of tension, where we may simultaneously sympathize with a character and yet not like that character, are moments where we grow in practical wisdom, recognizing the complexity both of human beings and of making prudent judgments about each other. Celebrating our common humanity, learning from those we read about, and hearing the wisdom of those we read with are all ways in which deep readers can also be wise readers.
Concluding Reflection on Prudent Reading
Western culture in general and Western Christianity in particular can easily draw us into hostile, either/or approaches to life and to reading material where we approach the new with skepticism and consider all who disagree with us to be the other. Practicing prudent reading can be a remedy to such hostility and can draw us toward the telos of deeper love for our neighbor. Prudent readers read widely, without fear that the truth will escape us; prudent readers read relationally, putting aside the self in favor of learning from others; and prudent readers read with open hearts, encountering the values and mores of other cultures without skepticism. Individual readers as well as teachers and leaders of reading groups can practice prudent reading by resisting easy movements toward judgment, critiquing ourselves more readily than the other, and being open to learning from characters and authors with whom we may have little in common. Most importantly, readers who read deeply and prudently resist transactional reading in favor of reading practices that create relationships with texts, with authors, and with our fellow readers. Out of these relationships come generous conversations that resist both hostility and consumerism.
SUMMARY of SUGGESTED PRACTICES
Choose a text that you have heard a lot of people talk about but that you have not read yourself. Read the text with a sense of inquiry and openness to what you may learn.
When you encounter an idea or character that strikes you as repugnant or that you do not fully understand, ask yourself, Am I encountering a moral dilemma or a different set of cultural mores? If the latter, do some additional reading (or have a careful conversation) to learn more about that culture and its values.
When you encounter an idea or character that strikes you as repugnant or that you do not fully understand, ask yourself, What is it about me that makes this character or idea troubling? What might I need to learn in order to understand or sympathize with this idea?
Consider how characters in the texts you read prioritize or order their loves. Consider how your own ordered loves are similar to or different from theirs.
Look for points of connection with the characters you read—whether or not you consider these characters to be wise or good role models.
Look for points of connection with your fellow readers and for common values or experiences that you share with these reading neighbors.
REFLECTION and DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
Have you read a text recently that challenged your beliefs? How did you react to the text? With whom did you discuss this text? What did you learn from this reading experience?
When you read a text that involved a different moral code than yours, a different set of cultural values than yours, or some combination of the two, how did you respond? How did your body react?
Have you engaged in a “transactional” reading experience like the one described in this chapter regarding the Bible and A Wrinkle in Time? What did you learn from this reading experience? If you returned to that text to read it less transactionally, how would you go about doing so?
Who is a literary character (or author or historical figure) that you can learn from? What is it about this character that you admire (or despise)?
Who is a literary character (or author or historical figure) for whom you have sympathy even if you do not admire this person? What makes this figure sympathetic to you?
1. This concern about the novel was, in some ways, an extension of a fifteenth-, sixteenth-, and seventeenth-century conversation about the possibly dangerous effects of reading romances, particularly for women readers. See, for example, Arcara, “Margaret Tyler’s The Mirrour of Knighthood,” and Carrell, “Pack of Lies in a Looking Glass.”
2. “Character and Effects of Modern Novels,” 185.
3. Golden, Images of the Woman Reader, 24.
4. Ellis, Mothers of England, 338.
5. Wilson, Reading for the Love of God, 124.
6. See Griffis’s article on the evangelical romance genre, “When the Church Library Is Bad for You.”
7. Gallagher and Lundin, Literature through the Eyes of Faith, 139.
8. Myers, “Reading Critically,” 77.
9. J. K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 52.
10. Because all three of us have (to varying degrees) been educated, have worked, and have worshiped in American evangelicalism, our examination of hostility and worldview is particularly focused on evangelical circles and on an American/Western perspective throughout this chapter.
11. Veith, “Reading and Writing Worldviews,” 119; Ryken, “Thinking Christianly about Literature,” 29.
12. Jacobs, How to Think, 73.
13. Jacobs, How to Think, 73.
14. Harding, “Representing Fundamentalism,” 37; Jacobs, How to Think, 27.
15. Jacobs, How to Think, 27.
16. Verhaagen, How White Evangelicals Think, 62.
17. Verhaagen, How White Evangelicals Think, 79.
18. Verhaagen, How White Evangelicals Think, 82.
19. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 21. We will discuss false prudence further below.
20. Felski, Limits of Critique, 9, 12.
21. Felski, Limits of Critique, 37.
22. Felski, Limits of Critique, 21, 22.
23. Prior, Booked, 64.
24. Prior, Booked, 64–65.
25. Lewis, Experiment in Criticism, 141.
26. Wilson, Reading for the Love of God, 62.
27. Aquinas, Summa Theologica I-II.57.4 (trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province).
28. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 22.
29. J. K. A. Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 73.
30. Ryken, “Thinking Christianly about Literature,” 29.
31. Wood, “Prudence,” 49.
32. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 19–20.
33. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 21.
34. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 21.
35. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 20.
36. For some other excellent commentary on avoiding the impulse to read for domination, see Liu, “Reading Generously,” especially 68–72. One of Liu’s examples of generous reading deserves its own mention: Chu, Does Jesus Really Love Me?, particularly chapter 3.
37. Jackson, Christians, Free Expression, 2.
38. Jackson, Christians, Free Expression, 3, 4.
39. Milton, Areopagitica, and Other Prose Works, 13.
40. Milton, Areopagitica, and Other Prose Works, 14.
41. Prior, Booked, 14.
42. Phelps-Roper, Unfollow, 215.
43. Prior, Booked, 14.
44. Wood, “Prudence,” 37.
45. See also Yancey, Beyond Racial Division, especially 33–51.
46. L’Engle, Walking on Water, 118.
47. Tidball, “Bible in Evangelical Spirituality,” 261, 271.
48. Richards and O’Brien, Misreading Scripture with Western Eyes, 193.
49. Silliman, Reading Evangelicals, 220.
50. Bellah et al., Habits of the Heart, 142.
51. Delbanco, Real American Dream, 103.
52. Coles, “Civility and Psychology,” 137.
53. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 20.
54. Forgetting the self frequently requires that we, in the words of McCarty, “enter voluntarily into a place of tension” (“Reading Differently,” 105). Becoming comfortable with tension, or at least becoming willing to endure it, is thus also an essential step on our path to wisdom. We also discuss the tension of reading as empathy in chapter 3 and the value of open-ended questions in chapter 5.
55. On taking the work on its own terms, see Edmundson, Why Read?, 61, as well as chapter 5 of this book. We discuss reading for enjoyment more fully in chapter 6.
56. See also Brubaker, “Reading Digitally,” 121, who reminds us that “texts and the interpretations they contain do not exist solely to maximize my reading pleasure or simply to confirm my convictions” and challenges us to read “without responding, to see what happens.”
57. For more on reading texts from different time periods, see chapter 3. See also Birkerts, Gutenberg Elegies, 21–26.
58. Augustine, City of God 15.22 (trans. Dods, p. 303).
59. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine 1.27–28 (trans. Shaw, p. 18).
60. Prior, On Reading Well, 35.
61. Cha and Jun, “Whiteness as Witness,” 66.
62. Brown, I’m Still Here, 20.
63. Fletcher, “Looking to the East,” 13.
64. Franklin, Autobiography, 523.
65. J. Adams and A. Adams, Letters of John and Abigail Adams, 5.
66. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 18.
67. Prior, On Reading Well, 46.
68. Vivanco and Rhodes, “U. of C. Tells Incoming Freshmen.”
69. Vivanco and Rhodes, “U. of C. Tells Incoming Freshmen.”
70. Bridgland, Jones, and Bellet, “A Meta-Analysis of the Efficacy.”
71. Van der Kolk, Body Keeps the Score, 21.
72. Van der Kolk, “What Is Trauma?”
73. Such triggers are very commonly innocuous things, such as “hitting a bump in the road or seeing a kid playing in the street” provoking a reaction in a combat veteran, or a consensual sexual encounter provoking a reaction in a sexual abuse survivor. Van der Kolk, Body Keeps the Score, 67.
74. Van der Kolk, Body Keeps the Score, 67.
75. Flynn, “Trouble with Trigger Warnings.”
76. Van der Kolk, Body Keeps the Score, 67.
77. Flynn, “Trouble with Trigger Warnings.”
78. Van der Kolk, Body Keeps the Score, 234.
79. Van der Kolk, “What Is Trauma?”
80. Van der Kolk, Body Keeps the Score, 354.
81. Prior, On Reading Well, 45; Wood, “Prudence,” 47.
82. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 12.
83. Pieper, Four Cardinal Virtues, 13.
84. McCarthy, The Road, 114.
85. J. K. A. Smith, Imagining the Kingdom, 108; Smith, Desiring the Kingdom, 18.
86. Adichie, Purple Hibiscus, 3.
87. A famous example is, of course, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, about which Achebe wrote a scathing and perhaps equally famous essay (“An Image of Africa”); we discuss these works briefly in chapter 3.
88. For a further productive complication to this picture, see Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s book Decolonizing the Mind, in which Thiong’o critiques African writers who choose to write in European languages. Selections from this book are widely anthologized; the one I (Ooms) use when teaching is from Literary Theory: An Anthology, ed. Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan.
89. We should note an even further complication: Yeats, an Irish nationalist, had his own relationship with the effects of British (or English, rather) imperialism and cultural control.
90. Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, 14; Morrison, Playing in the Dark, 16–17.
91. Jacobs, Breaking Bread with the Dead, 45.
92. Woodward, “You Know about Mojave Rattlesnakes?,” 31.
93. Wood, “Prudence,” 42.
94. Wadell, Happiness and the Christian Moral Life, 191.
5
What Readers Bring to the Community
Conversation as Gift Giving
The digital age and prevailing cultural climate in the Western world have exacerbated our propensity not only for distraction and hostility but for consumerism as well. One result of a digital-consumerist society of particular concern to us is the way it undermines community, influencing us to see our neighbors as competitors and enemies rather than human beings pursuing the good life, just like ourselves. Much of our contact with other individuals is through social media platforms that present personas, distancing us from the human behind the screen. We partake of vitriolic discussions online in which other people are often reduced to a username and an intellectual position or worldview we find abhorrent. Social media posturing has even been credited with causing depression in young people, who are disheartened at seeing the happiness and affluence of their peers through their strategic curation of shared photos and stories.1 As a result, we often think of our neighbor as a barrier to the fulfillment of our desires or a distasteful reminder of what we lack. Other people are players in a game where the options are winning and losing. If another person’s life is more exciting or successful or adventurous than our own, we have supposedly lost something. In the political realm, we often perceive the other party as a thief who has stolen something from us. We hold them responsible for the undesirable environment in which we live. The other party might be the reason we do not have the job we want or enough money in our retirement account. In an extreme though relevant example, politically conservative people make offhand comments that all leftists need to be exiled to California because they are destroying our economy. Likewise, the politically liberal routinely blame conservatives for the country’s social ills and consequently make threats about moving to Canada or Europe.
The dehumanizing suggestion behind these dramatic claims about physical relocation is that living together and being in each other’s presence is intolerable. This suggestion is akin to what Lena Younger, in Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun, describes as another person telling her she “wasn’t fit to walk the earth.”2 In this play, a white community attempts to foil a black family’s plans to move into their neighborhood because, as one character puts it, “a man, right or wrong, has the right to want to have the neighborhood he lives in a certain kind of way.”3 Although more than six decades separate Hansberry’s play from the publication of this book, the character’s desire to have “the neighborhood he lives in a certain kind of way” is eerily similar to the entitled, hostile, and ultimately consumeristic mindsets that are both common in and characteristic of our time. Other people are not our neighbors but commodities to be used, put aside, or eliminated. Economics professor Roger Swagler defines consumerism as “excessive materialism,” a habit and mindset that other thinkers have connected to the dehumanization of people.4 John Mohawk, for example, a Native American historian and activist, writes that “ambitions for power and possessions” result in “destructive, cold-blooded people hostile to everything and everyone failing to serve their needs.”5 Similarly, historian Stephanie Coontz asserts that consumerism contributes to the erosion of “family time, neighborhood cohesion, and public solidarities.”6
As we have been arguing in this book, deep reading is an antidote to the vices of our age. Accordingly, we suggest that a common practice associated with reading—discussion and conversation about the text—can be harnessed to counter our consumerism and train us to see and treat each other as neighbors we ought to love as ourselves. This chapter, then, focuses on practices that create conversations between readers within communities (including students and teachers) as well as conversations between readers and the texts themselves. When we engage in openhearted conversation, we become less preoccupied with the consumeristic ends of reading, which might be obtaining a grade or a degree, possessing the social capital of having read a famous text, or being able to condescend to our repugnant cultural others. Instead, we learn how to practice radical generosity, in which we both offer and receive gifts in community.
Theological and Cultural Considerations
Consumerism in Reading Spaces
At their best, reading spaces, including the classroom, are sites of intellectual community. However, that community is often disrupted by a consumerist approach to work, intellectual labor, and relationships. Consumerism frames labor as a means to the specific end of gaining material goods. Furthermore, the labor of deep reading rarely results in such gains and is thus seldom valued in a consumeristic perspective. Likewise, a consumerist approach to relationships frames them as competitive networks, making generosity and communion challenging. When we consider what generous conversation might look like in spaces devoted to deep reading, we must begin by recognizing the harmful effects of consumerism on those spaces.
