Note concerning this particular exploration here: this is here if you want to take a deeper cut into "getting" what your reading style, what your "reading for," is.
Distinguishing Rhetorical Stance: "What We Always Already Read For"
From the outset, I will introduce you to a phrase that might strike you as odd on the tongue-- always already--though it will play a very important role in the work we will be doing the entire semester. Think "always already," as in something that is already ready--prepared--and always ready, at any moment always ready, always there, waiting to go. Indeed, it is also always already going--whatever it is that is always already is already and always in the background determining how you see and understand the world, yourself in it, including of course, what you read for.
The single most noteworthy quality of that which is always already in action, is that we are always already ignorant of it, like the eyes with which you see, and the ears with which you hear: you ignore that you are seeing and hearing the way you are. When you begin to question the always already, it's a little like if you could turn around fast enough to see yourself, for your eyes to see themselves.
Like I said, always already is a bit odd on the tongue. It isn't something we ordinarily say as an adjective or adverb, like we would when we say something like "He bitterly hates those who deceive and lie," and render it as "He always already hates those who deceive and lie." Or "he always already knows the answer" communicates something quite different than simply "he knows the answer." What the "always already" points to is a durable way of being, a style, a stance, a place you come from when you listen, and respond. We will apply this "always already" as an adjective to "reading for," as in: "you always already read for." You might always already read for adventure, or for romance, or you read for the deep meaning, or for solving a mystery, or for discovery, or for the experience of being swept up into the world of the narrative, or for the aesthetic emotions a text is designed to trigger in the audience, and many, many others.
Consequently, crucial to all stages of reading is noticing and questioning our "always already rhetorical stance" or "always already reading for"--the customary style(s) that we project, our controlling values, values that reveal to us the reading situation as if it and its significance were there prior to our encountering it. As a lens that directs what we are on the lookout for, our always already rhetorical stance determines what we customarily "read for," that is, the set of generic expectations we bring to anything we read.
Distinguishing what we customarily "read for" opens up the possibility of "getting" a text in multiple ways. First might be the possibility of getting the text on its terms--in greater levels of complexity and sophistication, beginning with the mimetic and thematic dimensions of the text: the narrative as it is structured to impact its audience as "real," as an imitation of the real--mimetic--and expressing "thematic" meanings. This is what reading for structure gives us, which is the focus of the first reading of each narrative. But essential to getting the text on its terms is being able to articulate your "reading for": what is the value that controls how you read? How does that value determine how you read? How does this empower you? How does it limit you? |
The challenge here is that the reader must bring self-critical awareness to their most dominant rhetorical stance (or controlling value) from which they read, to test their projections--generic expectations--against what's there in the text, on the page, and to do this repeatedly until an experience of coherence arises, where all the parts of a text emerge in the reader's "memory" as "hanging together" in ways that work, that make sense as something speaking to us as a coherent narrative structured by a conflict that opposing forces work to resolve in their favor.
We will use a tool I call the value graph as a means to "get the text," that is, to get what is called the fabula, the "what happened" independent of how the narrative is "told," what is called in narratology the syuzhet. This practice lets us attend to the mimetic and diegetic aspects of the text to gather together a grounded understanding of the text as it is structured by conflicting controlling values. |
Memory is the fourth of the five cannons of rhetoric: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. I am applying this rhetorical understanding of memory as the reader constructing a narrative in their interpretive world. Read more about fabula and syuzhet. |
Attempting to graph the values of a text involves us in a recursive process that pulls in the reader to converse with the various pieces or "units" of a text. This back and forth conversation allows the reader to build an understanding of how the text works, and second, the conversation allows the reader to generate various interpretations, beginning at the mimetic level, where the narrative is understood as an imitation of reality, and extends to the thematic, the significance of the narrative. With some degree of mastery of the mimetic and thematic dimensions of a narrative, it becomes possible to move beyond comprehension of the mimetic and diegetic/thematic aspects of the text and toward critical possibilities made available though attending to the synthetic dimensions of the narrative: surprising details that allow the reader to challenge dominant readings of the narrative.
To be clear, "critical" does not mean reading for what's wrong with something. That is a mechanical mode of "reading for" that may distract from "getting the text" on its terms. Being critical in this way (as a rhetorical stance), brings us to project a prejudice called "there's something wrong here." I'm going to suggest we move beyond this approach to reading critically. What if reading critically means bringing alternative values into conversation with the text? However, we cannot bring alternative values into a dialogue until we've grasped a given text on its terms, in all its complexity and sophistication, beginning with the mimetic (as well as the thematic) dimension of a given narrative. In fact, until you "get" a text on its terms, I dare say that you cannot even deal with a text responsibly, let alone ethically. In such moments--when we fail to get a text on its terms--we project our point of view uncritically. So, to get a text on its terms requires recursive interactions with the text. By recursive, I mean that the reader must return again and again to various units of the text to test any comprehensive view of it. Returning again and again to a text and its various units is necessary due to the very sticky problem that we cannot escape our rhetorical stances/controlling values. When we first approach a text, our controlling value seeks only to confirm its structure, to remake the unfamiliar into an understandable, familiar whole. For instance, take a common controlling value/rhetorical stance we have as readers: |
“Since I must be able to get what any writer writes in the first attempt to read her, if I don’t 'get it' right away, it means the writer, and/or the writing is flawed.” |
Such a readerly role inevitably leads to certain textual units disappearing from view, while others become more prominent. What the reader generates as a comprehensive view only includes pieces of the text filtered through the judgment called: “this is bad writing.”
However, taking a cue from Jane Gallop's essay "The Ethics of Reading; Close Encounters," I assert that close-reading demands the reader to acknowledge and account for units of the text that do not readily work with the controlling value/rhetorical stance one always and already (mechanically) employs when reading. In order to read closely, the reader must dwell in the language of the text recursively, again and again. Doing so forces numerous revisions not only of the comprehension of the text, how it works, but also the range of possible interpretations the reader can generate from the conventions the writer has assumed in writing the text. Close reading challenges the reader to revise her rhetorical stance(s), and to develop a wider repertoire of narrative conventions beyond the set the reader brings with her (the "reading for"). Here is one way to see how this process of recursive reading works. Any reading produces significance in each successive unit of the text due to the reader’s controlling value (and already mastered conventions) generating a sufficient explanation of the present unit in relation to other units. The reader then brings this generated explanation into the next successive unit of the text, in fact, informing how this next unit appears to the reader. Thus, since each generated moment of significance simultaneously points backwards to past units and forwards to future units (in anticipation), each prior unit of significance impacts the significance of each following unit, while the significance of each following unit calls for various revisions of the significance the reader has given to prior units. However, in a single reading, this series of units is read through the lens of the reader’s given rhetorical stance (controlling value), thereby limiting the reader to comprehend and so interpret the text from a single point of view, which cannot but reduce the text to an abstract summary that may indeed be more about the reader's controlling value (the reader's projected prejudice) than the value articulated in the text. Re-reading a text, returning to the various units within a text, promises to yield new iterations of significance. And through successive readings it becomes more likely that the reader may begin to inhabit the perspective the text calls its reader to inhabit. |
And so, as you move through your reading list and compose your blog posts and your entries for your annotated bibliography, include reflections on the transformations of understanding you go through as you read and re-read units of a given text.
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