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thought about how ways of reading can be applied to any text, including my
essay. I wondered about the kinds of approaches as a lecturer/reader you may
use when marking this essay. This essay is anonymous but could you use Ways
of Reading to work out who the author is? Am I male or female? Young or old?
Will you look at the essay intrinsically, looking at the form, style, metaphors and
imagery used or will you look at the essay extrinsically? Can you see what may
have motivated me to choose this question above the other [a draft of the final
assignment]? Does this essay tell you anything about me?
I can no longer detach myself from this new found knowledge, that is Ways
of Reading, there is no going back for me now, all texts in many ways have lost
their innocence. I am unable to read anything without reflecting upon the
components of the module. At this point my learning experience is balanced
equally between positive and negative, as the module unfolds I am convinced
that the positive will outweigh the negative.
Reproduced by kind permission of Tracey Tingey
This is a meditation on the juncture faced by all beginning English under-
graduates; experienced by some as a crisis. Tracey still describes  hating some
books in her past reading but realises that from now on, as a literature student,
she can no longer rely upon such opinions as a method of discussing texts. As we
have seen in the last chapter, reading is part of cultural belonging. Fairy tales and
storybooks are the first texts children encounter as the start of the process of
socialisation into society. It is the realisation that books are part of the real world,
that they are ideological products, that erects the stumbling block between old
ways of reading and new. Tracey s description of this event creates a poignant
moment in her conclusion when she reveals that as a result of the module, for
her, all texts have lost their  innocence . But in fact her account, through use of
the first-person pronoun ( I can no longer detach myself . . .  ), discloses that she
has lost her innocence as a reader. Simply liking a book is no longer enough.
In the essay, Tracey is coming to terms with four things: that an individual s
views are not paramount in academic literary criticism; that taste and passion
are in themselves too ideologically dense to analyse; that what has replaced
Reading 35
literary value judgements in English studies is a multiverse of isms and schools;
and that, finally, the new literature student must adopt a critical voice and nego-
tiate a critical position within this multiverse. These precepts, regardless of
whether or not they are explicitly spelt out by lecturers, meet with some resis-
tance from freshers. The uncertainty residing at the close of the above account is
tentatively resolved in optimism,  that the positive will outweigh the negative ,
but there are many students whose accounts are more defiant. Tracey recognises
that she has in fact practised some of the approaches unwittingly when she read
in the past but now they have names and theories that she must learn  in order to
speak with conviction and clarity on future essay questions . She feels that,
although she has interrogated books in the ways that the discipline demands, she
must now adopt a new discourse in order to succeed. Her own voice will not be
acceptable. Other students feel that the unfamiliar literary theories are coercive,
demanding agreement in ways that prevent them from expressing their own
views. They object to the idea of adopting another( s) voice.
Discourse This term is traditionally used to mean a formal and extended
discussion of a topic, like a sermon or a dissertation. The influence of linguistic
theories of communication upon Structuralism gave it a much wider
application, however; it has come to mean the language and statements used
by any designated group or community, governed by conventions. Stanley Fish,
an exponent of Reader-response theory and critic of Structuralism, termed
these groups  interpretive communities , whose members achieve  literary
competence (competence in reading) through the absorption of the features of
the literary discourse.
This resistance reflects both the contemporary cult of individuality that
decrees self-expression paramount, and other life experiences. For the majority
of students, those who begin university within a year or two of leaving school,
the demand to read in a new critical way coincides with a new independence in
which educational figures of authority may be something to shun, not emulate.
Students may not want the university experience to simulate the power rela- [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]