Re: How do YOU read?

Timothy J. Lensmire (tjlensmi who-is-at artsci.wustl.edu)
Fri, 15 Dec 1995 11:29:16 -0600 (CST)

Gordon,
Your message reminded me of how the literary theorist Robert
Scholes talks about surrendering to and recovering from (I think these are
the terms) the text, in either Textual Power, or in Protocols of Reading
(both wonderful books). In the surrendering part of reading, we would be
giving ourselves over to, working at recreating with the help of the text
the meanings the author is trying to convey. But in the recovering part,
we are answering back, beginning to answer the author with what we know.
What I like about how Scholes formulates this is that to not engage in
both the surrender and the recovery is not to read well. If you only
surrender, you efface yourself and are trapped in the text's/author's
world. But you can't really recover (dialogue) without surrendering
either. There is a very similar movement, I think, in Bakhtin's notion of
dialogue.
There are great risks in pursuing reading this way, of course.
You can surrender to hurtful things, but you don't really know that they
will hurt until after (and the recovery might be partial). And any time
you give yourself over to something, meanings and values held dear may be
challenged or put in question. At the same time, without this giving
over to the text, we can't really learn, but are destined just to repeat
what we thought before. (In the terms you were using--the dialogic
function is dependent on the univocal function. And in an interesting
twist--when Volosinov in Marxism and the Philosophy of Language says
something like meaning is created when we, as readers/hearers, bring
signs to the signs of authors/speakers--the univocal function is always
already dependent on the dialogic function as well (??).)

Tim Lensmire
Washington University in St. Louis

On Thu, 14 Dec 1995, Gordon Wells wrote:

> I have been interested to see how many responses to the original question
> have focused on the way in which so much of what we read seems to "feed
> into" our current projects and concerns, whether selected for that
> purpose or not. Writing about this very topic some years ago, I didn't
> know whether I was atypical in this respect, but I noted how I tended to
> be more interested in the thoughts that the text provoked in me relative
> to the topic I was working on than in those that the author wanted to
> convey (?evoke).
>
> One of the texts I was reading at that time was Lotman's (1988) "Text
> within a text" (Soviet Psychology, 26(3): 32-51). He distinguishes two
> functions of text: "in an overall cultural system, texts fulfill at least
> two basic functions: to convey meanings adequately and to generate new
> meanings" (p.34). These functions he terms the "univocal" (text as conduit)
> and the "dialogic" (text as "thinking device"). He goes on to describe
> the text, in the second function, as "a generator of meaning" (p.40).
>
> Obviously, most of those who have responded are more interested in the
> dialogic function. Russ Hunt evenseemed to be suggesting that this is the
> _only_ function for him - or did I misunderstand? (Presumably, though, to
> ask about misunderstanding is to recognize the importance of the univocal
> function?)
>
> As a teacher, I have been concerned about the appropriate balance between
> these two functions in students' reading. The traditional reading lesson
> (e.g. as described in Heap's "Discourse in the production of classroom
> knowledge" (Curriculum Inquiry, 15(3):245-79, 1985)) is mainly concerned
> with students' ability to uptake the author's meanings (the univocal
> function) and this seems to continue to be the main emphasis when
> students read most texts in high school. Very little attention, if any,
> is given to the dialogic function - at least in the official business of
> the classroom, according to the lesson extracts quoted in articles that
> I have read. In the reading of "literature", on the other hand, reader
> response theory has sanctioned a much greater valuing of students'
> responses to what they read - sometimes, it seems, to the point where
> there is little concern that they engage with what the author might have
> intended.
>
> With the M.Ed. students I teach (all full-time educators), I have noticed
> that, when they are engaged in group discussion of a text, they too tend
> to emphasize the dialogic function rather than the univocal. And
> sometimes, I confess, it worries me that they don't seem to be too
> concerned about whether or not they have understood the author's meaning.
>
> At the same time, I am sympathetic to Russ's point that meaning is a
> process and that it is therefore problematic to talk about the
> author's meaning, as if it were a fixed thing that could be got from the
> text. And yet, as a writer, I know that I try to construct a text so that
> it will "convey [my] meanings adequately"; I also hope that my reader
> will attempt to understand those meanings and respond to _them_ (rather
> than to quite different ones) when dialoguing with my text.
>
> I see I have now written myself into a state of considerable uncertainty
> about the relationship between the univocal and dialogic functions. Can
> anyone come to my assistance?
>
> Gordon Wells, gwells who-is-at oise.on.ca
> OISE, Toronto.
>
>
>
>
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