Doug,
Two points: You wrote, "Although this assignment
>seems misguided, it doesn't seem all that dumb in general to give
>students some tools for doing this; otherwise they are locked into just
>skimming, and in doing so oftem mistake the meaning of passages
>completely. (Yeah, I know there's no "right" meaning of any passage, but
>as the pig in the Boynton cartoon said, "There's no such thing as a wrong
>answer, but if there were, that certainly would have been it. Some
>readings just don't connect with the text that has generated them.)
>
Now, I have some difficulty with using the tool metaphor as it is used
here. The techniques of analysis that this discussion suggests might
be helpful do not operate in a neutral environment; they are very
much subject to the vagaries of context: who is doing what and why. The
only constant is the physical text; though, even that as it is placed
in different situations, becomes a slightly different creature. When you
speak of "giving tools," I wonder how we hand over these tools, as thoug
h we're passing on something like a wrench or even computer software or
a calculator. This whole business of equipping (metaphorically) our
students for demands to come remains problematical for me. I call it the
next world syndrome: do this even if doesn't seem relevant at this time;
it will be something you need when you get out there. It may seem simpli
stic, but I think they'll learn to read nineteenth century prose by
reading it often, and making the effort to do so because for some reas-
on it matters to them. We simply need to create the kinds of contexts
where the mattering happens. And that's what we need to work on.
Sometimes, I am not sure whether we are offering answers to questions
our students have never really asked. I think they first need to have
appropriated the question/s.
The second point: You wrote
>If we don't teach students how to read 19th c prose, will they be forever
>unable to read anything written before 1985?
Why 1985? But no matter. We need to think along a longer timescale than
the frame offered by their collegial or school lives. Most of us, I be-
lieve, haven't looked at Carlyle, or Ruskin, or Mill except by accident
or second hand as some relevant quotation in a larger text. I mean,
haven't looked since our university days. When and if I ever need to
read Mill again (and I am not negating the value of what I have missed
by not having read him in the original over a 30-year gap), I shall
have to learn to read him all over again (a process of plodding famil-
iarization) and then I shall read him because I have a purpose and goal,
and it's my own purpose and goal.
Oh, I sound so didactically 19th C.
Glad you raised the question.
Patrick Dias
Faculty of Education
McGill University
3700 McTavish Street
Montreal, QC
Canada H3A 1Y2
Telephone: (514) 398-6960 (work)
626-3605 (home)
FAX (514) 398-4529
E-Mail: [log in to unmask]
