Paul T. Corrigan
DOI: 10.7330/9781646421190.c001 When I touched the ancient tree, placed my hands on its rough bark, emotion swelled inside my chest and moisture welled up in my eyes. Standing at Angel Oakâs enormous trunk, among its endless limbs, under its nearly half acre of green leaves, I suddenly felt I had to change my life. How could a tree do this to me? Allergies? No, my reaction followed from and flowed back into my reading of the tree in that momentâthat is to say, the meaning I constructed out of what was unfolding before and within me. Namely, having traveled there purposefully as if on a pilgrimage, I read the tree as a sacred entity and my being present to it as a sacred event.
Now, some time later, my training as a scholar and teacher of English allows me to step back and consider what went into that reading. Yes, the tree itself, its physical presence, influenced my interpretation, but so did the many associations I brought with meâmy sense of the usual size of trees; my memories of trees I loved and climbed during childhood; the oak at the nearby plantation I had visited just hours before, upon which humans had lashed other humans during slavery; and the many books I had read that taught me the value of âstanding still and learning to be astonishedâ by the natural world (Oliver 2006, 1). All these went into my reading. Likewise, I can also step back and see how others interpret the tree differentlyâhow my daughters who were with me, playing in the leaves, just found the tree a lot of fun, whereas the company Allstate, featuring the same tree in an ad selling insurance, took it as a chance to make a profit.
In considering these and other factors surrounding my reading of the tree, I can come to understand more deeply and complexly both the tree and myself. In doing so, I follow Robert Scholes (1989, 19): âWe do well to read our lives with the same intensity we develop from learning to read our texts. We all encounter certain experiences that seem to call for more than a superficial understanding.â I likewise follow Scholes (1989, 78) as I turn, now, to add something to the âtextâ of the tree that was not initially there, âexceed[ing] it in some way.â I am making the tree a metaphor for reading. This metaphor helps me speak of the many ways of reading that exist, varied practices for making meaning with texts, as Louise Rosenblatt (2005) would put it, that have developed in different times and places but that are all part of the same larger category we call reading. Such a metaphor for organizing ways of reading is one way of helping ourselves and our students practice what Ellen Carillo (2015, 2018) calls âmindful readingââdeveloping a metacognitive awareness of what we are doing as we read, what we could do differently, and why.
More specifically, for my present purposes, the metaphor of the tree of reading offers a structure for mapping out Scholesâs work on the teaching of reading and for building on that work. In this essay, I sift through Scholesâs major pedagogical works, written over a span of decades, from Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English in 1985 to English After the Fall: From Literature to Textuality in 2011, with other monographs, articles, and textbooks in between. My purpose is to read Scholes as Scholes reads reading. I identify in these works the core tenets of Scholesâs theory of teaching readingâthe ârootsâ of the tree of readingâand I catalog the many different ways of reading that he advocates or, in some cases, warns againstâthe âbranches.â Because this essay synthesizes a large body of work, I proceed by way of cataloging more than arguing. But the heft of the resulting catalog does imply an argument about the breadth and depth of Scholesâs contribution to our understanding of the teaching of reading. Meanwhile, several gaps in the catalog also give occasion for an additional argument, that we ought to build on what Scholes has left us by attending to a still broader range of ways of reading than those confined to the âlimbâ of critical reading.
Roots: The Tenets of Scholesâs Theory of Reading
Before cataloging the many ways of reading Scholes advocates, I want to spell out the tenets I see grounding his work, his root principles, the reasons for naming ways of reading to begin with. The first tenet is simply that we should indeed teach readingâthat we should make the teaching of reading the defining practice of our work as English teachers. âAs a teacher I have for years,â he shares in The Crafty Reader, âseen a major part of my task as helping students see reading as a craft, a set of methods or practices that can be learned, a skill that can be improved by anyone willing to make an effortâ (Scholes 2001, 139). Later in that same book, he urges other English teachers to follow suit: âstart taking reading seriouslyâ (Scholes 2001, 215). He calls for nothing less than âa constant and prevailing emphasis on the process of readingâ from English teachers (Scholes 1998, 169).
He justifies this emphasis in several ways. First, teaching reading represents a better model of education. A way of doing, teaching reading contrasts with the more common âcoverageâ approach: âIt is not what students have been told that matters but what they remember and can doâ (Scholes 1998, 149, emphasis added). Thus, instead of âproduc[ing] âreadingsâ for our students,â we should âgive them the tools for producing their ownâ (Scholes 1985, 24). Second, teaching reading fulfills an overlooked need. Though âwe do not see reading,â he declares, âif we could see it, we would be appalledâ (Scholes 2002, 166). In short, we need to teach reading because many students read so poorlyâor at least not as well as they could. Third, by teaching reading, we help students make meaning in their lives, and that, thereby, lends meaning to ours: âhelping students learn how to understand texts more fullyâ is a crucial aspect of helping them âdevelop better intellectual equipmentâ for life (Scholes 1998, 32, 142), including the âpower to change the worldâ (Scholes 1985, 165). For this reason, during the social upheavals and struggles for social justice in the late 1960s, Scholes found justification for his life as an English professor in the fact he âtaught reading and writingâ (Scholes 1998, 32).
The second tenet is that all readers at all levels can grow. On one end of the spectrum, Scholes works to help first-year college and even high school students read better (Scholes 2002, 1998). On the other end, even after decades as one of the most accomplished scholars in English, a discipline based on reading, Scholes himself still wants to grow as a reader. He seeks âto make the practice of the craft . . . more open to use by those who, like myself, still hope to improve as readersâ and âto sharpen my own command of the craft of readingâto become a craftier readerâ (Scholes 2001, xv, emphases added). Indeed, the limits on our growth as readers are the same as the limits on our mortal lives: âwe may continue to improve as readers until age begins to weaken our powersâ (Scholes 1989, 18).
A third tenet is Scholesâs concept of a canon of methods. This canon is the major way he envisions us placing the teaching of reading at the center of the discipline of English. In short, we must âreplace the canon of texts with a canon of methodsâ (Scholes 1998, 145). Although we are all more familiar with the concept of a canon being formed around contentâa set of texts that define our disciplineâScholes explains that canons have been and can be formed around methods: a set of ways of doing that define a discipline (Scholes 1998, 109, 111). He writes: âA canon of methods, unlike a set of texts, must be conceived in terms of competence. There is no point in introducing students to the writing of Jacques Derrida, for example, if they finish their study unable to deconstruct a text and unaware of the strengthsâand the limitationsâof deconstruction as a way of reading and writing. A canon of methods must be organized in terms of enhanced capabilities that students will take away from their studiesâ (Scholes 1998, 149). How would we form such a canon? By âsimplifying and clarifying the ways of reading we have already learned to use in our studies of English literature and cultureâ (Scholes 2001, 215). By such simplifying and clarifying, we could come up with a set of âintellectual toolsâ students can use or âintellectual movesâ students can make while reading (Scholes 1998, 149, 167). We could break reading down for students into âdiscreteâ intellectual movesââjust as certain movements in dance or sportâ are often broken down (Scholes 1985, 21).
However, if we must simplify reading, then one more tenet is that we must not oversimplify it. In Protocols of Reading, Scholes (1989, 2) writes: âI should say at once that I have no simple system to propose. Reading is indeed learned and taught; it is done well and done badly; but it has too much in it of art and craft to yield entirelyâor even largelyâto methodization. Still, education amounts to taking method as far as it will go and then finding some way to go a bit further without it.â The canon of methods will not be absolute or final. It will be an open, evolving canon. âEach of us,â he adds elsewhere, âmust develop the craft of reading in a way that suits our needs and capabilities. There is no single methodâ (Scholes 2001, 242). Yet there are methods, many methods, and his work over many years has unpacked a great number of them for us. Let us turn to cataloging them now.
Some Branches: A Sprawling Catalog of Reading
In surveying Scholesâs work, I had initially hoped to lay out a tidy taxonomy. But I found this impossible. An early draft of the following catalog included over seventy ways of reading. Although I have tried to group closely related ideas together, the best groupings were not always obvious. I have settled on three broad categories, ways of reading related to different intellectual moves readers might perform, purposes readers might have, and types of texts readers might readâreflecting that our ways of reading vary according to what we do while reading, why we read, and what we read. Still, because such facets of reading cannot always be pulled apart neatly, the catalog remains sprawling, its categories loose, porous.
One more thing to note is that this catalog stands in contrast to an anticatalog we also find in Scholesâs writing, ways of reading poorly that he cautions us against: we should not read or teach students to read with âan attitude of reverence before textsâ (Scholes 1985, 16), nor with âunearned certaintyâ about meaning (Scholes 2001, 219), nor ignoring âthe complexity of the texts themselves, their histories, and their present situationsâ (Scholes 2001, 219), nor to find âthe correct interpretationâ (Scholes 1985, 13, emphasis added), nor merely to find and identify literary devices (Scholes 2001, 24). We should avoid the âselective literalismâ of fundamentalist reading, whether of a political or religious variety, which âforce[s] closure uponâ texts (Scholes 2001, 223). Instead, we should practice and teach âcraftyâ readingâmany varieties of which appear in the following catalog.
Ways of Reading Related to Moves
The first section of this catalog includes ways of reading that Scholes advocates in which readers make particular intellectual movesâsuch as contextualizing, moving among layers of meaning, and writing back. These methods are actions readers perform to make sense of texts.
Reading, interpretation, and criticism. The most prominent breakdown of reading in Scholesâs work entails these three parts, appearing first, as far as I can tell, in Textual Power (Scholes 1985, 21â35) and reappearing, in sometimes adjusted form, in most of his pedagogical books thereafter. These three terms represent a progression of reading moves where readers first see what a text says (reading), then suss out what it means (interpretation), then decide what its implications are (criticism). While interpretation takes on its usual meaning, the other two terms take on somewhat specialized emphases: âreadingâ has a lot to do with connecting a text to other texts, while âcriticismâ requires speaking from a particular groupâs perspective (in the way that feminist criticism, for instance, speaks from the perspective of that larger group, i.e., feminists) (Scholes 1985, 35). Scholes initially describes the progression through these three moves in terms of a shifting balance of power: âIn working through the stages of reading, interpretation, and criticism, we move from a submission to textual authority in reading, through a sharing of textual power in interpretation, toward an assertion of power through opposition in criticismâ (Scholes 1985, 39). In his final book, English After the Fall, he makes one major revision to the scheme, swapping out âreadingâ for âreactionâ (Scholes 2011, 50â51). More attuned to how students experience texts, this revised sequence begins not with technical textual analysis but with careful consideration of a readerâs initial, spontaneous response to a text and then works from there.
Reading toward and from the text. Scholes also often breaks reading into two parts or directions. In one place, he describes these in terms of âcentripetalâ and âcentrifugalâ impulses (Scholes 1989, 8). In the first, readers try to adhere as close to the text as possible, trying to get as close a sense of the writerâs intention as they can (Scholes 1985, 15; Scholes 2001, 230; Scholes 1989, 51). In the latter, readers step back and consider the larger implications of the text for their own lives and values. In The Crafty Reader, Scholes (2001, 197) describes how the reader falls âunder the control of the writerâs visionâ but only âtemporarily.â Afterward, âthe readerâs critical faculty comes into play.â He describes elsewhere these forms of stepping in and stepping back as a dialectic between reading âsympatheticallyâ and âunsympatheticallyâ (Scholes 1998, 169) and between reading ârespectfullyâ and âdisrespectful[ly]â (Scholes 1989, 78). In the one, readers try âto get insideâ the text and âunderstand the intentionality behindâ it (Scholes 1998, 169). In the other, readers try to also âget somewhere . . . [to] open a new perspective on the text read, and not simply double or repeat the textâ (Scholes 1989, 78).
Reading in context. âSituate, situateâ acts as a refrain for Scholes (2001, 67). Putting texts in context in order to understand them better is one of the reading moves he touts most often. He writes, âA large part of the craft of reading is the ability to âplaceâ or âsituateâ any particular textâ (Scholes 2001, 139). No text exists in isolation or comes from n...