You Are What You Read

A Practical Guide to Reading Well

Robert DiYanni

• Éditeur: Princeton University Press
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9780691216607
• Sujet: Éducation
• Sous-sujet: Méthodes pédagogiques pour la lecture

How you can enrich your life by becoming a more skillful and engaged reader of literature We are what we read, according to Robert DiYanni. Reading may delight us or move us; we may read for instruction or inspiration. But more than this, in reading we discover ourselves. We gain access to the lives of others, explore the limitless possibilities of human existence, develop our understanding of the world around us, and find respite from the hectic demands of everyday life. In You Are What You Read, DiYanni provides a practical guide that shows how we can increase the benefits and pleasures of literature by becoming more skillful and engaged readers.DiYanni suggests that we attend first to what authors say and the way in which they say it, rather than rushing to decide what they mean. He considers the various forms of literature, from the essay to the novel, the short story to the poem, demonstrating rewarding approaches to each in sample readings of classic works. Through a series of illuminating oppositions, he explores the paradoxical pleasures of reading: solitary versus social reading, submitting to or resisting the author, reading inwardly or outwardly, and more. DiYanni closes with nine recommended reading practices, thoughts on the different experiences of print and digital reading, and advice on what to read and why.Written in a clear, inviting, and natural style, You Are What You Read is an essential guide for all who want to enrich their reading—and their life.

PART ONE Approaches

ONE Reading and Questioning

WHAT TEXTS SAY AND SUGGEST

WHAT THEY SHOW AND DO—AND HOW

Reading sets our minds, our inquiring minds, in motion as we pursue a deeper understanding of our lives and the world we live in.

—PAT C. HOY II

An important question readers consider when reading literature and other challenging texts is “What does the text mean?” It’s a familiar question, and it no doubt stimulates thoughtful inquiry. I’m not ready to abandon it. However, I think we should consider its limitations for literary understanding, especially its interference with readers’ enjoyment of literature. To think about the question of meaning productively, we need to postpone it and reframe it in the context of other textual considerations. Reading for meaning is important, but it shouldn’t drive our reading practices and limit our reading intentions.

What other questions might we ask about what we read? What else can we consider about a text, while postponing the quest for meaning? Though grappling with textual meaning(s) may be our ultimate goal, it does not follow that we should begin with the question of meaning. Other questions can lead us into, around, and through texts, literary works especially, with enhanced pleasure and understanding.

The questions we ask about texts reflect fundamental assumptions about textual understanding, about interpretation. Our questions determine the directions our reading can take. Our questions determine what we are able to see and say about texts; they profoundly influence how we perceive texts and what we make of them. Changing our questions changes both our understanding of texts, literary works especially, and the value they hold for us.

Let’s consider, to start, a brief essay by Yoshida Kenko, a fourteenth-century Japanese writer. Kenko was a Buddhist monk best known for his Essays in Idleness, among the most studied of Japanese literary works, a book that remains today a staple of the Japanese high school curriculum. The following essay, like all of Kenko’s essays, carries a number as its title.

Essay 189

You may intend to do something today, only for pressing business to come up unexpectedly and take up all of your attention the rest of the day. Or a person you have been expecting is prevented from coming, or someone you hadn’t expected comes calling. The thing you have counted on goes amiss, and the thing you had no hopes for is the only one to succeed. A matter which promised to be a nuisance passes off smoothly, and a matter which should have been easy proves a great hardship. Our daily experiences bear no resemblance to what we had anticipated. This is true throughout the year, and equally true for our entire lives. But if we decide that everything is bound to go contrary to our anticipations, we discover that naturally there are also some things which do not contradict expectations. This makes it all the harder to be definite about anything. The one thing you can be certain of is the truth that all is uncertainty.

Refusing to say what his essay is about, Kenko leaves us to decide this for ourselves. He draws us into the essay’s topic without naming it first. Instead, we dive right into the situation—ways our intentions get subverted. Eventually, by the end, Kenko states his claim: the one thing we can be certain of is uncertainty.

How does Kenko manage this topic? How does he carry us along his trail of thought? How does he engage us in thinking along with him? He does these things by making our reading experience inductive. Kenko provides examples, but he withholds the idea those examples illustrate.

He also engages us personally. From the opening word, “You,” Kenko addresses us directly. He speaks to us, naturally, even informally, “you” and “your” appearing six times in the first three sentences. The fourth sentence, using no pronouns at all, serves as a hinge, a fulcrum. From there the passage pivots to the first-person plural: Kenko talks of “our” experiences, “our” lives, and “our anticipations”; he mentions things “we discover” about our everyday experience. The move is from the individual to the larger group, from the particular “you” to the more general “we.”

The essay’s brevity is also noteworthy: a single paragraph of nine sentences and fewer than 175 words. In that short space Kenko invites us to consider the ways our lives are replete with the incidental and accidental. He alludes to how plans become disrupted, intentions circumvented, the way things go awry. Not always, however, as he notes that some things do go the way we hope or expect. Kenko reminds us that we don’t know and can’t know which things will work out for us and which will not. Uncertainty sabotages that degree of confidence.

Kenko’s essay operates on a fairly high level of generality, his examples notwithstanding. The essay’s personal tone and informal style coexist with declarative sentences that remain general, nonspecific. Kenko offers us nothing about his personal experience. Instead, he gets us thinking more broadly about uncertainty, about the indefinite, and about our inability to control events. Implicitly, Kenko invites us to apply his general assertions to our own experience; we reflect on our own personal examples to substantiate, qualify, or perhaps challenge his claims.

Genre

One question we need to ask when encountering a text is what kind of text it seems to be. Just what are we looking at (and listening to)? Though brief, Kenko’s text makes clear that it’s an essay—a considered set of observations about human experience. And we respond to essays differently from the ways we respond to fictional works or to poems or plays. Essays make different demands on us than do works in other literary genres.

Here is another short prose text, considerably briefer than Kenko’s mini-essay. What might we make of its mere two sentences?

This is just to say I have eaten the plums that were in the icebox and which you were probably saving for breakfast. Forgive me, they were delicious so sweet and so cold.

This text appears to be an explanatory note, a weak apology, one that might be attached to a refrigerator door. Its matter-of-fact tone, its seeking of forgiveness (playfully and teasingly), and its speaker’s pleasure in eating the plums suggest as much. But what if these words were rearranged as their author, William Carlos Williams, published them?

THIS IS JUST TO SAY

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

How does our experience of reading this version of the text, as verse, differ from our experience reading it as a prose note of apology? How does our response to the text change when aligned as the poem Williams wrote? Seeing those sentences spanning the margins of a page, we understand them one way—as an everyday note. Seeing them lineated as a poem, we approach and experience them differently—as literature. The change in genre alters our perspective and our perception—how we take what we are reading, what we make of it, and what we do with it. The shift of genre from note to poem changes all this and more.

Williams’s poem slows down our reading, focusing our attention on plums swiped from the icebox that someone else was anticipating eating for breakfast—these facts, along with a description of their taste and the physical sensation of eating them. It’s not that those details were unavailable in the prose apology—but rather that they were not accentuated and brought to our attention the way they are in Williams’s poem.

Once we accept a text as a literary work, we know better how to look at it, what to do with it; we know what questions to ask of it and what kinds of analysis to subject it to. We know what rewards such attention can yield. Genre knowledge guides our reading of literary works; knowing a text’s genre is crucial for understanding it.

Applying the conventions of literary analysis to bumper stickers, shopping lists, advertisements for shampoo, and other mundane texts is possible, of course, but the payoff is far less than when those conventions are applied to an epigram by Martial or Pope, or a lyric by Wordsworth or Dickinson—to say nothing of grander works, such as “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” The Tempest, Jane Eyre, The Fire Next Time, or One Hundred Years of Solitude. Why? Because each of those literary works says much more; each shows more, does more, suggests more, signifies more, and does so with greater complexity and fecundity.

Contexts

Considerations of context beyond genre can open up a text in still other ways. We can ask about the relationship of the text to its author’s other works. How, for example, does the speaker eating plums in “This Is Just to Say” compare with the speaker eating plums in another of Williams’s poems, “To a Poor Old Woman”? How are those speaker’s acts of plum eating different? Or, alternatively, how does Williams’s emphasis in “To a Poor Old Woman” differ from his emphasis in “This Is Just to Say?” To what does “To a Poor Old Woman” direct our attention?

TO A POOR OLD WOMAN

munching a plum on

the street a paper bag

of them in her hand

They taste good to her

They taste good

to her. They taste

good to her

You can see it by

the way she gives herself

to the one half

sucked out in her hand

Comforted

a solace of ripe plums

seeming to fill the air

They taste good to her

We notice first how the title is part of the poem’s opening description: it provides a point of view—how things taste to the poor old woman. We likely notice the sheer joy and sensuous pleasure the woman takes in eating those plums; we see how they comfort her; we feel the solace they bring her. We also notice how Williams plays with line endings to shift the emphasis at the end of lines from the woman (“her”) eating the plums, to their “good” taste, and her particular pleasure in eating them. The repetition of the full line at the end of the poem closes it up and reemphasizes just how good those plums tasted, calling up, perhaps, the “sweet” taste and “cold” touch of the plums in “This Is Just to Say.”

We notice as well, especially when we read the poem aloud, how Williams directs our attention to the way the poor old woman eats the plums, sucking out half at a time. The poem pushes toward two key words that complement these concrete details—“Comforted” and “solace”—abstract words that convey what her eating of the plums gives her.

Similarity and difference; similarity but difference. Connections and distinctions. We read poems and other literary works in relation to one another. We read everything in context.

We now slow down a bit to consider Williams’s famous poem about a red wheelbarrow:

THE RED WHEELBARROW

so much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens

What, we might ask ourselves, does this poem have in common with the others? Though there are no plums in the wheelbarrow, “The Red Wheelbarrow” shares characteristics with Williams’s poems about plums: everyday subjects, simple language, short lines, a lack of end rhyme. The poems’ appearance on the page, their visual form, directs us how to read them; their form influences how we see, hear, and take them, and what we make of them.

Describing “The Red Wheelbarrow” without worrying, initially, about its meaning frees us to notice patterns of sound and structure (as for example the assonance of lines 5 and 7 (glazed with rain; beside the white), and the use of two-line stanzas, with the first line containing three words and the second line a single word of two-syllables). We can notice those thin...

Table des matières

• Cover Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Preface
• Part One: Approaches
• Part Two: Applications
• Part Three: Uses
• Coda: Nine Recommended Reading Practices
• Appendix A: Print and Digital Reading
• Appendix B: What to Read and Why
• Acknowledgments
• References
• Index