Hayles’ Reading & Trask Prompt
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What did reading mean before the internet?
We’ve had the discussion before about “no turning back”. That still stands, but it’s not as if books have disappeared. I just want to emphasize this “close reading” still exists and in most cases we are still expected to do it, at least to a degree. I don’t want to start talking about close reading as if it has died. We can discuss its relevancy, sure, but that’s kind of a different question, isn’t it?
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 0 Hayles makes sure we can define close reading, or at least she gathers other definitions for us. After all, reading is what we do. When we start to acknowledge the existence of other viable forms of reading we have to take the time to define our terms. I want to just list some of the definitions:
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- “The most valuable thing English ever had to offer was the very thing that made us a discipline… Close reading–learned through practice with literary texts, learned in literature classes–is a widely applicable skill, of real value to students as well as to scholars in other disciplines.” –Jane Gallop (qtd on 63)
- “[Close reading] is the only teaching that can properly be called literary; anything else is history of ideas, biography, psychology, ethics, or bad philosophy.” –Barbary Johnson (63-64)
- “Close reading is our contemporary term for a heterogeneous and largely unorganized set of practices and assumptions” –John Guillory (64)
¶ 4 Leave a comment on paragraph 4 0 Do those definitions not speak to the kind of training we’ve had in this very department? Everyone has taken 271, right? Or any class where you read poetry? Close reading is taught. In my experience, Lit teachers just define it as reading carefully, slowly, and decidedly to get the full meaning of the syntax and diction within the text. Once we get to learn about decon-and post- structuralism we get to read other kinds of texts, like advertisements and posters. This is the kind of reading that happened before the internet. And I think it’s definitely still expected of us.
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How has that definition changed or remained the same?
Now, this probably depends on who you ask, right? I would enthusiastically declare the reading I do of quick headlines, news stories, blog posts, and excerpts of texts online reading. Someone more traditional would say… “Eh, not quite.” Of course you could argue people were always reading the news and parts of the news. They didn’t call that reading then, why should I get to call it reading now? Hayles wants to call it reading. She wants to find a way to incorporate digital reading in a productive way into a lit curriculum. Hayles says: “Deep [attention] and hyperattention each have distinctive advantages. …
¶ 7 Leave a comment on paragraph 7 0 “Deep attention is essential for coping with complex phenomena such as mathematical theorems, challenging literary works, and complex musical compositions; hyperattention is useful for its flexibility in switching between different information streams, its quick grasp of the gist of material, and its ability to move rapidly among and between different kinds of texts. …
¶ 8 Leave a comment on paragraph 8 0 “The problem, as I see it, lies not in hyperattention/hyperreading as such, but rather in the challenges the situation presents for parents and educators to ensure that deep attention and close reading continue to be vibrant components of our reading cultures and interact synergistically with the kind of Web and hyperreading in which our young people are increasingly immersed” [72].
¶ 9 Leave a comment on paragraph 9 2 I don’t think what we need is one super definition of reading. Hayles’s approach is useful. That approach being one of multiple categories and understanding the benefits and disadvantages of each kind of reading.
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True, as I just did a close reading assignment in my Shakespeare class a couple weeks ago, and I’m sure some of our classmates have done this in other courses this semester.
Technically, every time you’re assigned to read an essay for this class, you are tasked with doing “close reading.” We instructors tend to assume that, since that is the method that we teach, that is what students will most often practice. In reality, of course, we’re aware that this doesn’t always happen …
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Definitely: this is a point that is worth emphasizing.