Critical Reading and Interpretation Workshop #1

 

Sometimes we are inclined to class those who are once-and-ahalf witted
with the half-witted, because we appreciate only a third part of their wit.

--Henry David Thoreau

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

KEY QUESTION: What does it mean to engage in reading a difficult text?

 

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Lesson Take Away #1:
Re-reading makes a difference in our understanding.

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Lesson Take Away #2:
A problem in understanding a text is not evidence of your insufficiency as a reader. Encountering difficulty in reading doesn't mean you are a bad reader. The difference between strong readers and weak readers is strong readers have a higher tolerance for failure.

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Lesson Take Away #3:
Strong readers don't run from difficulty in reading. They confront difficulty and uncertainty and work to resolve it. Rather than cutting short their thinking and depend upon others for interpretation (interpretive dependency), they work to form their own interpretation.

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Taking someone else's interpretation as your own is like having someone else eat your dinner for you. A steady diet of that kind will lead to literary starvation but to a conviction that you can never eat for yourself. --Louise Rosenblatt (as paraphrased by Sheridan Blau)

 

Part 2 of Workshop #1

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
And I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.
(1807)

William Wordsworth

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Lesson Take Away #4:
Poetry and reading in general is often difficult but not inaccessible to readers who are willing to read it thoroughly and do the work of making sense of it. Just as writers create flawed early drafts, so to do readers create incomplete or flawed readings of a text. It is through a "reading process" of reading and re-reading and working to make sense of the text that we come to the best understanding of texts.

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Lesson Take Away #5:
Encountering difficulty in reading is not evidence that something is missing in you as a reader; it is a normal part of reading (in fact, it is a built in part of literature).

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Lesson Take Away #6:
Confusion often represents an advanced state of understanding; it forms a generative force and motive for intellectual work to resolve the confusion. Confusion and doubt are often the necessary starting point for any act of interpretation. Strong readers endure the confusion of interpretive doubt and embrace rather than avoid the problems raised by interpretive challenge--invariably it will advance your understanding.

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