Week 11: Reading a Text in the Literature Classroom

In Chapter 3, through an experiment about how different groups of children come to understand the implications of a particular text (involving a girl who may or may not imply that she wants someone to be beaten up), Gee illustrates that different texts mean different things to different people, based upon however they make meaning.  He explains,

“Texts and the various ways of reading them do not flow full-blown out of the individual soul (or biology).  They are the social and historical inventions of various groups of people.  One always and only learns to interpret texts of a certain type in certain ways through having access to, and ample experience in, social settings where texts of that type are read in those ways.  One is socialized or enculturated into a certain social practice.  In fact, each of us is socialized into many such groups and social institutions” (45).  

This idea of our knowledges being wrapped up in our social and ideological situations is, for all intensive purposes, quite akin to Donna Haraway’s concept of “situated knowledges.” That is, the idea that all knowledge (and what others might call “truth”) is partial and situational rather than fixed and concrete.

Gee poignantly deconstructs the myth of a single way to read a text when he begins to interrogate the process of “reading” a text.  He asks,  “How does one acquire the ability to read a certain type of text in a certain way? (40).  Further, Gee invites us to think about the implications of power for this kind of reading—who is it, he asks, that gets to decide how we ought to or ought not to read texts? Why do they get to make this decision? What larger ideological purposes and powers does this “correct answer” serve? The answer is unequivocally what bell hooks would call the “white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy” that we are entrenched in. 

These questions that Gee asks have striking consequences for folks like me interested in teaching literature.  Ascribing a great deal to the idea of “situated knowledges” and the importance of critical, analytical reading, I often remind students when they do writing or discussing in my classes that they can put forth any reading that they want to as long as it is supported by the text.  However, in saying this, I’ve always taken it rather for granted that “supported by the text” is going to mean basically the same thing for everyone.

I wonder now if this is the case? If I am always as well equipped to judge whether or not there is a basis for such a reading based upon the evidence that a student gives as I thought I was.  That’s not to say that there are not times in fact where our students read texts incorrectly—one cannot possibly support the claim that Beowulf is killed by Grendel. The text just doesn’t at all support that reading. However, where does a student’s reading have to be on continuum between “not at all supported” and “my own reading of the text” before I take it completely seriously? What if their reading, and they as people, are just too far outside of my situated-ness for me to recognize? And, more importantly, what are the consequences for a student who is not seeing their ideas/knowledge affirmed?  Gee, I think, would argue that they are larger than we might imagine.     

Week 8: Gee's Discourse Analysis: A few Questions

In the interest of trying to get ready to write an analysis of my own, for my response this week I want to primarily focus on Gee’s 7th chapter on Discourse Analysis. I have two major sets of issues and questions to address. 

First:

Gee notes at the beginning of the chapter that “Making sense is always a social and variable matter:  what makes sense to one community may not make sense to another.  Thus, to understand sense-making in language it is necessary to understand the ways in which language is embedded in society and social institutions (such as families and schools)” (112). 

If it is true that to understand the language you must understand how language functions in a society, to what degree can people like me interested in old texts from societies long past make any sense of texts? For that matter, can an outsider ever really come to have the kind of insider knowledge that Dracula so vehemently longs for in Gee’s example?  And, ethically, if we as researchers do not have an insiders knowledge, what right do we have to analyze and try to make meaning out of a text? 

Second:

I also have some questions about Gee’s system for discourse analysis.  In what he calls his “five inter-related linguistic systems” that work together to “constitute the sensefulness of a text” (116) he outlines his procedure for discourse analysis.  My first frustration with Gee’s analysis methods is that while he claims to be interested in texts of any kind—oral or written, one system really doesn’t seem to apply much to written text.  It is hard to imagine prosody as a tool when looking at writing.  I suppose you might look at line breaks or punctuation for clues about prosody?

I also wonder about the ways that hand gestures, facial expressions, illustrations, or paratextual apparatuses might fit in to Gee’s schema.  They seem to me to be as much a part of the discourse, as much a part of linguistic meaning-making as the written or spoken word.  For example, Old English manuscripts often have marginalia—doodlings, illustrations, figures that act as parts of the discourse and can help readers significantly in terms of making sense of the whole text.  

So my question is, where do they fit? Perhaps in “Contextualization signals”? I’m not sure that this is a good fit though. Would it be useful to put some of these sorts of discursive tools into a new system of analysis?