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.