Just Reading


JUST  READING

As Rita Felski (University of Virginia) notes in her syllabus for ENCR 3400: Theories of Reading, Spring 2019, many "everyday experiences of reading…are either ignored or treated with suspicion in literary theory.  Felski is introducing undergraduates to critical (theory-based) and post-critical (experience-based) reading.  Why experience should be identified as post-critical is subject to question.  Unless logic fails us in 2019, it is logical to assume experiences of one sort or another are prior to the construction of theories.  Perhaps Felski invokes the critical/post-critical binary to suggest her pedagogy is more orthodox than radical, that in her classroom what ought to be said coldly to literary theory will not be voiced:  Um Himmels willen, ficken Sie sich selbst.  Felski, who succeeded Ralph Cohen as editor of New Literary History, perhaps remembers one of his rules:  a proper scholar/critic speaks to colleagues and only by dint of accident  to the masses.  She remembers, no doubt, another of Cohen's claims:  good propositions contain grounds for their refutation.



While reader-response theory and other speculations in the domains of subjective criticism do refute or deconstruct the hype of literary theory in academic cloisters, they remain safely behind the walls, behind the arrogant veils of mystery.  They hesitate to walk the walk or talk the talk of everyday reading experiences.  They dread the plain talk and common sense of everyday life that promotes meaningful conversations among people who resist academic enslavement.



 Over the past two years, my fellow senior citizens and I in the New Orleans People Program  have explored the joys of just reading selected works by Richard Wright; works that illuminate the African American impact on classic American literature ; works by  Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Ernest Gaines, Toni Morrison, and Ralph Ellison.  In spring 2019, we are just reading a handful of Southern writers -----Jean Toomer, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Ellen Douglas, Minrose Gwin.  We happily just read, opening floodgates of remembering.  Our exchanges are models of discovery, of self-conscious re-discovery, of selecting our terms of engagement.



Just reading doesn't resolve any of the always increasing problems of everyday life, but it does make the inevitable path to dying much more pleasant.  Our weekly conversations say to the world: Um Himmels willen, ficken Sie sich selbst.





Jerry W. Ward, Jr.                                            February 9, 2019

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