The Precarious Hunt for Meaning

As a recently declared English major still adjusting to the type of out-of-class work I will be frequently drowning in from here on, I have taken to spending great amounts of time at coffee shop tables next to a tedious stack of books. Today, as I cracked the Theory Toolbox, the friend across from me laughed at how I was closely reading a chapter literally entitled, “Reading.” Such is my fate now, I suppose – not just reading, but reading about how to read, what it means to read, and how reading isn’t so much what matters but, evidently, the interpretations we make as a result of said reading. If there’s anything the first week of this course has taught me, it’s that I will have to start training my brain to think differently than it did before. My pre-English brain, and, I’m assuming, the brains of students in many other academic concentrations, opened a book, ingested the words for what they said, and moved forward. As an English major, it is becoming clear that unearthing what lies “between the lines” and learning to draw some intelligent and personal response from it is what truly makes the grade. In other words, it isn’t the reading of the text itself that rewards us with one true and singular meaning. It is the deep and unrelenting investigation of that text – the intent of its author, the context, other reader’s interpretations of it’s meaning, etc. – that will lead us to just one of thousands and thousands of possible meanings. In the words of Nealon and Giroux on page 22, “Reading, in face, has become a privileged metaphor for perception or experience itself… Like texts, expressions or clues or golf courses don’t simply contain a meaning. We must interpret them.” It all seems a bit lucrative at first glance – on one hand, the author is getting less and less credit as a concrete maker of meaning. On the other, readers are often unreliable and unpredictable interpreters. I guess what reading calls for in the end is a careful act of balance, and an even more careful attention to detail that I haven’t quite employed before. In other words, “What something means is always an effect of how something means, and reading is always a process in which one must take into account the various contexts in which a piece of writing is produced, read, circulated, and evaluated” (p. 28).

One Response to The Precarious Hunt for Meaning

  1. Prof VZ January 24, 2016 at 10:29 am #

    Great post! I like it when you write that “it isn’t the reading of the text itself that rewards us with one true and singular meaning. It is the deep and unrelenting investigation of that text.” You describe yourself as “drowning” in work and daunted by “tedious” stacks of books. And the situation where you’re sitting there reading a chapter called reading does seem almost laughably meta. But at the same time, you seem very much ready for the rigor, and for that “careful act of balance” as you engage in more critical thinking and more careful analysis than you had before.

    A note on formatting of the post itself: imagine an audience outside of class for your post, include links and images when they might spice things up, and use paragraphs to help direct your reader’s attention. It can be daunting approaching one big unstructured paragraph!

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