Wuthering Heights
Mere Christianity
Madame Bovary
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
Crime and Punishment
Hamlet
The Forgotten Garden
These Is My Words
The Help
Ella Enchanted
Princess Academy
The Goose Girl
The Kite Runner
The Great Gatsby
Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl
The Giver
A Wrinkle in Time
Lord of the Flies
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Ender's Game
}

Saturday, May 14, 2011

how to read

In class yesterday, Dr. Burton told us to read our novels [i'm doing To Kill a Mockingbird by harper lee] in a different way. I was not quite sure how I was going to do that, maybe looking through the index and reading sections looking specifically for how they relate to a certain subject. Today I was reading an article called "Actual Reader and Authorial Reader" by Peter Rabinowitz and came across this sentence:
"[I]n the case of successful authorial reading, the author and readers are members of the same community, so while the reader does in fact engage in an act of production, he or she makes what the author intended to be found."
Obviously, I am not from the deep South of the 1960's. And I'm not exactly sure who Harper Lee was hoping to have read her book. And I know this isn't necessarily reading the text in an explicitly different way from how I usually read a novel, but I think I'll start by trying it this way: reading it as if I were a member of the white middle class in the deep South in the 1960's.

What do you think? Is this going to be any different from the way I read now?

2 comments:

  1. After you told me the other day after class that you were reading 'To Kill a Mockingbird' I thought about if for a second and it just kind of made sense. Sometimes you're talking to someone and get a feel for them and then they tell you their name and it clicks, it makes sense. Their name totally fits them. It was like that when you said you were reading 'To Kill a Mockingbird'. So you may not have to worry about your different background, because of an innate, intangible perspective that seems to fit Harper Lee and this work.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I think that this is a really interesting idea. I also think that it is going to be super difficult. I think that if you can put yourself totally in the mindset then you could get a lot out of it. I really like the idea that Dr. Burton had of creating another persona for yourself and writing and reading from that point of view. Good luck tell us how it goes!

    ReplyDelete