Notion Of Reading Research Articles

Cavell, literacy and what it means to read

This paper explores three current notions of literacy, which underpin the theorisation and practice of teaching and learning for both children and adults in England. In so doing, it raises certain problems inherent in these approaches to literacy and literacy education and shows how Stanley Cavell's notions of reading, and especially his reading of Thoreau's Walden, help to construct a notion not of literacy, but of being literate. The paper takes four themes central to Cavell's work in his The senses of Walden: awakening; estrangement and familiarity; conviction; and the obligation to read, and argues that these ideas offer an approach to language, and an understanding of reading in particular, that is different from current iterations of literacy. Such ideas, though alien to current – mainly empirical – work within literacy studies, have a resonance for literacy research and education today.

“The Rose That Grew from Concrete”: Postmodern Blackness and New English Education

For David E. Kirkland, the New English Education locates English language arts in the realities of youth, where texts emerge from students’ lives, and the notions of reading and writing in English classrooms are open to revision. Kirkland reflects on how “postmodern Black experience, especially as seen in hip-hop, gives English teachers one way of envisioning the New English Education.”

In Medias Res: Reading, Writing, and the Digital Artefact

In information systems and end-user computer research, ‘using’ appears to encapsulate a range of activities, such as reading, writing, viewing and so on. And yet it is a grossly inadequate descriptor for any of these activities, failing to account for the fact that texts — digital or otherwise — are produced and engaged by humans for a variety of purposes, from study to recreation. The wide adoption of ‘use’ as a descriptor for engagement with hypermedia reflects the challenges inherent in understanding and facilitating interaction with complex multimedia artefacts. It also points to a potential problem with research in this area: do attempts to accommodate the complexity of the digital artefact by devising terms that synthesize the range of literacy processes involved in human—computer interaction deter us from attending to the distinctiveness of those processes? The author takes up this question by considering how notions of reading and writing have been construed in relation to digital media, and whether such notions are in fact useful in furthering understanding of digital literacy.

Commodifying Respectability

This article argues for a focus on the relationships between retail managers, workers and the objects that they sell in understanding the production of retail spaces and service interactions as meaningful. Sociological and critical management literatures on the service encounter have emphasized the extent to which retail workers are encouraged to display enthusiasm for the things that they sell as part of the process of selling. Indeed, competitive advantage in large modern retail environments is often premised upon the ‘quality’ of customer service and the genuineness of worker engagement with the customer. This article examines these debates in the context of the UK retail book trade and argues that this emphasis in the literature might neglect the extent to which relationships with symbolic goods in consumer society are not simply benign resources for the creation of reflexive selves. It argues that the notion of reading as a worthwhile or respectable leisure pursuit informs the working practices of the book trade. It demonstrates this through interviews with bookshop managers about processes of selection and recruitment and interviews with managers and workers about relationships with customers. Both of these aspects of retail work are informed by relationships to objects that reflect and produce inequalities in cultural capital. In the discourse of the retail book trade, bookshop workers and customers are presumed to be particular types of people with particular orientations to the products being sold. The embodied cultural capital of workers leads to interactions that implicate the bookshop as a site in which hierarchies of cultural value are produced and reinforced.

Skeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel (review)

REVIEWS 503 into a question of character and rationality, making crucial connections between property and biography" (p. 150), Fielding makes us wonder what will happen to characters such as Tom or Amelia in a drama revolving around the presence or absence of money. Frances Burney provides for Thompson an occasion to investigate debt and its relation to female protagonists. Burney's works "moralize, psychologize, eroticize and therefore gender the spending of money" (p. 164). Thompson notes in Burney's work a fire wall built between the world of money and the domestic space, seen as a precapitalist site of primitive accumulation so that "the fetish of commodity does not poison affective individualism" (p. 180). Finally, Jane Austen creates an ironic voice "capable of violating and then repairing the equation between love and money" that Burney seeks to avoid. Thompson must be thanked for opening our eyes to the role of money and political economy in the development of the bourgeois subject in novels. I have to agree with Kristina Straub's blurb on the back of the book when she writes, "it is hard to see how past discussions of the novel have managed to ignore the crisis in 'value' addressed in eighteenth-century concerns with money." That said, there are some areas in which I wished there were more discussion. Thompson tends to read his texts as allegories or as "compressions of capitalist narratives." He seeks in Defoe's work, for example, instances of monetary transactions. Although he does begin to theorize these instances into larger statements about character and narrative, one would like to see Thompson develop a unified field theory, of sorts, about the nature of representation, in all the senses of that word, in regard to novelistic discourse. Likewise, notions of reading, the investment of credit and credibility on the part of readers in the fictive representation on paper, need further amplification. Finally, a discussion of the notion of the bourgeois subject in relation to money would be of great benefit, as would a longer consideration of Austen amplifying Thompson's earlier insights about her work. These recommendations only point to areas that Thompson himself highlighted in his text. We look forward to future work in which Thompson reaps the investment he has made in this work, or in non-capitalist terms, in which he explores the dialectic between money and novels that he has set in motion and points it to some transformatory ends. Lennard J. Davis Binghamton University (State University of New York) Elena Russo. Skeptical Selves: Empiricism and Modernity in the French Novel. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. vii + 225pp. US$35.00. ISBN 0-8047-2465-2. In the introduction to Skeptical Selves Elena Russo makes a case for her attempt "to construct a biography of the modern narrative self out of the examination 504 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:4 of highly particularized autobiographical narratives" (p. 1). Abbé Prévost's Histoire d'une Grecque moderne (1740), Benjamin Constant's Adolphe (1816), and Louis-René des Forêts's Le Bavard (1946) all contain the focus and the structuring principle provided by "narrative failure" for the "shared notion that a particular experience cannot be reconciled with general language" (pp. 2-3). Russo examines the epistemological problem that emerges from the "failure these novels thematize" and the empiricist notion of the sign initiated by Locke's Essay on Human Understanding that can still be found in the contemporary novel and in current theoretical discourse: "the persistence of an atomistic and nominalistic model of the sign rooted in ... word-to-object correspondence " (p. 3). In Russo's view, the model of mimesis is the source of representational failure, presupposing the separation between experience and linguistic concepts, which these three narrators must resign themselves to. Russo proposes to offer a dialectical and less pessimistic vision of the relationship between language, experience, and reality for the project of representation. She finds in each novel a persistence of the same conception of narrative truth, of me self, of the longing for what lies beyond representation and expression in "a language that, paradoxically, would not be social but individual" (p. 4). The body of Skeptical Selves is divided...

Post-structuralist Notions of Reading in John Barth

Post-structuralist Notions of Reading in John Barth

On the literary solution: A response to Gardner

Gardner places the “person-centered quartet” of personality, self, will, and consciousness at the heart of what remains of psychology after the flanks have been hived off into neurobiology, cognitive science, and cultural studies. The diagnosis is bleak, however; according to Gardner, the heart that remains is a weak and stunted one; here progress has been slow and important insights thin on the ground. The solution is literature; a garnering by psychologists of the rich repository of insights about human nature and an exploratory collaboration of workers in the two areas. Our comments focus on Gardner’s literary solution to his version of the malaise of psychology. Gardner’s view of the nature of literature fits into a long tradition of understanding in which Emile Zola is perhaps the most celebrated example. Zola thought of literature as a social laboratory in which characters could be invented and then sent on trajectories through psychological crises to enable their reactions to be explored (Merrill, 1967). I n recent literary theory this general view is known as expressive realism: “the theory that literature reflects the reality of experience as it is perceived by one (especially gifted) individual, who expresses it in a discourse which enables other individuals to recognize it as true” (Belsey, 1980, p.7). Gardner’s references to Rorty and Geertz incorporate traces of a form of literary theorizing into his solution which forcibly reject this notion of reading and literature-but this radical alternative is never formulated. Instead he is content to suggest that literature is a “rich repository of information” capturing “crucial insights”.

Essay on the Notion of Reading

Essay on the Notion of Reading