An imaginary letter to Robert Scholes ( I would never dream of actually taking up his time and attention with such a thing. Why? Because I am painfully aware of it's shortcomings. While it may be of some use to you and me, I don't expect it would be of any use to anyone so completely unconnected to me as he is at present. The indirect quotation of Pride and Prejudice just now was intentional):
Sir, I am a fan of your work. I'm not
saying I understand all of it. Or that I've read all of it, or that
I can summarize any of your works I have read in 250 sentences or
less. But I have developed an affection for you that started way back
in 2004, or was it in 2005, when I read an excerpt or yours published
as A Fortunate Fall? in the
book Falling into Theory
by David H. Richter. I liked that selection so much that I read it
aloud to my husband on a car trip one Saturday afternoon. Years later
I used the book that the selection was from, The
Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline,
as a source in a graduate school essay on the role of literature in
teaching composition. I don't remember the title that was given to
the essay as it was largely unremarkable.
Even
later, I read The
Rise and Fall of English
in it's entirety and attempted to praise it to a rhet-comp. professor
who is my friend, but I realized in so doing that I had not engaged
your text thoroughly. I was inarticulate and unable to defend your
specific ideas as they had been so thoroughly filtered through my
unpracticed and disappointingly inattentive consciousness. A couple
of months ago I finished reading your book Protocols
of Reading.
I find again, to my chagrin, that while I heavily underlined the
text, I am powerless to write down much of anything about it.
It didn't help that the first essay included the history of two
authors with whom I was unfamiliar, and that the third was largely
taken up by a critique of Derrida that somehow exposed the
inconsistencies in the possibility of a feminist deconstructionist
reading.
The
point of this letter is to lament the fact that I am a very poor
student indeed, that while my heart is willing, my intellect is
terribly weak, but that I want to do better. That is a lamentable
revision to scripture, but the grammatical balance was appropriate
and not to be resisted. I want to learn, to grow, to begin to
understand these things that lie just beyond my grasp (an ugly
statement, though it describes what is in my heart this afternoon),
and I have committed myself to do a certain amount of work in order
to get there. I have to put a limit on that “certain amount of
work” because I confess that I do not exactly know what I am
getting into, and I haven't yet figured out who my teachers will be.
There is a certain amount of cost-counting that is yet to be done. I
see hope for some measure of future understanding as I read what
other people have to say about reading, and understanding, and the
art of argument. I see hope as I remember that one very valuable
result of engagement is the expansion of understanding, that as Adler
and Van Doren claim in How
to Read a Book,
the only way to expand understanding is to read books that are a step
beyond your reach. I begin to wonder if I am yet conversant in
anything as I realize that every thought must be examined, as I
realize that I could not possibly, on my own, do a fraction of the
work that has yet to be done.
It is a beginning. I doubt there can ever be an end.
In
skimming through The
Rise and Fall of English
I realize that the time has come for me to read it once again. There
is so much there in the way of those things that interest me, such
richness. Only moments ago I read something lovely on the role of
quotes in composition. If we are unable to work them, they have no
place in our critical endeavors. Quotations should be used, not
showcased. One of the things I like about your writing is the way in
which you humanize it for your readers. Often it is confessional in
tone by which you communicate that writers share many of the same
sets of problems, no matter their experience in the task of writing.
I wish that I could get a list of recommendations from you, books to
read, modes of careful reading, ways of entering sympathetically into
the text before criticism begins. Then I realize that I could have
some of those things if only I read your texts. In many ways the
desire for communication that is actual and direct, unmediated by
print that was edited and published years ago, is a symptom of a
certain lack of imagination on my part.
No comments:
Post a Comment