[marginalium]
A different way of reading
14 Feb 2025
It’s very skimmable, but I liked the idea:
For me, the reading culture that our practice would be counter to, as I thought about my session in advance, was as much that of school, of college, as of the internet … The reading we’d be doing would be utterly non-instrumental. There would be no papers, no grades, no credits or transcripts, and thus none of the habits and affects that come with them. The students wouldn’t be competing with each other, nor would they be stressed or fearful. They wouldn’t be doing the minimum, or trying to “figure out what the teacher is looking for”, or asking whether this was going to be on the test. I wouldn’t have to wheedle them or humor them or pressure them to do the reading. The program wasn’t going to get them anything except the experience of doing the program. They would be there for that …
for me, deep reading means first of all close reading: the scrupulous examination of the text for patterns of language and image, narrative structures and strategies, manipulations of generic expectations, formal balances and juxtapositions, allusions, concealments, ambiguities, and anything else you can find, then the further attempt to interpret them.
And so on. Interesting. Wonder what a ‘deep reading’ of the usual YA fiction suspects would illuminate.
Anthologies: Gratification, Somatic Architecture, On (Un)happiness, On Aesthetics, On Being Fruitful, Noetik