Looking For Trouble: A Way to Unmask Our Readings (1984)

The past decade has seen an attack on the myth of the inspired writer. Less attention has been given to myths of "inspired reading." (756)

So long as the process of interpretation is unrevealed, myths of inspiration can persist; students will claim that they cannot read poetry because they are not good at getting hidden meanings. (756)

In the traditional classroom the instructor rarely reveals what happens in his or her initial contact with a poem. (756)

The use of unconventional sources: (i.e. Martin Minsky, profile in The New Yorker)

The difficulty begins with a sense of incoherence, in what Dewey calls an "emotional quality" that pervades the experience. On subsequent readings this general sense is given conscious definition; the reader discovers that the root of the sensed incoherence is in the relationship of the first stanza to the rest of the poem. The reader then proceeds to generate a hypothesis to account for the relationship. In the response to "Moss-Gathering" we see a move to intellectualization; the reader notices a sense of "uneasiness" and then goes on to specify the "observed conditions" that can explain his uneasiness. (761-762)

I think the thing I’m most struck by reading this piece is the way that reading can be a topic of discussion here. Reading this article, it makes me consider, for the first time, that I might teach literature again someday. I’ve moved so far away from this, but I can recall a way of approaching literature that I learned as a graduate student and enjoyed a great deal. Newkirk is offering me the chance to try to remember what I liked about teaching literature. How I found a way to do it that didn’t feel like I was trying to teach something I’m not prepared to teach and also a way to avoid what often happened when I taught literature which was that there was never much to talk about. I think the focus is on the process of reading and not on the literature itself. That’s the key, I think, he’s teaching the process of reading, just like we teach the writing process. We teach the reading process or he’s showing a way of teaching the reading process and so WHAT we read really doesn’t matter (I don’t want to lecture on major themes in the work of Melville and am not qualified to do so). It’s this idea of teaching the reading process that interests me. I can imagine asking students to write a paper about their reading process, to treat reading process in the way I treat writing process. This interests me and this is what I think most about as I read the piece, but mostly I just think about how far we or I or both have come from a time when this sort of attention was paid to teaching reading…in a first-year course. It’s so hard for me to imagine asking students to read and write about literature in a first-year writing course.

Also, I’m thinking about my project, where I’ve mostly thought of a UNH writing course AS a writing course and NOT as a writing AND reading course and Tom is reminding me of the extent to which these things were, perhaps, not separate in a UNH writing course, reading and writing. How literature was not yet banned. How reading was not yet banned or the teaching of it, how it received perhaps even equal treatment and how I may be completely ignoring this fact.

Another thing that’s occurring to me ties into the point Graves makes about a contribution to the development of the individual no matter that person’s background, etc. I’m reading Tom’s essay and what’s occurring to me is how REAL these students seem. I know them. I was one. And what it seems that he is up to and, by extension, others in the tribe who did the kind of work that he is doing, is helping students to learn how to read literature in a way that will be meaningful. Now, the students have likely been reading literature for a long time, but he’s offering them something else—he’s offering them an insight into HOW more mature/experienced readings make meaning. Again, it’s this gesture towards demystification and, towards democratization. And towards validation. The process he’s describing allows students to acknowledge and share their feelings of confusion, frustration, and even alienation from literary texts and acknowledges that those feelings are not just reasonable but are to be expected. It’s a stance towards the work he is trying to get them to take that is different, I think, from how literature is typically taught. He’s inviting them to see it as a problem to be worked through, as opposed to…what? Something that other people understand and get and see that you don’t. Here’s the clear articulation of the gift:

In the traditional classroom the instructor rarely reveals what happens in his or her initial contact with a poem. I recently asked a group of senior English majors whether they had ever seen a literature professor read something for the first time. None had. (756)

So, the thing is to give the students a literature professor reading something for the first time, just like we were asked to give the students a writer writing something for the first time. Obvious parallels here.

The kind of teaching Tom is describing turns the process of reading into the content and focus of the course, not the books/poems/plays, etc. read. It sort of flips the focus of the typical literature course, which was organized around the question—what texts should the students read… to understand THIS period in American literary history or the work of THAT author. The period or the author is secondary to the students’ processes of learning to make meaning. This is the distinguishing feature here of how reading literature was taught differently. Presumably, any literary text or any text could be used. The text was the means to some other ends, teaching reading, the process of reading, of making sense of texts, of the discovery—or construction—of meaning.

This protocol particularly illustrates the capability of this approach to show how understanding emerges, how a reading is composed. (763)

This procedure led to an openness in the discussion because the working assumption was that all readers experience difficulty. Students were less likely to blame their own problems on an inability to read poetry. (764)

But most importantly, procedures like the one I have described allow us all, teachers and students, to drop the masks that can inhibit learning. We can all act as the fallible, sometimes confused, sometimes puzzled readers that we are. We can reveal ourselves as learners, not always the most graceful of positions. To borrow from the response of one student, we can "show what the hell is going on" with us, and we can ask students to do the same. (765)

So, what Tom is pushing back against here is the way we usually teach literature, literary interpretation, and the traditional critical analysis paper:

Like Bartholomae I feel that the traditional critical analysis paper may discourage students from dealing with reactions that are not easily resolved into a thesis, that they may discourage the student from dealing with the more puzzling (and very likely more complex) issues of meaning and language, that, in sum, they encourage the student to play it safe. (757)

I’m not sure I fully grasp the significance of “Looking for Trouble” although I can say that it’s not what I thought it was going to be. What he seems to mean by “looking for trouble” is teaching students in such a way that they are able to “look for trouble” in their own reading process, in order to use that as a tool for developing understanding of literary texts. You have to tap into the troubles you experience as you read, to attend to them—that’s what we should teach when we teach students to read literature.