The thing that struck me the most about this week’s readings was the focus on demystifying how experts analyze literature, and moving away from thinking about one correct “answer.”  In her article “The Reader’s Apprentice,” Sherry Linkon delves into this as she says, “we teach skills and ways of thinking through demonstration,” but this method “can leave students with the impression that the process of analyzing cultural texts is natural and instinctual.  Unintentionally, we hide the effort involved, making textual analysis seem simple and straightforward” (247, 248).  I know that I have been guilty of making students think this even when I believe I’m teaching them how to read a text.  I have a vivid memory of talking about Tennyson’s “Ulysses” with ninth graders, which they found very challenging.  I offered some starting points for discussion and they continued to look baffled and unsure.  Finally, one student said to me, “It’s easy for you, you’ve got the answers on your poem in front of you.”  It was my turn to be baffled as I held up an identical copy to the poem they had in front of them without any sort of “answer key” (what would that even look like?!) on it.  They had never considered that I was simply thinking about the poem and talking about it; I had never considered that they thought I was just telling them the one “right answer.”

This week’s readings touch on many things that were going on in that exchange—novices often approach things like a multiple choice problem—as Linkon says in “Developing Critical Reading,” students believe “texts have set meanings that are available for identification by the informed reader, and that the purpose of reading a text is to locate and define its meaning” (para 2). Students also don’t realize that there is an awful lot going on behind the scenes for practiced readers, and students lack an understanding of the idea that literature can, and does, mean something different to all people depending many factors.

Even though I want students to understand that there are several possible interpretations, there does need to be some guidance about how to get to an interpretation that seems well-reasoned and sensible. Peter Rabinowitz in Before Reading discusses this—he accepts the idea that texts can mean something different to readers, but he also promotes the idea that there are certain conventions, symbols, approaches in literature which guide readers as they construct meaning.  One example he gives is that a cross would never work as a symbol for Judaism in a religious parable (24) because there are certain interpretations of meaning which are not open to us.  Elaine Showalter also talks about this in “Teaching Poetry,” as she gives some practical suggestions for ways to approach poetry with students.  This balance is what I want to strive for—having some concrete ways of discussing things with my students where they can see my thought process and understand how I came to interpretation without making them think it is the one right answer.