I wish I had had a copy of “The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty” as an undergraduate English major in the 1970s. It would have been reassuring to know that a text loaded with obscure references and confusing imagery can be accessible if approached in comprehensive method.
The best way for me to understand Salvatori and Donahue’s book it to juxtapose the methods they have put forward against the recollections of my education in literature. I think I was fortunate because my initial exposure to literature in high school had clued me in to the fact that much of what I was going to study was going to be difficult to understand and require me to find other ways to construct meaning than the more contemporary ones I was used to. Still, my introductory college literature classes took me by surprise.
I remember struggling with one or two other literature students in my dorm, trying to keep up with the readings and knowing that complete understanding was out of our grasp; only in class would more be revealed. I think I succeeded because I had instructors who were passionate about literature and understood our predicament. They would hint at a couple possible interpretations of a passage or give us a new perspective with which to analyze the text. They were patient and would shepherd us along in the general direction they wanted us to go until we understood, making us occasionally feel that we had stumbled upon something nobody else had discovered.
Reading Salvatori and Donahue’s book, I understand that they too have a passion for literature and a desire to make it accessible to all; their methods also rely on the student “discovering” possible meaning. Salvatori and Donahue, however, have emphasized that the process of discovery, the journey we all take when we read a difficult text, is as important as arriving at understanding. How do we know what we know if our teachers don’t let us go through the process of analysis and examine our repertoire of beliefs?
The only issue I can see with their approach the authors take in their book is that they do not emphasize enough the importance of “pre-reading” activities. Students who receive a thorough back grounding on the author, the genre, and the period frequently feel better prepared in dealing with ambiguities in the text. If the student’s context is expanded, there are likely to be fewer difficulties in interpreting the text.
You raise an important point on this question of “pre-reading activities.” Exactly how much should we let students know about the text, its context, and its author before we ask them to read? It’s an ongoing debate in the field. On one hand is the kind of close reading of New Criticism that argues the author and his or her intent is totally irrelevant (this is referenced in TEAPOD with the mention of I.A. Richards, p. 100). On the other hand are critics who believe a text must always be understood in relation to history, to other texts, and to its author. We’ll come back to this idea when we read The Literature Workshop, but this idea of what Salvatori and Donahue call “cultural noise” is worth thinking about now.