Cognition is Recognition: Literary Knowledge and Textual “Face”

<p>This thesis investigates Samoan parents and their primary school aged children’s experiences and perceptions of learning to read and the role this plays in home reading practices. A key purpose was to investigate what can be learnt from Samoan born parents regarding their cultural values and understandings around learning to read. Gaining understandings of the influences and experiences these parents have had when learning to read in Samoa would provide insights into the home reading practices being used with their own children. By examining the parents’ cultural values and practices, possible connections or disconnections between home and school reading practices can be drawn. While home and school partnerships are deemed to be important in New Zealand primary schools and by the Ministry of Education there needs to be improved understandings of the cultural values and practices that are taking place within many Samoan households regarding reading instruction. The valuing of these practices also needs to be considered with the understanding that there are diverse forms of literacy across cultural communities. The focus has been on how school reading practices can be implemented into the home environment rather than what can be learnt from home practices. This thesis has aimed to amend this by acknowledging and giving voice to Samoan born parents through discussing their own reading practices and experiences, and the influence this has had on the strategies they use when reading with their children. Pasifika students’ learning and achievement within New Zealand schools has been identified as a key priority for the Ministry of Education. The recent Pasifika Education Plan 2013-2017 (Ministry of Education, 2013) has outlined specific goals and targets aimed at improving Pasifika educational achievement that include establishing stronger connections between home and school for Pasifika learners. If connections are to be made the influence of social and cultural factors on students’ learning and achievement needs to be identified and valued. The methodology used was qualitative in design. A case study approach that integrated a socio-cultural perspective and the practices of Pasifika research methodology were used to allow for literacy to be seen as social practice where peoples’ views, values and experiences are used to enhance understandings of the role social and cultural factors play within education. Data collection was through Talanoa1 individual interview sessions with five Samoan born parent participants individually. Two Talanoa sessions were held with each parent. The parent participants’ eldest children were then interviewed in pairs. The voices of the participants were used to gain insights into cultural perceptions of reading practices within school and home contexts. The parent participants’ knowledge of school reading practices was also sought. The research data was analysed by using Rogoff’s three planes of analysis (1995). Rogoff’s framework was used to interpret the key themes as they relate to the connections and/or disconnections between home and school reading practices. The research findings indicate that strong cultural reading values and practices are in place for these Samoan parent participants. The practices being employed have been formed from their own experiences and memories of learning to read as children, in Samoa. These reading practices are based on the cultural values and actions that have been previously identified in literature on Samoan literacy (McNaughton, Amitanai-Toloa & Wolfgramm-Foliaki, 2009; Duranti & Ochs, 1993; Duranti, Ochs & Ta’ase 2004; Tagoilelagi, 1995; Tuafuti, 2000). As parents, these participants have continued to use these reading strategies and practices with their own children in New Zealand. Another key finding was that the parent participants’ knowledge of school reading practices in New Zealand was found to be limited. This finding in combination with the cultural home reading practices being employed has strong implications for home and school connections between Samoan communities and primary schools within New Zealand.</p>

One in five children in Norwegian kindergartens are multilingual, and reading practices that encourage the use of multilinguals’ entire linguistic repertoire can serve as important opportunities for language sharing, which is also encouraged by the Norwegian education authorities. In this study, we initially aimed to explore kindergarten reading practices involving languages other than Norwegian. When it became clear that such practices are rare, we expanded our investigation to include early childhood teachers’ experiences of reading with multilingual children more broadly. Our data sources consist of both self-reported data from a nationwide survey on reading practices in Norwegian kindergartens and six semi-structured focus group interviews with kindergarten staff. As reading in Norwegian kindergartens appears to occur in a space between kindergarten children’s right to meaningful experiences in different languages and their need to learn Norwegian, we shed light on what early childhood teachers highlight as central resources for reading with multilinguals. The key resources that emerge in the analyses encompass different forms of expression, hence multimodality is used as the overarching theoretical perspective in the study. Additionally, we discuss how good opportunities for promoting diverse reading practices become evident when kindergarten staff demonstrate curiosity, creativity, and a problem-solving approach to reading with multilinguals.

This paper will examine the role of affect as a key force in the experience of reading. I argue reading is an experience rather than an instrument of cognition. The latter, I suggest, gives way to dehumanizing and violating forms of reading as instrument or nomenclature or categorization. I suggest that new relations can be made in, within and from practices of reading that conceive it as a fragile, faltering practice of knowledge production. My reconceptualization of reading derives from Derrida’s notion of deconstruction as learning to read the trace of affect unraveling the normative and/or binary procedures cohering privileged and/or prejudicial understandings of the text. Reading for affect asks researchers to engage in an analysis of the felt and non-evident of people, events and texts. Rather than comprehend in the sense of cognition, we feel the trace of meanings cathected in signs before we know what the sign might mean. My paper will expand on reading as conveying affectivity or the unheard embedded in text. Increasingly there is a demand to read the other’s words with greater attention to feeling for what they do and do not say, can and cannot speak. In studies that purport to do research with humans, it seems to be imperative to engage in a practice of reading that attends to the other meanings indicated by words. This requires the development of a critical or close research reading practice that attends to affect or the interior meanings of articulations and text that words cannot easily convey.

The contested category of Asian American literature presents a rich opportunity to explore questions of epistemology. At the start of the 21st century, a formal turn in literary study further illuminates shifts in structures of knowledge and ways of knowing. Asian American literature emerged in the 1970s as a critical response to a history of exclusion and misrepresentation. As the field established itself, literary knowledge was defined quite narrowly: it is produced by Asian Americans and the subject of knowledge is Asian America itself. The reading practices that arise from this central paradigm have been called “instrumental” or “sociological,” insofar as they conceive of literary language, with varying degrees of formal interest, as an instrument or expression of Asian America. From the 2000s onward, scholarship on Asian American form and poetics has grown steadily, and what distinguishes this particular movement is its privileging of form as its primary object of investigation. Correspondingly the subject of knowledge also shifts from Asian America as the default referent to Asian American literature and the literary tradition. Critics note that one consequence of making form the prime objective is a potential tendency to drift away from the ambit of Asian America altogether. Those literary texts featuring conspicuous formal experimentation have garnered a lot of attention; less has been paid to the early texts, like the anthology Aiiieeeee!: An Anthology of Asian-American Writers (1974), where formal concerns are not as explicit. Yet upon closer examination of Aiiieeeee! one discovers another type of figurative activity that can help redefine Asian American literary knowledge, offering us new ways of reading and looking at race.

Digital text has become the dominant medium for participation in higher education. Yet little is known about the consequences from the shift to digital text usage on the academic reading practices of specific groups of students. Using a unique data set of higher education students, we analyse differences in digital reading skills, practices, perception, and experience for female students and male students. Then we explain these differences by social inequality related to gendered reading practices and artifacts and reveal that the digitisation of academic reading is reproducing gender inequality in higher education.

In the film Educating Rita Michael Caine, a Pygmalion figure cast as an alcoholic English professor, creates what he thinks is a Frankenstein out of his Galatea, an unlettered hairdresser with a hunger for literary experience and literary knowledge. Caine chisels Rita's tabula rasa squeals of Wow! and Fantastic! into polished emanations of lit. crit.-and he looks upon what he has done as an abomination. Embodied in this teacher-pupil relationship is a current dilemma in the field of response to literature: the presumption that critical commentary on literary works is an unsalutary educational goal, certainly a mitigation, if not a total negation, of the actual literary experience, which is deemed of far greater pedagogical importance than literary criticsm. That engagement with the text is mutually exclusive with detachment from it is a vestige of T. S. Eliot's of in which the simultaneous participation in and awareness of experience is seen to be psychologically impossible.1 As readers, our habitual mode of responding to literature is invariably some form of imbalance between thought and emotion: we either overintellectualize-and lack feeling, or sentimentalize -and lack truth. Given the preponderance of the former vice in English classrooms over the past half century or so, it is not surprising that recent trends in both literary theory and literature education have been content to err on the side of subjectivism. To right the balance we need a curriculum model that aims at reintegrating Eliot's dissociation of sensibility, a model premised on the assumption that literary knowledge, as a legitimate component of literary experience, can enhance that experience. Although this paper cannot aim to accomplish that, it will attempt to clarify the

The current research is an in-depth study of four pre-service teachers’ own experience of reading in various contexts and for different reasons. The aim is to analyse what has been significant regarding reading in a life history perspective by the use of narratives. A socio-cultural perspective on reading is used as analysis tool. The over-arching result from analysing pre-service teachers’ narratives is that reading is a relational process regardless of the context reading takes place in. The emerging themes allow a deeper understanding on critical aspects for developing reading in various contexts and at different levels. Significant others seem important in every reading practice, from new readers in primary school to pre-service teachers’ reading at university level. The narratives reveal a need for bridging the gaps that arise between the reading practices in the various contexts that students meet in school and university. Key words: pre-service teachers’ narratives, reading contexts, reading trajectories, significant others.

In this research, based on the theoretical and methodological framework of narrative inquiry (CLANDININ; CONNELLY, 2000; 2015; MELLO, 2005), I aimed at understanding, narratively, the reading experiences of a patient, in the context of an ophthalmological office of a clinics hospital, and analyze, also narratively, my own experiences in attending to that patient. Accordingly, the participants in the study were Helena, a person with low vision undergoing prolonged treatment in the low vision service of the referred hospital, and I, as a researcher-participant, who was seeking to understand my own practice. Thus, my research was developed during my psychopedagogical services at the Low Vision Service of the ophthalmology outpatient clinic of a clinics hospital in a city in the interior of the state of Minas Gerais. This thesis was, then, developed based on the field texts which I composed, taking into consideration the three-dimensional space of narrative research. As for the composition of meanings, I took as a basis the theoretical assumptions of Clandinin and Connelly (2011, 2015) and Ely et al. (2001). My initial questions were as follows: When rethinking the material I have used for the visual rehabilitation for my patients’ reading process, I ask myself: Are they adequate? Does the process of showing them letters and words out of context really help? How can emotions affect the reading process? What is my role as a psychopedagogue when patients show their emotions during the process? Why does reading cause so much emotion for my patients? What are the boundaries between my vision-oriented care and the reading process experienced during outpatient care? In order to write this thesis, I constructed narratives based on the experiences lived by the research participants, Helena and I. As for the theoretical foundation for the analysis, I used the concepts of “literacy” (SOARES 2004, 2009; TFOUNI, 2010; STREET 2012, 2014; MENEZES DE SOUZA 2011; FREIRE; MACEDO, 2017), of “emotion” and of “emotional literacy” (MIGUEL, 2015; BARCELOS; SILVA, 2015; BARCELOS, 2015, 2021; NABÃO, 2020). When looking at Helena's experiences, lived, narrated and retold, I understood that the right moment for the patient to have the experience of reading what he/she wants may start from the first consultations. I could see that reading experiences in the office can arouse many emotions and feelings, which is why I must be attentive to the subjective issues that permeate the reading process in visual rehabilitation. I learned from the research that literacy practices in visual rehabilitation can be experienced in different ways by people with low vision. Thus, the experiences with Helena allowed me to reflect on my professional practical knowledge. Each individual can tell me a lot about their own literacy process, if I have an attentive listening to what each one brings to my psychopedagogical service. For that, I need to try not to get stuck to the techniques and procedures prescribed in that medical context and go beyond, as far as reading practices are concerned.

This chapter explores reading diaries to illustrate the bibliographic world in which individual readers encountered novels. From the recording of a baffled enjoyment of Tristram Shandy, through the conjuring up of the ‘excessive’ teenage delights taken in the illustrated novel, and on to the pleasures of dismissing emergent new genres as ‘too Highlandish’, the evidence presented here suggests just how much pleasure readers gained from novels. Readers engaged with fiction in a number of different forms during this time and textual context subtly altered the kind of reading that it was possible to produce. Similarly, anecdotal accounts of reading aloud recognizes reading as a material act, which brings the body as well as the mind into play. Moreover, it is worth remembering those everyday gestures of reading, such as hurrying to the library for the next volume, that were such an important part of the novel reader's experience during this period.

Much medieval devotional and visionary literature is concerned with directing its audience’s meditative practices toward gaining a deeper understanding of Christ’s suffering and salvation history as a whole. Some such texts, however, make use of the text’s materiality—as book and as language—to generate knowledge of God. This chapter argues that Rolle’s Meditations and The Book of Margery Kempe strove to bring their readers to deeper knowledge of God through the reading experience itself. Rolle employs a poetics of presence that both models and generates an affective response, whereas Kempe’s references to books model a literate response for her readers. Both works thus present the text in itself as a means of producing experience. The centrality of the text’s materiality in these reading practices—not only as a vehicle for devotion but as an object that manifests devotion in its own right—indicates the importance of the act of reading in emerging spiritual praxes, which is particularly significant in an era of growing vernacular textual production and broader access to works of spiritual guidance.

As If in a Book: Everyday Reading in Stevens Nora Pehrson When I complain of the “bareness”—I have in mind, very often, the effect of order and regularity, the effect of moving in a groove. . . . But books make up. They shatter the groove, as far as the mind is concerned. They are like so many fantastic lights filling plain darkness with strange colors. —Wallace Stevens, letter to Elsie Moll, January 17, 1909 “OFTEN WHEN I am writing poetry,” Wallace Stevens explained in a 1949 letter to Barbara Church, “I have in mind an image of reading a page of a large book” (L 642). Unsurprisingly, therefore, meta-readerly scenes occur from first to last in Stevens’s verse, and they illustrate his changing ideas not just about the lyric but about creativity itself. “[W]hat one ought to find” in poetry, Stevens insisted in the same letter, “is normal life, insight into the commonplace, reconciliation with every-day reality” (L 643). His own solitary reading practice afforded him the simultaneous grounding and revelatory moments of insight necessary to sustain a generative relationship to “every-day reality,” or to the outward, communal world inhabited by his readers. Like a flash of brilliance, or a sudden illumination of strange and fantastic colored lights, his immersion in a text, as he saw it, could constitute “a momentary existence on an exquisite plane” (CPP 786). It could bring about a state of heightened receptivity and attentiveness—one that would ultimately wane but that left his sense of himself and of the environment beyond the text invigorated and transformed. For Stevens, the ordinary habit of reading was a means of opening up to the extraordinary value and artistic potential latent in the everyday—an accessible and reliable way of prompting creative discovery, but also, secondarily, of connecting with his actual readership. In the pages that follow, I first consider, briefly, Stevens’s private reading habits by way of his journal entries and personal correspondence. Then, I turn my attention to a group of six poems that focus specifically on the activity of reading: “The Reader,” “Phosphor Reading by His Own Light,” “The Lack of Repose,” “The House Was Quiet and the World [End Page 48] Was Calm,” “Large Red Man Reading,” and “The Novel.” Arising out of Stevens’s own reading practice, these poems, which depict and enact the experience of reading an absorbing and challenging text, elicit a parallel response in us, Stevens’s real-life readers, drawing us in as active collaborators in the textual process. This may seem contradictory, given that the poems, with one exception, evoke solitary figures reading in private spaces. Unobserved, unaccompanied, apparently indifferent to company, if these readers speak, it’s to themselves. Yet the solitary reading experiences in question are figured through various grammatical and rhetorical strategies—shifting pronouns, direct address, wordplay, and open-ended syntax—that are more suggestive of an interpersonal exchange. Stevens took his readers increasingly into account with each published volume—not by lessening the difficulty of his work, but by invoking the reading experience itself as a subject, thereby projecting his poetry outward to share his own habits and include his readers in the process. Using theories of the everyday, I will explore how Stevens’s collaborative stance—a result of his self-referential, open-ended, experimental lyricism—corresponds to his efforts to achieve an ongoing creative relationship to what he called the “normal”—that is, the shared, social, collective—experience of daily life. As a group, the reading poems remain an underappreciated part of Stevens’s work, one that has perhaps been overshadowed by the seemingly more ambitious aims of long poems such as “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction” and “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” Yet to focus on these particular poems about reading is to deepen our sense of Stevens as an artist, to see him afresh as a poet chiefly and principally devoted to connecting with his readership.1 Furthermore, isolating the reading poems as a unit helps us see Stevens—as Susan Howe and other contemporary poets do—as a forerunner of postmodern experimentalism and a precursor to the avant-garde interest in capturing and...

In this qualitative study, I explore how one group of fifth grade African American boys performed masculinity through classroom reading practices. I focus on two aspects of boys' experiences with masculinity: first, how reading practices made visible some of the ways that masculinities were performed in the classroom, particularly how boys defined themselves in relation to each other and to girls; and, second, how boys' performances of masculinity were disrupted through a particular reading experience in which they were required to read texts that they had previously rejected on the basis of gender. Interest in masculinity has recently increased, both in literacy and other humanities and social science fields. Yet, few studies have examined the intersection of masculinity and literacy in classrooms, particularly for boys of color. This study grounds boys' practices of masculinity and reading in recent discussions of masculinity in the popular press and theories of performance, critical and poststructuralist theories and scholarship on the intersections of race and gender. Drawing on interviews, fieldnotes, and transcripts of small group discussions, I show how the boys' performances of masculinity, particularly the relationship between dominant and subordinated masculinities and dichotomous notions of masculine/feminine, both shaped and were shaped by boys' choices of what to read and their conversations about books. These boys' experiences point to the complexities and possibilities of engaging masculinities in literacy classrooms and encouraging boys to adopt a different discourse of masculinity that is less reliant on defining itself in opposition to femininity and other masculinities.

Reading in Japan has a rich history replete with transformative moments. The arrival of Chinese logographs by the 5th century necessitated the development of reading mechanisms adapting the logographs to the Japanese language which had previously lacked writing. In the Heian (794–1185) court, reading was often a social activity incorporating performance. Small reading communities read romances aloud to one another, while poetry competitions involved intense bouts of composition and reading. During the medieval era (1185–1600), literature spread through the recitation of epic tales with musical accompaniment, while in early modern times (1600–1867) the gradual expansion of literacy combined with a print revolution fueled the emergence of socially and geographically diverse communities of readers. Alongside studies of medicine and Neo-Confucian thought a market in popular fiction flourished. The arrival of modern printing technology at the end of the 19th century ushered in mass-market readership. Cheap printings of classic texts competed with popular serial fiction, both of which were encouraged by newspapers. During the early 20th century, reading came to be seen as an act of self-cultivation but retained a social element as students and educated urbanites read together and discussed literature. Contemporary Japanese society retains a strong emphasis on the social values of reading, understanding reading not primarily as an individual engagement with one’s interests but rather as a means to acquire a consciousness of one’s group and nation. Newspaper readership continues to be enormous, and the influence exercised by newspaper corporations and prominent publishers in Japanese society is significant, shaping not only what is read but how. Japanese manga, meanwhile, continue to enjoy a diffuse range of reading communities that represent considerable wealth and influence. Such communities vary by gender, age, and political leanings, and demand media suited to their own particular reading practices and identities. Technological innovation has also facilitated new reading experiences, such as visual novels, a type of interactive fiction game popular among Japanese gamers. The Internet has given rise to virtual reading cultures, embracing both traditional print readerships and visual novel fandoms, further enhanced by ubiquitous smartphone use among readers of all ages. Tokyo’s book town, Kanda-Jinbochō, is a thriving cultural center, and book fairs and other events are widely celebrated.

In this paper the author describes a study undertaken at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM)) to explore the influence of the Internet on the reading habits of students. The study showed increasing familiarity with information technologies and the Internet and that reading practices are changing as a result. There is a need for libraries to take a lead in promoting broader reading experiences.

Abstract: This article analyzes Shirley Jackson’s use of allusions in The Haunting of Hill House and Hangsaman . Drawing from Nicholas Royle’s work on the Freudian uncanny in relation to literature and pedagogy, it argues that, in both novels, allusions draw readers with literary knowledge into the protagonist’s psychological experience and ultimately comment on literary studies as an inherently gothic practice. In Hill House , a connected web of allusions to Charles Perrault’s “Bluebeard,” Oscar Wilde’s “The Canterville Ghost,” and Samuel Richardson’s Pamela works to convey the house’s telepathic power while simultaneously inviting us to feel, along with Eleanor, a proud possessiveness if we are (or think we are) able to discern the allusions’ significance for the novel. In this way, Jackson puts her well-read readers in the place of gothic protagonist; we believe we have a special ability to unearth the novel’s secrets but must ultimately wonder whether we, like Eleanor, are the ones who have been consumed. In Hangsaman , allusions to Pamela , Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland , Through the Looking-Glass , the 1908 pornographic novel The Way of a Man with a Maid , and "The Waste Land," as well as the Tarot and Tony Sarg’s marionettes, lead readers through a disorienting maze of clues and connections that replicates its protagonist’s disconnection from reality during her first year of college. In both novels, Jackson cultivates an uncanny reading experience through uncertain recollections, telepathic communications, and surprising correspondences. She illuminates both the allure and danger of literature’s enchanting power, revealing the intrinsically gothic nature of our engagements with the literary tradition.