5. After studying Foster, what ideas about the process, the experience, and the purposes of reading seem significant? What are the philosophical underpinnings of his book about books? What does it mean to be literate? What does it mean to read? How does this relate to “being human?” What will you carry with you from this book?
After reading How To Read Literature Like A Professor, by Thomas C. Foster, ambiguity seems the most significant. This enriches the reading experience because it strengthens the understanding between the reader and the story. If the purpose of reading literature is to fully comprehend every detail within the story, then ambiguity is required. As Foster says in Chapter 12 Is That A Symbol? "Every readers experience of every work is unique." That is largely because most stories are ambiguous and contain more than one meaning, allowing each reader to follow the story as they believe, but also follow along the path the writer has made.
Which leads to the question, What is the difference in being literate and reading? To be literate, is the ability to use the text to comprehend all the parts and place them together. The ability to read is great, but simply reading does not necessarily mean that the parts are coming together. Consider a puzzle, being literate is taking every piece, of information, and forming the big, put together picture. Reading is taking incomplete pieces and trying to make one whole picture. Foster's philosophy puts the focus on the pieces that are required to start understanding how everything connects. Meaning Foster, like other author do, uses ambiguity to guide the reader but also give free rein to what the reader takes from the story. This book showed me that taking multiple steps to get ahead and understand is not wrong, it is simply the way that my brain functions.
We must be careful not to think our goal is to understand "all parts." Any work that allows this kind of complete understanding wouldn't be worth our time. We must give ourselves (and the works we read) permission to not "get it all." That is never our goal. I just always hope to walk away from a great work of art more whole and alive than I was; but I don't presume to understand everything. That is a scary and unreasonable stance to take. I want to allow myself the possibility of luxuriating in my confusion.
ReplyDeleteAs I read your response, the fact that you said that ambiguity enriches the readers observations really stuck with me; with having a different interpretation of a literary text, this leaves bonding with others and intellectual speaking with others regarding the text. I also really love the fact that you used the example of a puzzle. In a sense, reading and understanding a piece of literature takes different strategies (what can be considered puzzle pieces.) Without the presumed puzzle pieces, the understanding of a text can never be fully realized. With the many puzzle pieces, different interpretations of a text can be realized which changes the game of the reading in general.
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