My Weary Query

Most of my free time this summer was spent observing and interviewing actors involved in various productions around town. I was interested in literacy events occurring in theatre rehearsals, and teasing-out possible connections between identity and the production of a multi-modal text. I interviewed 18 people ranging in ages 14-48. Their stories are very compelling. They suggest that the modes of expression necessary for the production of a dramatic text often establish a space that suspends enforcement of gender and sexuality norms—norms that have traditionally been policed by school administration, teachers, and even peers. I’ve started wondering if such policing can infringe upon a more aesthetic orientation toward text and composition in classrooms.

In Rosenblatt’s view, “The reader who adopts the aesthetic stance can pay attention to all of the elements activated within him by the text, and can develop the fusion of thought and feeling, of cognitive and affective, that constitute the integrated sensibility.”

If teenage boys do indeed take an aesthetic stance toward a text in school, I wonder if prevailing gender norms may cause some of them to self-censor their response?

In my pilot study, which occurred outside of a school, informants described an aesthetic stance in their encounters with texts, whether it be with print or a dramatization. This stance was part and parcel of analyzing a script and interpreting a character, but few of them felt they experienced such engagement in language arts classrooms. Their aesthetic readings mostly occurred within a community that shared similar sensibilities, where the active construction of a character via the text was key for establishing in-group status and increased responsibilities within the community.

I asked one of the actors how he creates such believable and compelling characters that locals remember years after watching him perform. He said:

It comes from the text itself. I like to read the script several times. Just by reading it, I get my lines down, and all the other stuff can come through. But it is mostly the gut instincts I have with the initial reading. It is like when you are reading a novel. Each person has a certain sound, and when I read the script there will already be a way that person sounds in my head, and then I try to emulate what that was. That’s initially where the sound comes from. It is based on the initial feeling I had when reading.

Using the sounds and images inspired from a text to create a character requires an aesthetic stance, and to draw on Rosenblatt’s metaphor, is a process akin to playing the piano. When reading aesthetically, we are not unlike a musician who actively interprets notes, and who inserts something of her personality and artistic sensibility into the piece, even as she is bound to the notes on paper. Like the musician, the reader takes and active role attending to the personal and qualitative elements of the text, takes time to study and appreciate the sound of the language, the feeling a particular word conjures, and relates the work to life experience.

Yet so much of reading in classrooms is efferent reading. It is reading to gain specific knowledge from the text, usually for the intent of getting something done, when there’s immediacy to the task, like finding a correct answer. In this sense, the text is only useful insofar as it provides needed information. Once obtained, the reader tosses it aside like a dirty napkin—it serves a limited purpose for fulfilling an immediate need. Sadly, even great works of literature can be read this way if students are motivated only insofar as gaining just enough knowledge to pass the class.