Report On Reading

Karen Rosenberg’s Reading Games: Strategies for Reading Scholarly Sources is a must for anyone considering graduate study in any of the humanities. It’s one thing to be a whiz at reading the novels that populate the syllabi of English classes in undergraduate study; those classes are often the first opportunity for students to encounter literature on their own, without a question packet that the teacher handed out for them to answer or a series of quizzes to complete every day on part of the book. The only assessments about these novels, in many cases, comes in essay form, giving the student a chance to show everything that he or she has gained from reading, discussing and thinking, rather than having to fill in a multiple-choice answer sheet so that their high school teachers can predict how well they will do on the next standardized test.
However, heading to graduate school is a different ballgame, even if you stay in the field of literature. Instead of reading novels and plays, you’re reading books about novels and plays, which become a much drier sort of fare. You might be fascinated by the notion of New Criticism, and Cleanth Brooks’ The Well-Wrought Urn might have made you jump for joy when you saw it on your syllabus; the opportunities for deconstruction and reconstruction of meaning that make the writings of Roland Barthes so salivating might also call to you. However, Barthes’ S/Z is not nearly as entertaining as Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart or any of the other books that opened your eyes to the world.
\It is this new challenge of reading at the graduate level that Rosenberg shows the reader how to embrace. The first step involves looking at reading as a sort of conversation. The technical information that comes from a political science tome, the writings of Carl Jung or even the phraseology of the great Thucydides is not going to keep you awake and enthralled like literature does. This means that you have to prepare to read this type of work as though you are joining a conversation. Before joining the conversation, though, you have to figure out why the text is even there.
Rosenberg suggests beginning with a consideration of the audience. Obviously, you’re a part of the audience, because the book was on your syllabus. But why are you in the audience? You’re engaged in the study of that particular field. If you’re in the audience for a graduate lecture, you’re not there for entertainment; you’re there for engagement and instruction. So you’ll need a pen and a highlighter so that you can mark the claims with which you agree, with which you take issue, and which you have a hard time understanding. You’ll probably have to go back and reread those tough parts.
If you want to figure out where the author is going in a scholarly article or monograph before you’re 25 pages in, take a look at the title and the abstract. Admittedly, titles can be gargantuan in research journals, but if you look at the part after the colon, you can usually determine what the author is analyzing. A look at the abstract (that paragraph before the beginning of the paper proper) tells you the findings of the study, in summary, as well as the main idea of the paper. It’s true that this is sort of like “spoiling the ending,” but this isn’t Arlington Road – this is graduate humanities.
Scan the section headings, and read those sentences that appear important – at least the first in each paragraph, if not further. When you get to the conclusion, read that with just as much absorption as you read the abstract and introduction. Are there parts you don’t understand? Go back to those relevant sections and re-read. When you’re done, you should be able to present that person’s opinion and findings, as well as your own reasonably educated response to it. There’s no time to doze off, because there’s so much work to do. When you emerge from the piece, you should be ready to engage your class in discussion.