WINTER CHALLENGE: DAY 9 UPDATE

i'm on page 310 of Anna Karenina.

joke! (i just wanted to freak out the competition. maybe cause some ventricular tachycardia, a little visit to the doctor, distraction from reading. dirty competition, i know).

i'm on page 310 of Jane Eyre. this means i have 211 pages left. i know i have been slacking but forgive me because Christmas demands cookie-eating and relative-mingling (not to mention Jesus-celebrating), and thus leaves little time for page-turning. i intend to have the book finished before i go to bed tonight. usually i fall asleep with the light on and my face on the book... three pages after i start reading. so we shall see.

i wanted to take a moment to clamor a bit about academic literature.

my copy of Jane Eyre is a Penguin Classics edition, and so it contains not only the original text of the novel but also a bunch of nice little mini-thesis introductions, appendices, and footnotes. i can't ignore these, as an academic reader, because they contain all the literary allusions and thematic importance and historical context that i need to understand the book's greatest significance. so i've been reading them and reading them - there's eight to twenty of them in each chapter - and they sometimes help, sometimes don't matter at all, but sometimes spoil the plot. and this is what i can't stand about academic literature.

i've read Jane Eyre before, but i don't remember much of it at all. i like to think that that's less of a natural failing and more of a natural preparatory route my mind takes so that i can get the most out of it another time through. i am convinced that a complete immersion in the text - the "reader's ecstasy," the point where you're turning page after page nonstop in wide-eyed rabid curiosity of what will happen next, where you actually gasp out loud and sometimes, sometimes tear up in reaction to the plot movement - gets the best comprehension of it. so when the footnotes tell me what's going to happen next or later or at the end or whatever, it ruins everything. reading a spoiler footnote pulls you right out from the story and therefore the writer's intention for you. uninterrupted dramatic action gives the reader a better understanding of the work than an academic footnote can, regardless of whether the reader has read the book zero times or a hundred times.

so these academic literary folk, who think that their work and their words enrich the text to all it's full glory, actually lessen the experience for you and therefore almost the value of the text. because a text - a poem, a novel, even an essay - really is just that: an experience. compare Jane Eyre to a wife, and the academic to the man at the restaurant hitting on her when you've gone to the restroom. to extract another point from the same metaphor, we might say that to get to know your wife better, you don't write papers about her; you simply spend more time with her, being completely and unadulteratedly attentive to her.


all this to say: the true academic reader is the enamored common reader. he (or she) who reads simply for pleasure gets just as much as he (or she) who reads and studies in preparation for a dissertation.

all this to really say: it's not about how academic a reader is; it's about how attentive a reader is.

i think there's two types of attentive: attentive within the text, and attentive within the learned world. by "attentive within the text" i mean captive to the dramatic action; by "attentive within the learned world" i mean aware of all the historical context and allusions. if you are "attentive within the text" to every text you read, you will naturally be "attentive within the learned world." you don't have to learn facts about books when you've been there, you know? what i'm talking about is simply the difference between

a) knowing that a certain line in Jane Eyre references a certain line in Milton's Paradise Lost and

b) reading Jane Eyre and remembering a certain line in Milton's Paradise Lost.

an academic tells a reader of these things; a text naturally reminds him or her of them. in this sense, the text asks more of the reader than the academic does: the academic goes off the assumption that the reader hasn't had these other experience and so tries to fill him or her in on what he or she may have been missing; the text goes off the assumption that he or she has had them. a book asks us to be smart, well read, and caring, whereas an academic discourse just asks use to read what they have to say in the moment. a book is also generous where an academic discourse can be condescending: complete attention to a story allows the reader to experience a fullness of drama regardless of how experienced he or she is with other texts, whereas the academic assumption seems to be that without knowledge of all the allusions, context, facts, etc, the reader is at a loss. an attentive read is never a loss.

this is why if you are a good (attentive) reader you don't have to study very much for tests (in all disciplines).


i'm going to go forget the footnote i just read and enjoy the rest of the book.

happy readings, all!