How To Read A Text
When you first approach a text, particularly during tertiary study, your priority is not just to read it, but to read it well. How do you make the most of your reading? What is the best way to read a text? Generally, the best way is to read it twice: the first time to satisfy curiosity as to “what happens next” and to get a sense of plot, characterisation, narration, and other structural features. The second reading is slower and takes in the finer points of the text, and is more critical in that you should ask yourself questions about the text as you go along. Unfortunately, we are not always graced with enough time to read a text twice, and we need to make sure our reading time is quality time.
Nietzsche described his perfect reader as “a monster of courage and curiosity, also something supple, cunning, cautious, a born adventurer and discoverer”. Good reading, as Nietzsche would like, is slow, patient, careful, thoughtful and self-conscious. The first thing you must do if you are reading for an assessment item or for preparation for a tutorial or seminar is to take notes as you go along. The fate of most students who think “I'll remember that” is that they forget. You can also use those notes to refer back to passages and find them easily when you realise later on that they are quite important parts of the text. Your notes should include (though this is not an exhaustive list): page numbers, main events, characters, your first impressions, any passages that give away the text's links to certain ideologies, and anything that relates directly to your assessment questions or that you think will assist you in your analysis of the text as a whole.
The second important thing when reading a text is to think. Resist the temptation to read too fast. Be alert in your reading to the language of the text, for imagery, motifs, metaphors, symbolism, and question the text as you go along. For example, why does the colour garnet keep coming up in Patrick White's Fringe of Leaves? How is this colour significant? Or why are there few women in Henry Lawson's short stories? Be aware of the absences within the text as well, and what these might mean. A text is layered. It has an ostensible meaning but also has silences which can be revealing of assumptions and ways of thinking. You might ask yourself what genre the text belongs to. This will raise certain expectations as to things like plot, setting, characterisation and how the narrative is delivered. You might then look at what kinds of issues are present within the text, and how they are dealt with.
Critical reading, which is reading the text closely and thinking about it as you go, is self-conscious, reflective and analytical. Be aware also of your responses to the text. Do you like certain characters? How does the setting make you react? Do you think the text is aligned with certain political or social movements? With critical reading, you need to step back from the text itself and from your initial subjective response to gain a wider perspective on both text and response. Question your response to the text, and what it is about the text that produces that response.
There has been much debate amongst theorists about the “death of the author”, that is, whether a text should be read on its own or whether the author's perspective should form part of the analysis. When you read a text, you may find it difficult to read it without some consideration of the author. For example, we know that Toni Morrison writes novels explicitly about American race relations from the perspective of an Afro-American woman, and we approach her novels with that knowledge and certain expectations as to the perspective they offer.
What follows on from whether or not to consider the author is the related issue of context. The relationship between text and context is the subject of much literary theory. Texts do not just appear out of nowhere, they are written by a particular person (race, gender and nationality) in a particular time and at a particular place. Texts are inevitably products of their context and of the interactions between author and society. The reader's understanding and interpretation of a text also depends on the context at the time of reading. Naturally, the way we read and interpret a text that was written in 1851 will be different to way we would have read it at the time of its publication. We might now see how it has influenced other texts that were published after it, and we might now miss certain nuances of mannerisms in characters that would have been apparent to a reader in 1851.
It is often claimed that there are as many interpretations as there are readers. Meaning is something that is derived from the interaction between reader and text. A variety of theoretical approaches can be overlaid on the individual interpretation – psychoanalysis, post-colonialism, post-structuralism, semiotics, feminist analysis – to name a few. However you wish to approach the text, you must make sure that your reading is supported by what is in the text itself, not what you think is in the text. Always go back to your source (and this is where your notes will be invaluable) and ensure your evidence supporting your approach is accurate. You don't want to put forward a Marxist reading of a text in a tutorial or paper and then not be able to say why.
In the words of J. Hillis Miller: “The relation between reader and story read is like a love affair. In both cases, it is a matter of giving yourself without reservation to the other”. However, once you have wholly yielded to the text, you need to distance yourself again and cast your critical eye over it in order to be insightful and analytical. And always have the other eye on your own response to the text, because more often than not, your response is the key to how the text works. “Reader response theory” is a discipline all on its own - the text/reader nexus has been taken up by just about every theoretical approach in the academy. However, in order to read a text, remember J. Hillis Miller and give yourself to the text, and then step back and see where it took you.