Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill [83]
Much of our time is spent investigating how authors construct their narratives: the mode of emplotment (comedy, tragedy, romance, satire), the way the argument is formed, and its ideological position—liberal, conservative, radical, anarchist. These various frames for viewing the reading help us to move beyond content, delay judgment, and evaluate readings on a more sophisticated level.
—Ted Conner, Professor of Music
READING AGAINST THE GRAIN
When we ask ourselves what a work (and, by implication, an author) might not be aware of communicating, we are reading against the grain. When we ask ourselves what a work seems aware of, what its (and, by implication, its author’s) conscious intentions are, we are reading with the grain.
Surely you have had the experience of looking back on something you wrote and wondering where it came from. You didn’t plan to say it that way ahead of time. This suggests that writers can never be fully in control of what they communicate—that words always, inescapably, communicate more (and less) than we intend. Any of us who has had what we thought a perfectly clear and well-intentioned letter misinterpreted (or so we thought) by its recipient can understand this idea. When we look at the letter again, we usually see what it said that we hadn’t realized (at least not consciously) we were saying.
Communication of all kinds takes place both directly and indirectly. Reading against the grain—looking for what a work is saying that it might not know it is saying, that it might not mean to say—requires us to notice and emphasize implicit patterns and make their significance explicit. So, for example, in the classic novel Jane Eyre, the narrator Jane repeatedly remarks on her own plain appearance, with the implication that physical beauty is transient and relatively insignificant. Reading against the grain, we’d see the novel’s very obsession with plainness as a symptom of how worried it is about the subject, how much it actually believes (but won’t admit) that looks matter. (See also Chapter 9 for methods of analyzing the logic of an argument.)
USE A READING AS A MODEL
Most of the critical activities with readings involve assimilating and thinking about the information conveyed. But to use a reading as a model is to focus instead on presentation. This represents a change in orientation for most readers, and it takes a little practice to learn how to do it. A useful guideline to remember is look beyond content (or subject matter). To focus on presentation is to focus on what a piece of writing does rather than just on what it says.
There are two primary reasons for using a reading as a model:
It can provide a way of approaching and organizing your own material.
Additionally, it can lead you to see features of a reading that you might otherwise overlook. We are, for the most part, “seduced” by the content of what we read, and so we do not see how the piece is “behaving”—how it sets us up, how it repeats certain phrases, how it is patterned.
If, for example, you were to do an analysis of programs designed to help smokers quit by using an analysis of programs designed to help drinkers quit, the latter might be used as a model for the former. And, if the drinking cessation piece began with a long anecdote to phrase some central problem in program design, and you then began your piece with an analogous problem serving the same aim for your piece, that would represent a still closer use of a reading as a model.
To use a reading as a model, detach your attention from the pure informationassimilation mode to observe how the reading says what it says. Where does it make claims? What kind of evidence does it provide? Does the writer overtly reveal his or her premises? How and when does she use metaphors or analogies?
And what about the overall organization of the piece you are reading?