to reconstruct the author’s meaning, some to test out their own meanings.
And it must be remembered that some, perhaps the majority of world’s
population, read nothing at all.
But there is also such a thing as learning to read competently, that is, to
read according to the relevant cultural conventions, and we need to know
how these conventions evolved historically and how they are learned.
Teachers everywhere encounter students who adopt a completely supine
orientation to texts, memorizing them, and holding themselves account-
able to those texts without troubling to decide whether or not they
actually believe them. We may think of this as the naı ̈ve stance or the
naı ̈ve way of reading. The reader is unconscious of his or her own contri-
butions to the resulting meaning. To read critically and with perspectival
understanding requires that one distinguish the content from the force,
that is, to distinguish what is being said from how the author intended it
to be taken—as a hint or as an assertion, as a suggestion or a command,
for example. Seeing written statements of fact as assertions by a writer is
the first step to appropriately relativising factual statements. This stance is
sometimes described as the willing suspension of disbelief; grasping the
thought without necessarily agreeing with the author. And the third way
of reading allows the reader to take up the assertions of the author in
terms of the reader’s own perspective and goal. This stance acknowledges
that reading involves the freedom to characterize the assertions of
the author relative to the beliefs and goals of the reader. The reader is
allowed to use a text for his or her own purposes; it gives the reader
the right to his or her own meanings and beliefs. The mechanism for this
third way of reading involves not merely reporting the illocutionary
force of the quoted expression but characterizing it in such a way as
to indicate the speaker or writer’s own perspective. Thus, what was
offered as an assertion may be taken up by a reader as an allegation.
Creating an appropriate attitude to texts is an important route to system-
atic thinking.
As a preliminary taxonomy of ways of reading we have the following:
The world is getting smaller every day. Grasping content.Na ̈ıve reading.
The world is getting smaller every day. Mouse thinks so. Grasping contentþ
author attitude.Critical reading.
The world is getting smaller every day. Mouse thinks so. I doubt it. Grasping
contentþauthor’s attitudeþreader’s perspective.Reflective reading.Thereis the universal dilemma between choosing whether to make up one’s
own meanings, the right Menochio insisted upon at his peril (Ginzburg
1982), and the responsibility to the forms of interpretation sanctioned by
one’s culture. Does one have the right to read ‘‘against the grain,’’ or is it an
obligation to read as tradition dictates? Students of literacy are concerned
with how and why writing exploits these diverse roles.
400 Epilogue