"Reading in Slow Motion"

Here is my (lengthy) summary of and commentary on an essay the great literary critic Reuben Brower wrote, called "Reading in Slow Motion" ("slow motion" is what he uses to replace the "close" in "close reading"). The essay (collected in In Defense of Reading, Dutton: 1963) tries to outline a famous course that he taught at Harvard in the 50's, called HUM 6 (famously mentioned in Paul de Man's essay, "The Return to Philology"). Enjoy:

The question Brower tries to answer (though it is not his question: it gets put to him in a conference and he takes it up somewhat reluctantly, thinking it is badly formulated) is how to instill in undergraduates a “lifetime reading habit.” He begins his response (tweaking the terms of the question) by saying that if reading “is to do us any good, it must be fun” (4). Therefore “active ‘amusement’ is the reading habit I am concerned with here and more especially with the role played by the teacher of literature in encouraging students to acquire it” (4). In other words, he will not be answering how to instill just any “lifetime reading habit,” but a habit of engaging actively with books and getting amusement from reading.

“How will the teacher go about reaching this noble aim? By a method that might be described as ‘slow motion,’ by slowing down the process of reading to observe what is happening, in order to attend very closely to their words, their uses, and their meanings. Since poetry is literature in its essential and purest form—the mode of writing in which we find at the same time the most varied uses of language and the highest degree of order,” what Brower will in The Fields of Light call “imaginative organization,” “—the first aim of the teacher of literature will be to make his students better readers of poetry. He will try by every means in his power to bring out the complete and agile response to words that is demanded by a good poem” (4-5).

He then proposes to describe a course that will do this: Literature X, i.e. HUM 6—though it is always a question of how much of the actual class is reflected here. “The most distinctive feature of the kind of literature course I am about to describe is that the teacher does have some ‘holds,’ some ways of reading that he is willing to demonstrate and that his students can imitate. In this respect ‘Literature X,’ as I shall call it, differs from the old-time appreciation course in which the teacher mounted the platform and sang a rhapsody which he alone was capable of understanding and which the student memorized, with the usual inaccuracies, for the coming examination” (5).

But first, why slow reading? “The sheer mass of printed material to which we are exposed… [And] if by temperament or principle we resist the distracting appeals of the press and other media, we must nevertheless read a great deal as we run if we are to perform our tasks as citizens and wage earners” (5). Furthermore, “most if not all of the writers of the past… have assumed reading aloud and a relatively slow rate of intellectual digestion. Literature of the first order calls for lively reading; we must almost act it out as if we were taking parts in a play.” (5-6).

And we do not get any Latin or Greek. Instruction in the classics may have had disadvantages compared with the direct method of today, “but as a basic preparation for the study of literature it can hardly be surpassed.” Translation in particular “required close attention to the printed word… the closest scrutiny of meanings and forms of expression in both the ancient and the modern language.” Therefore, “one purpose of a course in slow reading is to offer a larger number of present-day undergraduates an equivalent for the older classical training in interpretation of texts” (6).

On this note, citing Coleridge on his infamous instructor in Latin versemaking (the Reverend James Bowyer) Reuben Brower notes, “The Reverend James Bowyer and not Coleridge, it appears, was the original New Critic, which is to say that much New Criticism is old criticism writ large.” Similarly, translation suggests “that teaching of reading is necessarily teaching of writing. The student cannot show his teacher or himself that he has had an important and relevant literary experience except in writing or in speaking that is as disciplined as good writing” (7). We will come back to this last point soon.

What is clear already, though, is that Literature X demands some changes in pedagogy, for the goal is “to get the student to a point where he can learn form himself.” First, this “requires… a redefinition of a ‘lecture.’ It asks the teacher to share his ignorance with his students as well as his knowledge… What is wanted is the ‘nonlecture,’ to Borrow E.E. Cumming’s happy term, an action performed by the teacher but clearly directed to the next performance of the student” (8). Ways, not formulas, are what are to be given, and this forward-looking instruction is insisted upon throughout (see below). Indeed, this forward-looking aspect is the reason for the writing requirements and their particular structure, which (I promise) we’ll get to. Also Brower picks this up in The Fields of Light: the readings there are to change how we interpret the next thing we read—that is, change our reading habits—not primarily to change the established readings of the texts under consideration.

The best way to ensure that we get this sort of nonlecture (at least it seems that this is what Brower is saying), is if the lecturer opens himself up to the fun we talked about earlier. This point makes “fun” and its status for Brower more precise as well: fun or amusement is good, but it should be an outgrowth of the wholeness and complexity of the literary object. Thus, he restates the problem: moments where we see the concentration and complexity in a literary object are “wonderful, but what can a teacher do to guide a student to discover them? He will of course start from his own excitement, and he will do everything he can to infect his students… But… he cannot hand over his feelings to his students; he cannot force them to be more sensitive than they are” (9). The students must feel for themselves, and be able to demonstrate it. Pointing to the meanings of the words under consideration allows this, for “while he and his students do not have a common nervous system, they do have the same printed page and they share the some knowledge of the English language” (9). Therefore “we might describe Literature X as a ‘mutual demonstration society’” (10).

In order to bring about this society (between students and students and teachers and students), the way students are tested must be through some sort of activity that demands this particular type of demonstration—not the memorization of material like the “old-time appreciation course.” So “after several classes of reading aloud and exploring connections… an exercise will be set” on a particular passage. Indeed, “Literature X as a whole will consist of a series of these exercise waves, with some more terrifying than others, the seventh and last coming when the students are given two or more weeks without classes in which to read new material—poems, plays, or novels—with no teacher to guide them” (10). These exercises will have “a very carefully planned series of questions. Beginning with queries on words and phrases, the exercise goes on to ask about relationships of various kinds, and it concludes with a question demanding a generalization about the work as a whole or about a type of literature or experience. An exercise on Othello might finally call for a statement about the nature of Othello’s tragedy and for a tentative definition of ‘tragic’ as used in Shakespearian drama. But the words ‘tragic’ or ‘tragedy’ will not necessarily appear in the directions; rather the students will be impelled to talk about these concepts because they are relevant” (10). This, then, is the cardinal rule (which we met with above): “No test or exercise or final examination asks the student to ‘give back’ the ‘material’ of the course. On the contrary, each stage of the work is planned with a view to how the student reads the next work, whether poem or play or novel” (15).

We might pause a moment and see that now that we have almost enough to reconstruct the general structure of the course. Between this some other information I've found, it looks like each week there is one lecture and two discussion sections, in, say, a 12 week semester. We have exercises in seven waves totaling, as he says later, “twenty to twenty-five” (17, “very few readers can handle more”): how this breaks down into what needs to be done for each week is confusing to me. It seems that there might be two essays a week, though how this would work in “waves” isn’t clear. Regardless, the exercises are directed, as we saw, and the questions increase in specificity as the course progresses. However, they never reach the level where they ask that jargon be repeated back, mostly because the questions have to change with the material under consideration: as we’ll see below, the course moves from poetry to drama to the novel, then even into the essay. About halfway through (he makes this clear later, 15) there can be an midterm exam which can function like a longer exercise (it can be, he says, perhaps on a longer work read outside class, which I think he mentions to ease the burden but also to encourage more reading). At some point the class breaks when it gets to the novel (say, Tom Jones), which will be read in full (“it takes time!” Brower insists, regarding, I think, both reading the novel and the process required to read the novel, or anything, right,14). It then meets again and continues until it gets to the final meetings, which return to something shorter. The final exercise though will be longer, requiring, I think, that a larger set of critical tools be brought to bear upon the text—namely, the entirety of those that the class has tried to teach the student (summary is thereby achieved in the student’s activity).

Now, one of the most important things, as I already mentioned, is that the class moves from poems to drama to a novel, as Brower makes explicit above and throughout the essay (he also does this in The Fields of Light). “In Literature X we shall start by reading poems, and start with no apparent method or at least with method well concealed. We begin, as Frost says, with delight, to end in wisdom. ‘What is it like,’ we say rather crudely, ‘to read this poem?’ ‘With what feeling are we left at its close?’ ‘What sort of person is speaking’ ‘What is he like, and where does he reveal himself most clearly?’ ‘In what line or phrase?’” (12). Then, introduce critical terms. “But our emphasis will always be on the term as a tool, as a device for calling attention to the poem and how it is made” (10-11). Rhythm and formal things may be brought in, but, like the other terms, only “to show how the poem ‘works’ and what it expresses” (13).

Then a play by Shakespeare, say, “so that students can see at once that the way in which they have read poems also works for a poetic drama and that there are some basic similarities between the structure of these different types of literature. They may see, for example, that the man speaking in a poem corresponds to the character in a play, that Shakespeare has his large metaphors just as Keats has his smaller ones” (13).

Then short stories, on our way to the novel. “The short story like the poem gives us literary experience in microcosm and makes it easier to see analogies between fiction and poetry, to see that a tale by Hawthorne is the unfolding of a single metaphorical vision, or that the narrator in a story by Joyce controls our sense of being within the child’s world, exiled from adult society” (13). When we hit the novel, which “demands a very different reading from a Shakespearean drama,” and I think represents the biggest challenge for Brower (perhaps because of his conception of language, which as he emphasizes is highly dramatic), by nevertheless “putting the same questions to both genres their likeness and their unlikeness can be defined, and the exact quality of a particular work can be discovered. The student will find, for example, that the ‘marshes’ and ‘mists’ of Great Expectations are nearer to the fixed symbols of allegory than to the fluid metaphors of Shakespeare. But he can also see that in a novel as in a poem the narrative voice is of immense importance” (13). These are pretty odd statements, I think, to make about a novel, but let’s push on.

The novel brings us into history, reminding us “the meaning of the work in itself changes when we view it in relation to the other works and to the social situation in which it first appeared” (14). Brower then says that “Literature X will move on in its later phases to some experiments in historical interpretation, “historical” being used here to include the relation of a work to its time, especially to more or less contemporary works, and to literary tradition.” By this he means something like the following: “If we return to Othello or Coriolanus after reading the Illiad and after gaining some familiarity with the heroic tradition in the Renaissance epic and drama, we find that both plays are richer in their meaning. We see in Coriolanus what happens when an Achilles enters the Roman forum…” (14). Indeed, another interesting interpretation of how to integrate history. However, it is not, for Brower, amenable to a Great Books course (see below: Gerald Graff in Professing Literature outlines the debates that were going around in the 50’s about that, specifically at Harvard).

For the point about bringing in history is to keep the students away from the bad historical formulas that (Brower seems to think) often emerge in intellectual history and rely on some “abstracted idea” that gets developed over time. So in the 18th century there is “goodness” and “prudence” and “benevolence,” and all the thought of that time (including literature) would be the development of those notions. But the class avoids seeing these things as ideas that have force outside of their representation. So the class might move into “a series of readings in Chesterfield, Hume, and Dr. Johnson,” and “then be asked to define and place the moral attitudes expressed in Tom Jones, through comparing them with similar attitudes expressed in these eighteenth century moralists… [The students’] earlier practice in interpretation would protect them from reducing the experience of the novel to the abstracted idea.” Thus, the class would turn after the novel perhaps to the essay, and “undergraduates could be given some practice… in writing intellectual history” (14-15).

And at the end we would return to poetry, with the purposes I described above, but the emphasis here on writing brings us back finally to the exercises. Brower strongly believes that there is a “value for close reading” in the “practice in equally close writing” (16). “The student who looks at poems as carefully as we have suggested will understand that poetry begins in grammar and that to express a just appreciation of a poem demands fine control of grammar on the part of its appreciator” (16). The emphasis on exercise and in particular on the types of questions asked in the exercises—resistant as they are to any formula—is meant to show that the production of writing for the student is, institutionally, more valuable than getting the right answers. In other words, it is meant as direct opposition to fill-in-the-bubble tests, or even examinations which merely require that something be read to “fill in a gap” in knowledge (16). They require, therefore, intense critical commentary on the part of the people in charge of the discussion section. This is not only because grading the exercises is more laborious, but because the comments are in fact the most intimate and productive tool for furthering the development of the student’s reading and writing abilities. On this point, Brower thinks that the writing is even more important than the section meetings and the discussion there. Why? “The most valuable discussion a teacher can give is a comment surely directed to an individual written performance” (17). He continues: “A teacher who is not bewildered and dulled by reading too many papers on the same topic [that is, one that gives questions that call for individual and nuanced response, not calling for formulas] will be able to judge the student’s present achievement in relation to what he has done in the past. He can also help him keep track of his development and show him where he is going, and when he has failed, show him how to build on an earlier successful performance” (17). If I seem to stress this point, it is because Brower does. Witness the following, which I think I am getting embroidered on a jacket or something to wear around campus: “The marker of an English paper… becomes the higher literary conscience, the intellectual guardian angel of his students” (18).

Brower says this because he believes that the importance of writing for the reading of literature also marks out a place for English in the humanities and in the university more generally. It also does this in opposition to the claim that this place is secured by the reading Great Books: “There is a danger, which is increased by the large amounts of reading assigned in Great Books courses, that rich and special experiences will be too readily reduced to crude examples of a historic idea or moral principle” (18, see above). “Though reductions may be necessary and useful for certain purposes, we must not let students make them too soon or too easily… The undergraduate who masters the trick too early and too well may in the process suffer real damage. He may have acquired the dubious art of reading carelessly, of making the reduction before reading” (18). This type of reduction, though, extends all over the university. “Hence the special function of the teacher of literature, which is not to be confused with that of the historian or moral philosopher” Brower says, because this function is both slow reading and careful writing as the outgrowth of this reading, which is required for good (nonreductive) thought in these other disciplines (18-19). “A course in interpretation is a course in definition by context, in seeing how words are given rich and precise meaning through their interrelations with other words,” as he puts it earlier in the essay. “The student who acquires this habit of definition will be a better reader of philosophy or law or any other type of specialized discourse, and he may learn something about the art of writing, of how to control context in order to express oneself” (11). And I’ll close with how he sees his Literature X, insofar as it is able to actually make the student acquire this habit, as a revival of certain specific functions of a humanist education and the humanities more generally, from a site already within the humanities (a point which also reaches back to what we saw him say earlier on the Latin and Greek): “It is pertinent to recall the historic definition of the Humanities as it stands in the Oxford English Dictionary: ‘Learning or literature concerned with human culture, as grammar, rhetoric, poetry’… I suspect that some of the more enthusiastic general educators may be surprised by the words that follow ‘human culture:’ ‘as grammar, rhetoric, poetry’… The disciplines name are the ones that the teacher of literature has a special responsibility to impart” (19).