(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Rose is a history professor focusing on reading and reading practices.
In his study of how common readers use books he discovered that “reading can be and has been the most fundamental expression of human freedom, even in repressive societies” (Rose 2018, vii). A theme that animates this history is how people have read in groups. For example, he reports that “By 1906 it seemed that every American town of any size had a ladies’ literary society, self-organized and democratically governed” (p. 63). There were also “more than 500 Shakespeare clubs across America, largely in small towns, and most of them organized by women” (pp. 63–4):
These were grassroots institutions of higher self-education, where there were no professors and all students were on an equal footing. Remarkably, they did with Shakespeare everything that professional academics do today. They staged their own productions. They closely analyzed the texts, and tried to discern the nuanced meanings of Elizabethan English. They read critical studies of Shakespeare, and they edited their own journals, which published their own scholarship and criticism. They situated the plays in their historical context, related them to modern literature, and performed interdisciplinary studies that connected Shakespeare with (for instance) art history. They assigned themselves homework: essays, study questions, syllabi, and oral presentations.
This is an incredible picture. Women who were excluded from their larger society “had to make their own cultural life” (p. 64). They were engaging with difficult texts, in a deep fashion, without academic training. They were learning for the pleasure of learning and self-improvement in self-governing societies. Is this a model that could be revived?
Less self-governing, but also formed around the works of Shakespeare, are numerous prison reading groups of his plays in the U.S and the U.K (p. 117). Convicts sometimes memorise his canon, and in jail embrace the plays “as a kind of bible”: “Shakespeare is like a god to a lot of the other guys here, because the majority of them don’t believe in a god” (ibid.). A Shakespearean play is “a series of moral choices, where individuals think through alternatives”: it reveals to the inmates “where and why they went wrong” (p. 118). This is partly because: “With Shakespeare you can extract from the text or you can read into it. It’s like the text has a life of its own…” (p. 119).
Among convicts who had been through this program, “recidivism was practically zero, and psychological testing found improved self-esteem, more benevolence, more spirituality, a decrease in verbal aggression, and greatly sharpened problem definition” (p. 124). If our reading doesn’t have this effect on us, should we be asking why? If homesteading, uneducated people of the early 20th century, and violent prisoners society has given up on, can benefit from texts in this way, what holds us back? Our choice of reading material, our attitude to the text, our lack of community?
In both types of reading groups, participants encouraged diversity of views and dissenting opinions about the texts. The ladies groups felt free to criticise the critics, and the prisoners learned “the capacity for respectful dissent” (pp. 64, 124). This is in contrast to the situation Rose describes in universities, where he sees the logic being: “books can make readers uncomfortable, reminding them of traumatic episodes, and therefore they should be prefaced with ” (p. 191). He sees this as impractical given “the unpredictability of reader response”—“how can a teacher guess beforehand which readings will disturb which readers?” (ibid.). But more importantly, this is unhelpful to the reader (p. 192):
The pain that reading provokes in troubled minds is a necessary part of the healing process.
He asks: “If a book doesn’t trigger something, what’s the point of reading it?” (ibid.). He identifies this “squeamishness” as a peculiarly modern phenomenon; previously “novels were supposed to trigger deep emotional disturbances, and might be considered insipid if they didn’t” (ibid.). So, the reading groups outside the academy are freer in this regard. They are more in keeping with how liberated readers have developed in the past: through self-selecting, self-governing groups, relating texts to their own lives and experiences, responding from the heart rather than in academic cant, and regarding triggering books as tools for growth and reflection.
Rose discusses bibliotherapy groups wherein readers report that they’re helped “through identification with characters who have endured similar ordeals…There may indeed be a wincing flashback to the original trauma…but the end result is catharsis” (p. 193). Realising that their burdens are both real and widely shared, readers describe the process as validating, comforting, and hopeful (ibid.). These groups also tend to perfer classic titles. Rose discusses a bibliotheraphy group for “people at the bottom of the social scale” who voted to read Great Expectations—this being a popular title in such groups (ibid.). Marginalised and uneducated readers enjoying classic works in this way—resisting the stereotypes surrounding their preferences—has been common in many milieus Rose explores. These readers’ experiences should discourage us from only seeking comfortable novels, and also from believing that classic, “difficult” titles are unsuitable for people without higher learning—especially in a group setting, classical works can be approachable and highly rewarding.
If groups can’t be self-governing, some lessons from historical examples may help describe how they can be organised. A critical point is that the teacher must respect the autonomy of the student, cultivating the reader’s individuality (pp. 41–2). One teacher explained: “the students gave the course; I criticized their presentations” (ibid.). Further, he”replaced critical class essays with creative-writing assignments, asking students to respond to the assigned texts with their own poems, stories, and plays” because the “creative habit of mind, no matter how modestly exercised, is the surest of all protections against pedantry” (p. 42). Even reading independently, we can experiment with responding to literature in this way. Rose tells of blue-collar African-Americans in the 1850s who wrote “unwritten histories” by creating scrapbooks of newspaper items and “African-Americana” from mainstream sources (p. 18). This was a way to respond creatively to what you read, with scant resources, to create a source of inspiration, a record of black achievement.
Through discussion, collage, and creative writing we can organise our reading and make it a source of discourse, translating it into common coin which we can exchange with others so we all become better off. When Rose found liberated readers, they tended to be outside of academia, often together in reading groups.