Ramping Up
Dear Reader,
While I’ve written quite a bit about background knowledge’s role in reading comprehension, those pieces were about the general stretching of boundaries or developing some sort of reading habit. Beyond those pieces, I’ve hinted at a kind of ramping up, or at least the byproduct of it, in “Reading in Memoriam.”
(If I’d written “The Intellectually Honest Read” piece yet, I’d have hinted even more, but we’ll get to that one eventually! Starring John Dewey and some other characters.)
So I thought it might be worthwhile to write a little more about ramping up. I should probably have written the essay on “The Deep Read” first, but it’s my newsletter and that one scares me as it’s easy to mislead people in the explanation. And so I’m avoiding it until I can get closer to a draft that isn’t instructional in ways unintended…
By ramping up, I don’t mean in the sense of overall reading comprehension, with the various interdisciplinary and diversity of genre inputs that create a person’s reading comprehension in the abstracted, overall sense. That sort of ramping up I’ve already been addressing and might address some more. Today’s piece, however, is about ramping up within a single discipline or topic or even author.
Just last week, I wrote about Stephen Booth and how my comprehension of his Precious Nonsense is at about 95% now. (I honestly worry this is a boast, but I also think it’s true. As for his intellectual project as a whole… I’ve got some work to do.) This was from doing an initial deep read, and then some subsequent re-reads (and the sort of comprehension that comes when one has to discuss and even teach a text).
At this point, though, my interest in Booth extends beyond that singular, classic work. If you recall my piece on Chapter 1 of Lost in Thought, the quote I selected was about how some people read Augustine’s Confessions to “trace out his path further than he did” and others “have spent their lifetimes, simply trying to understand Augustine, for his own sake.”
I have neither the intellectual prowess nor the intellectual drive to trace out Stephen Booth’s path any further than he did. That’s not false humility—I know I lack both essential qualities to go further than he did, even if his book awesomely invites readers to do just that. (Among the reasons I love his scholarship.)
I am, however, trying to understand Booth for his own sake. It’s not for the sake of teaching—I’m not sure I can improve my comprehension of Precious Nonsense specifically. And even if I do, it won’t influence how I teach it, not fundamentally.
I’m simply intrigued by Booth’s intellectual project. So I’ve had to ramp-up my reading in order to understand him.
This specifically means I’ve had to do two things: start at the beginning of his writings and find guides to help me.
While Booth’s best-known work is his 1977 edition and commentary on Shakespeare’s sonnets, it’s not his first major publication. He had a few papers, and, more importantly, his 1969 An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets. That work is not an essay in the most-common contemporary sense of “short persuasive piece,” but is rather an essaying forth—an exploration of a particular theme. It’s also a full book.
And sometimes, if you want to get an idea of an intellectual project, you have to start at the beginning, particularly with an individual scholar. Personally, I enjoyed starting with this one because I decided to call this earlier book “Baby Booth.” It’s the sort of endearing term you place on something or someone who scares the dickens out of you, to humanize them and make them appear intellectually approachable.
It is, in fact, a baby Booth. In An Essay on Shakespeare’s Sonnets, you can find a consistent thread that continues straight through to Precious Nonsense. You can also see Booth writing as a mortal. As in, his scholarship and writing are now “merely” first-rate and excellent, not quite of the impossible heights found in Precious Nonsense. Most scholars are lucky to reach the status of Baby Booth. It’s frankly frightening to see how skilled he was from the start.
After finishing that “essay,” I moved on to Booth’s commentaries on plays I’ve read or observed in performance. And I’m now slowly working my way through his career-making commentary on Shakespeare’s sonnets.
For guides, however, I turned to a book written by a cohort of his contemporaries, Reading What’s There. It’s here that you read person after person writing about “Boothian analysis.” While Boothian analysis is technically within the amorphous category of “close reading,” it’s absolutely its own thing, though I must admit that it cracks me up to refer casually to Boothian analysis as if it were in the class of Hegelian analysis or something like that. (Perhaps it is, but that is not my judgment to make.)
Reading What’s There offered me three things to get more background on Booth: essays demonstrating Boothian analysis, essays about teaching alongside him and from his own writings, and an essay about his classroom exercise of analyzing the P.D. Eastman classic, Go Dog. Go!, which is my favorite part of that book.
My guides, then, offer me different aspects of Booth’s career and research interests. These guides have helped me expand my comprehension (and my comfort) of Booth’s project, giving me confidence to return to those of his writings I’ve yet to tackle.
So there’s that case study. It’s not the only way to ramp-up a read. But often, having more materials from an individual intellectual—especially their earlier works—and then materials from that intellectual’s contemporaries (or even later commentators) can help you to ramp-up. Two simple things.
For philosophy of science or science and technology studies (STS), which are not the same fields but have some interaction, one could start with The Hedgehog Review’s “The Cultural Contradictions of Modern Science” or Neil Postman’s Technopoly. From there, one might expand to E.A. Burtt’s The Metaphysical Foundations of Modern Physical Science or Thomas Kuhn’s more-famous The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (which is a knock-off of Burtt’s book, but that’s another matter). And from there, one might decide to read some John Dewey or Massimo Pigliucci or Stephen J. Gould or Susan Haack or Daniel Sarewitz, depending on one’s own inclination or purposes.
And from there, well, those authors and their interpreters (and their footnotes) could more than be your guide.
A friend of mine has taken to writing YA and MG fantasy. Well, “taken to” isn’t quite exact, as she wrote one manuscript a decade ago. But she’s recently taken more to it. And so she’s decided to read both scholarship on the genre and earlier fantasy works—particularly by female authors. Of course, she’s also had to read a host of contemporary books, too.
So her ramping up has included current trends, past works (those both significant and buried by time), and scholarship on both fantasy and children’s literature. If that sounds like work, YES. (I’m so glad I don’t write fiction of any genre.)
George MacDonald, Edith Nesbit, Ursula K. Le Guin, Robin McKinley, Susanna Clarke—these and more are shaping her understanding of the genre, helping her to frame her own stories and worlds in conversation with theirs.
The weird thing about ramping up is that the task seems insurmountable at the start. Like, how does one learn about argumentation theory or reading comprehension or gardening or astronomy? The answer, of course, is bit by bit. But if you look at the case studies above, the most important things are to 1) start and 2) keep going as you find intro or next-level reads to advance your comprehension.
(I should make note that simply because someone lists “Introduction to X” in their article or book title that it doesn’t mean it’s written for beginners. I’ve… had a few experiences with this phenomenon, even when I was beyond beginner stage with the specific subject matter, and each time was depressing. Of some amusement, in the case of one of these books, I was myself studying with that author’s former doctoral student, and even that former doctoral student had no idea what was going on in his former mentor’s “introductory” text. I felt somewhat better after that specific experience, but as you might be able to tell, I’m still a little salty about this phenomenon overall.)
I should also mention that sometimes you have to read several (truly) intro books before you can ramp-up to more difficult ones, at least if you’re hoping for dexterity. Another method for ramping-up is to select several more advanced works within a discipline, and then, if you find a particular read amidst them too advanced for you at the moment—and it would be imprudent to grind it out with that particular read—skip that read and turn to a different work within that discipline. You can always come back to a book, once your ramping up has given you better access to it.
As always, if you have any follow-up questions to this or other essays, just hit reply!
Happy reading to you,
Kreigh