7. Students and Reading Difficulties

I was struck by Bean's insight that students often struggle with considering themselves in conversation with the author, because in my own experience I've noticed that difficulty crop up in a few different ways. A common one in my literature classes is the assumption that the author's authority is unquestioning, a-temporal, and all-knowing. When I taught Giovanni's Room last semester, I remember it being especially tricky to convince my students that Baldwin's narrator, David, was unreliable--and that his motivations as a character might not be entirely altruistic or even downright amoral.

One of the approaches I've found helpful is assigning books by authors whose authority is itself, perhaps, a bit suspect, or authors whose biases or blindspots crop up in their texts, and pointing that out to students as they read, so they get a sense that the text, no mater how lauded or canonized, is capable of error, is constructed and occasionally incomplete or ineffective. I taught Into the Wild this semester, and my students and I discussed how Krakauer's strategies as a journalist and researcher were indicative of his biased reconstruction of McCandless' death.