Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers, Eleventh Edition
By David Bartholomae, Anthony Petrosky and Stacey Waite
Contents
PREFACE v
Introduction: Ways of Reading 1
Making a Mark 1
Ways of Reading 5
Engaged Readers, Engaging Texts 8
Reading with and against the Grain 10
Working with Difficulty 12
Reading and Writing: The Questions and Assignments 16
Questions for a Second Reading 18
Assignments for Writing 19
Making Connections 20
The Assignment Sequences 21
The Readings 23
GLORIA ANZALDÚA, HOW TO TAME A WILD TONGUE 26
“So, if you really want to hurt me, talk badly about my language. Ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity — I am my language. Until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. Until I can accept as legitimate Chicano Texas Spanish, Tex-Mex, and all the other languages I speak, I cannot accept the legitimacy of myself.”
[FROM Borderlands/La Frontera]
KWAME ANTHONY APPIAH, RACIAL IDENTITIES 42
“The observation that there is no common American national culture will come as a surprise to many: observations about American culture, taken as a whole, are common. It is, for example, held to be individualist, litigious, racially obsessed. I think each of these claims is actually true, because what I mean when I say there is no common culture of the United States is not what is denied by someone who says that there is an American culture.”
[FROM Color Conscious]
ALISON BECHDEL, THE ORDINARY DEVOTED MOTHER 73
“Like my mother, I keep a log of the events of daily external life, but unlike her, I also record a great deal of information about my internal life. Although I’m often confused about precisely where the demarcation lies.”
RUTH BEHAR, THE VULNERABLE OBSERVER 113
“To assert that one is a ‘white middle-class woman’ or a ‘black gay man’ or a ‘working-class Latina’ within one’s study of Shakespeare or Santería is only interesting if one is able to draw deeper connections between one’s personal experience and the subject under study. That doesn’t require a fulllength autobiography, but it does require a keen understanding of what aspects of the self are the most important filters through which one perceives the world and, more particularly, the topic being studied.”
[FROM The Vulnerable Observer: Anthropology That Breaks Your Heart]
JOHN BERGER, WAYS OF SEEING 142
“What the modern means of reproduction have done is to destroy the authority of art and to remove it — or, rather, to remove its images which they reproduce — from any preserve. For the first time ever, images of art have become ephemeral, ubiquitous, insubstantial, available, valueless, free. They surround us in the same way as a language surrounds us. They have entered the mainstream of life over which they no longer, in themselves, have power.”
[FROM Ways of Seeing]
ON REMBRANDT’S WOMAN IN BED 161
“In the painting … there is a complicity between the woman and the painter.”
ON CARAVAGGIO’S THE CALLING OF ST. MATTHEW 163
“And the promise is not in what will flare against it, but in the darkness itself.”
[SELECTIONS FROM And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos]
GLORIA BIRD, AUTOBIOGRAPHY AS SPECTACLE: AN ACT OF LIBERATION OR THE
ILLUSION OF LIBERATION? 173
“What have not been adequately addressed are the many differences between the People and ourselves, meaning Native writers, and these are issues of class. I have been educated in a system that is designed to deny us on many levels; but as a participant in that system, which has earned me a ‘site of privilege’ from which to speak, however marginally, what have I become? And if the answer to that question remains continually out of reach, it does not keep me from asking of myself, because I say as I please, is this an act of liberation or the illusion of liberation?”
[FIRST APPEARED IN Here First: Autobiographical Essays by Native American Writers]
SUSAN BORDO, BEAUTY (RE)DISCOVERS THE MALE BODY 186
“So the next time you see a Dockers or Haggarad, think of it not only as an advertisement for khakis but also as an advertisement for a certain notion of what it means to be a man. The ad execs know that’s what’s going on, they’re open about not wanting to frighten men off with touches of feminine decorativeness. What they are less open about is the fact that such ads don’t just cater to male phobias about fashion but also perpetuate them.”
[FROM The Male Body]
JUDIT H BUT LER, BESIDE ONESELF: ON THE LIMITS OF SEXUAL AUTONOMY 238
“To find that you are fundamentally unintelligible (indeed, that the laws of culture and of language find you to be an impossibility) is to find that you have not yet achieved access to the human, to find yourself speaking only and always as if you were human, but with the sense that you are not, to find that your language is hollow, that no recognition is forthcoming because the norms by which recognition takes place are not in your favor.”
[FROM Undoing Gender]
JOY CAST RO, HUNGRY 263
“I have not kept my place. Like my mother and grandmother, I chose the earth — but the real earth, complicated and torn, not a post-Armageddon fantasy purveyed by a global religious organization with its own political and financial ends. I chose education, although, growing up, I knew no one who had graduated from college, aside from my schoolteachers and, briefly, my father’s lawyer.”
ON BECOMING EDUCATED 266
“At the time, I didn’t realize that these small incidents were negotiations of power, contests over whose perspectives mattered and whose voices would be permitted and welcomed at the table.”
[SELECTIONS FROM Island of Bones]
TA-NEHISI COAT ES, BETWEEN THE WORLD AND ME 277
“Americans believe in the reality of ‘race’ as a defined, indubitable feature of the natural world. Racism — the need to ascribe bone-deep features to people and then humiliate, reduce, and destroy them — inevitably follows from this inalterable condition. In this way, racism is rendered as the innocent daughter of Mother Nature, and one is left to deplore the Middle Passage or the Trail of Tears the way one deplores an earthquake, a tornado, or any other phenomenon that can be cast as beyond the handiwork of men.”
[FROM Between the World and Me]
E. B. DU BOIS, OF THE MEANING OF PROGRESS 294
“The ten years that follow youth, the years when first the realization comes that life is leading somewhere, — these were the years that passed after I left my little school.”
OF THE WINGS OF ATALANTA 302
“The function of the university is not simply to teach breadwinning, or to furnish teachers for the public schools, or to be a centre of polite society; it is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization.”
OF THE TRAINING OF BLACK MEN 309
“But when we have vaguely said that Education will set this tangle straight, what have we uttered but a truism? Training for life teaches living; but what training for the profitable living together of black men and white?”
[SELECTIONS FROM The Souls of Black Folk]
MICHEL FOUCAULT, PANOPTICISM 328
“Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there continues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs defines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fabricated in it, according to a whole technique of force and bodies.”
[FROM Discipline and Punish]
AT UL GAWANDE, SLOW IDEAS 362
“In our era of electronic communications, we’ve come to expect that important innovations will spread quickly. Plenty do: think of in-vitro fertilization, genomics, and communications technologies themselves. But there’s an equally long list of vital innovations that have failed to catch on. The puzzle is why.”
[FIRST APPEARED IN The New Yorker]
SUSAN GRIFFIN, OUR SECRET 381
“The nightmare images of the German child-rearing practices that one discovers … call to mind the catastrophic events of recent German history. I first encountered this pedagogy in the writing of Alice Miller. At one time a psychoanalyst, she was haunted by a question, What could make a person conceive the plan of gassing millions of human beings to death? In her work, she traces the origins of this violence to childhood. Of course there cannot be one answer to such a monumental riddle, nor does any event in history have a single cause. Rather a field exists….”
[FROM A Chorus of Stones]
BEN LERNER, CONTEST OF WORDS: HIGH SCHOOL DEBATE AND THE DEMISE OF PUBLIC SPEECH 419
“The first few seconds of a speech might sound more or less like oratory, but soon the competitors will be accelerating to nearly unintelligible speeds, pitch and volume rising, spit and sweat flying as they attempt to ‘spread’ their opponents — that is, to make more arguments and marshal more evidence than the other team can respond to within the allotted time, the rule being that a ‘dropped argument,’ no matter its quality, is conceded.”
[FIRST APPEARED IN Harper’s Magazine]
RICHARD E. MILLER, THE DARK NIGHT OF THE SOUL 435
“Can secular institutions of higher education be taught to use writing to foster a kind of critical optimism that is able to transform idle feelings of hope into viable plans for sustainable action? Can the first year
writing course become a place where we engage productively with the dark realities of our time:
violence, suicide, war, and terrorism, as well as fraudulence, complicity, and trauma? Can teachers of
first year writing be moved beyond praising students for generating arguments without consequence,
thought with no interest in action?”
[FROM Writing at the End of the World]
Engaging with Student Writing 465
[Student responses to Richard E. Miller]
WALKER PERCY, THE LOSS OF THE CREATURE 472
“When a caste system becomes absolute, envy disappears. Yet the caste of layman-expert is not the fault of the expert. It is due altogether to the eager surrender of sovereignty by the layman so that he may take up the role not of the person but of the consumer.”
[FROM The Message in the Bottle]
MICHAEL POLLAN, NUTRITIONISM DEFINED 490
“Since nutrients, as compared with foods, are invisible and therefore slightly mysterious, it falls to the scientists (and to the journalists through whom the scientists reach the public) to explain the hidden reality of foods to us. In form this is a quasireligious idea, suggesting the visible world is not the one that really matters, which implies the need for a priesthood. For to enter the world where your dietary salvation depends on unseen nutrients, you need plenty of expert help.”
[FROM In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto]
MARY LOUISE PRAT T, ARTS OF THE CONTACT ZONE 512
“I use this term [contact zone] to refer to social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power, such as colonialism, slavery, or their aftermaths as they are lived out in many parts of the world today. Eventually I will use the term to reconsider the models of community that many of us rely on in teaching and theorizing and that are under challenge today.”
[FIRST APPEARED IN Profession 91]
RICHARD RODRIGUEZ, THE ACHIEVEMENT OF DESIRE 533
“What I am about to say to you has taken me more than twenty years to admit: A primary reason for my success in the classroom was that I couldn’t forget that schooling was changing me and separating me from the life I enjoyed before becoming a student. That simple realization! For years I never spoke to anyone about it. Never mentioned a thing to my family or my teachers or classmates.”
[FROM Hunger of Memory]
EDWARD SAID, STATES 559
“Exile is a series of portraits without names, without contexts. Images that are largely unexplained, nameless, mute. I look at them without precise anecdotal knowledge, but their realistic exactness nevertheless makes a deeper impression than mere information. I cannot reach the actual people who were photographed, except through a European photographer who saw them for me.”
[FROM After the Last Sky]
MICHAEL SPECT ER, THE GENE HACKERS 602
“CRISPR technology offers a new outlet for the inchoate fear of tinkering with the fundamentals of life. There are many valid reasons to worry. But it is essential to assess both the risks and the benefits of any new technology. Most people would consider it dangerous to fundamentally alter the human gene pool to treat a disease like AIDS if we could cure it with medicine or a vaccine. But risks always depend on the potential result. If CRISPR helps unravel the mysteries of autism, contributes to a cure for a form of cancer, or makes it easier for farmers to grow more nutritious food while reducing environmental damage, the fears, like the many others before them, will almost certainly disappear.”
[FIRST APPEARED IN The New Yorker]
JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN, OUR TIME 622
“The hardest habit to break, since it was a habit of a lifetime, would be listening to myself listening to him. That habit would destroy any chance of seeing my brother on his terms; and seeing him in his terms, learning his terms, seemed the whole point of learning his story. However numerous and comforting the similarities, we were different. The world had seized on the difference, allowed me room to thrive, while he’d been forced into a cage. Why did it work out that way? What was the nature of the difference? Why did it haunt me? Temporarily at least, to answer these questions, I had to root my fiction-writing self out of our exchanges. I had to teach myself to listen.”
[FROM Brothers and Keepers]
Assignment Sequences 663
WORKING WITH ASSIGNMENT SEQUENCES 665
Working with a Sequence 666
SEQUENCE ONE EXPLORING IDENTITY, EXPLORING THE SELF 669
APPIAH Racial Identities
SAID States
BUT LER Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy
GRIFFIN Our Secret
ALT ERNAT IVE SELECTIONS
WIDEMAN Our Time
MILLER The Dark Night of the Soul
BEHAR The Vulnerable Observer
ASSIGNMENT S
Narrative and Identity APPIAH 670
Identity and Representation SAID 671
The Concept of Human BUTLER 671
The Politics of Dehumanization BUTLER, SAID 672
Interconnectedness and Identity GRIFFIN 673
ALT ERNAT IVE ASSIGNMENT S
A Writer’s Identity, A Writer’s Position WIDEMAN 674
What We Read and Its Connection to Who We Are MILLER 674
Representing Others WIDEMAN 675
The Reflexive Self BEHAR 676
SEQUENCE T WO THE AIMS OF EDUCATION 677
DU BOIS Of the Meaning of Progress, Of the Wings of Atalanta, and Of the Training of Black Men
PRAT T Arts of the Contact Zone
RODRIGUEZ The Achievement of Desire
MILLER The Dark Night of the Soul
CAST RO Hungry and On Becoming Educated
ALT ERNAT IVE SELECT ION
GRIFFIN Our Secret
ASSIGNMENT S
Agents of Change DU BOIS 677
The Contact Zone PRATT 678
The Pedagogical Arts of the Contact Zone PRATT 679
Ways of Reading, Ways of Speaking, Ways of Caring RODRIGUEZ 680
A Story of Schooling RODRIGUEZ 681
The Literate Arts MILLER 681
Entering the Conversation PRATT, RODRIGUEZ, MILLER 682
Race and Education DU BOIS 683
Gender, Race, and Education DU BOIS 684
ALT ERNAT IVE ASSIGNMENT S
Writing against the Grain GRIFFIN 685
The Task of Attention GRIFFIN 685
SEQUENCE T HREE THE ARTS OF THE CONTACT ZONE 687
PRAT T Arts of the Contact Zone
ANZALDÚA How to Tame a Wild Tongue
WIDEMAN Our Time
SAID States
ALT ERNAT IVE SELECT ION
BEHAR The Vulnerable Observer
ASSIGNMENT S
The Literate Arts of the Contact Zone PRATT 688
Borderlands PRATT, ANZALDÚA 690
Counterparts WIDEMAN 690
A Dialectic of Self and Other PRATT, SAID 691
On Culture PRATT, ANZALDÚA, WIDEMAN, SAID 692
ALT ERNAT IVE ASSIGNMENT
The Essay as a Contact Zone BEHAR 693
SEQUENCE FOUR AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL EXPLORATIONS 694
RODRIGUEZ The Achievement of Desire
SAID States
GRIFFIN Our Secret
MILLER The Dark Night of the Soul
BIRD Autobiography as Spectacle
ALT ERNAT IVE SELECT IONS
WIDEMAN Our Time
BECHDEL The Ordinary Devoted Mother
CAST RO Hungry and On Becoming Educated
ASSIGNMENT S
Desire, Reading, and the Past RODRIGUEZ 695
A Photographic Essay SAID 695
The Matrix GRIFFIN 697
The Experience of Thought MILLER 697
The “I” of the Personal Essay RODRIGUEZ, SAID, MILLER 698
Theories of Autobiography BIRD 699
ALTERNATIVE ASSIGNMENT S
Old Habits WIDEMAN 699
Graphic Autobiography BECHDEL 700
A Single Life, a Multiple World CASTRO, GRIFFIN 700
SEQUENCE FIVE EXPERTS AND EXPERTISE 702
BUT LER Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy SAID States
PERCY The Loss of the Creature
ALT ERNAT IVE SELECT IONS
MILLER The Dark Night of the Soul
GAWANDE Slow Ideas
SPECT ER The Gene Hackers
ASSIGNMENT S
A Question for Philosophers BUTLER 702
On Representation SAID 703
On Experts and Expertise BUTLER, SAID, PERCY 704
ALTERNAT IVE ASSIGNMENTS
A Story of Reading MILLER 705
A Slow Pedagogy GAWANDE 706
Reporting as an Expert SPECTER 706
SEQUENCE SIX READING CULTURE 707
BERGER Ways of Seeing
BORDO Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body
BIRD Autobiography as Spectacle
POLLAN Nutritionism Defined
ALT ERNAT IVE SELECT IONS
MILLER The Dark Night of the Soul
LERNER Contest of Words
ASSIGNMENT S
Looking at Pictures BERGER 708
Berger and After BERGER, BORDO 709
Reading the Body BORDO 709
Reading Media BIRD 710
War on Food POLLAN 710
ALTERNATIVE ASSIGNMENTS
What Is It Good For? MILLER 711
The Food Market POLLAN 712
Why Read Anything? LERNER, MILLER 712
SEQUENCE SEVEN ON DIFFICULTY 714
FOUCAULT Panopticism
BUT LER Beside Oneself: On the Limits of Sexual Autonomy
APPIAH Racial Identities
POLLAN Nutritionism Defined
ALT ERNAT IVE SELECT IONS
BECHDEL The Ordinary Devoted Mother
WIDEMAN Our Time
ASSIGNMENT S
Foucault’s Fabrication FOUCAULT 714
Concept and Example BUTLER 715
A Reader-Friendly Text APPIAH 716
A Theory of Difficulty FOUCAULT, BUTLER, APPIAH 716
Science Is Hard POLLAN 717
ALTERNATIVE ASSIGNMENTS
The Graphic Challenge BECHDEL 717
A Story of Reading WIDEMAN 718
SEQUENCE EIGHT THE ART OF ARGUMENT 719
BECHDEL The Ordinary Devoted Mother SAID States
BORDO Beauty (Re)discovers the Male Body
CAST RO Hungry and On Becoming Educated
GAWANDE Slow Ideas
SPECT ER The Gene Hackers
ASSIGNMENT S
Engaging Visual Pathways BECHDEL, SAID, BORDO 719
Story as Argument CASTRO 720
Best Practices GAWANDE 720
Arguing as an Expert SPECTER 721