“Those classics you and I hated in high school actually contain greatness. Every one of them. If we were unable to discover this greatness, if we didn’t recognize the value found in these books, it’s because our teachers did not help us recognize this value.”
In my notebook I have a sketch depicting Gallagher’s understanding of the reader-text relationship; it features the teacher as a pope-like pipeline to understanding the classics. In his view, then, the student is essentially the receptor of information/relevancy as gleaned from the text and the teacher; the students seems to have a passive role in all of this. Any understanding of the experiences and expertise that students might bring to the table, even in a discussion of a classic work, seems lost. By contrast, the teacher is the active party, relayer of the Meaning of the Text, and the person from whom students will be able to develop a sense of said work’s “greatness.” The text itself is figured as unchanging, its location in our historical place and setting rendered irrelevant (unless, I assume, the teacher finds relevancies that he or she is willing to share).
This view of teachers and texts can, I’m sure, be quite empowering for teachers. Teachers are defined as the lynchpin of text appreciation and understanding. It doesn’t say much for the student, though, whose situation, motivation, and personality apparently play no part in meaning-making. I would propound a view of reading that figures the student-text relationship as primary and one that values a collaborative effort at meaning-making rather than an approach that values the teacher’s response more than the students’ responses.
Even the canon itself is the logical extension of Gallagher’s teacher-centric view of reading. Who chooses “classics”? Why are they classics? What about the notable exclusion of diverse writers (until relatively recently)? To argue that all classics are worth reading because, well, because they are classic is circular logic that sounds like bureaucrat-talk that serves to further entrench the status quo.
hahaha its u—- Laquessa