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Wednesday, March 01, 2006
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The Complex Text From today’s Washington Post: The ability to handle complex reading is the major factor separating high school students who are ready for college reading from those who are not, according to a new report. From the ACT website, here’s a bit more about complex reading passages: A complex text can be described with respect to the following six aspects (which can I don’t know. Speaking just for myself, I always find results like these kind of happy-making. After all, I’m an English professor… this is what I do… I stand up in front of people, the way I did yesterday and the way I’ll do tomorrow, and I read passages from James Joyce and analyze them and ask my students to discuss them and all. In the largest sense, the ACT results represent bad, though not surprising, news. But in a more personal sense, they point to the importance of the work that English teachers and professors do. In looking over the report’s criteria for complex texts, I thought of the famous final paragraph in Joyce’s short story, “The Dead” -- A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead. This stunning passage has it all: its ideas are subtle, embedded; its philosophically complex information is conveyed via literary devices; the organization of language is markedly unconventional; the author’s tone is hard to place - elegiac, frightened, defeated? - and context dependent. A word like “mutinous” is certainly demanding. Sailors, not waves, are mutinous. There’s a poetic suggestiveness to it, with its echoes of muteness, another form of silence in a passage about the descent of silence. And though the soft insinuating rhythm and sounds of the passage hint at a kind of tranquility, there’s a restlessness in the character’s decision to “set out on his journey westward.” To understand this passage, a student first has to intuit its value and then discipline herself in the patience to read it carefully and slowly, as it clearly wishes to be read. Ideally, the student would already have been aroused by the beauty of the language, and her aesthetic pleasure would now draw her toward the act of interpretation. She wouldn’t be able to be very clear about its meaning, but having read through the rest of “The Dead,” she’d have a general sense of the thing. Nor would she demand absolute clarity, since she would understand that great art is about ambiguity. |