A Case for the Humble Reader

I have recently talked with a few professors from outside the English department who have some serious doubts about literary criticism and theory in general, especially when it is taught at the undergrad level.  Though they recognize its value to some degree for helping us understand our own assumptions better, they worry that the theoretical-critical mindset can often lead to intellectual arrogance, disabling us from being humble readers of texts.  For example, if we read a novel from a feminist perspective, we may have a lot of very smart things to say about all the novel’s many shortcomings… but may also close ourselves off from whatever the text might be able to say to us.

This semester, I have been highly impressed with a number of the theorists we have studied.  They are brilliant people with piercing critiques to offer the world of literature; they make us think in new, challenging, and sometimes unsettling ways about our assumptions as readers.  However, I think my concerned professors also have a point.  In this class, we’ve done lots of talking about texts, standing above them and looking down with a critical eye.  Yet so often, it seems that one of the biggest needs within academia is a willingness to learn and grow, to be challenged and to set aside our own cleverness or preoccupations in order to hear others’ stories.  Certainly, literary theory provides some very helpful ways to do just that; we learn to hear marginalized voices, to recognize how our own thinking is shaped by ISAs, etc.  But at the same time, we have much to learn from the literature itself, not just from critique of it.  My hope is to become a reader who can use the tools of literary theory, and who yet can approach literature with the recognition that I too have much to learn and many flaws that would not withstand critical analysis.  I want to think about what I read, but first to listen to it, openly.  Once we listen to a text and even love it, we can perhaps begin to criticize it as well.