Reading Graff's essay I thought both about my own "liking of books" at an early age and my son's dislike for books, which used to trouble me. So I found myself entirely in agreement with Graff when he comes to the following conclusion: "...our ability to read well depends more than we think on our ability to talk well about what we read" (45). In other words, even when we experience reading, especially the reading of fiction or poetry, as a private experience, it's still essentially social, embedded in a web of relationships and motives. When my son and I read together, for instance the Harry Potter novels, he didn't mind reading at all. But once he decided that he was too big to read with his mother, he stopped reading--or rather, he stopped reading books and started reading magazines (Sports Illustrated and, later, National Geographic) and communicating online. Am I right to say that's not reading?
Graff's essay, first published in 1992, responds to the "culture wars" within English departments between those who insisted on the inherent value of reading something called "literature" and those who brought a complex array of literary theories to the study of literary texts. Although I agree with Graff's side of the issue--that there is no "innocent" or unmediated reading of a literary text--I don't agree that teaching the debates about a text is always the best way to help students approach it. However, creating conversations about a text is, in my mind, the best way to enable the kinds of relationships that might motivate a young reader to give a new piece of "literary" reading a chance.
But what kinds of conversations?
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