What is a text? What is a writer?

A text and a book are not necessarily the same thing. All books are texts, but all texts are not books. Texts might include things like poems, essays, stories, and plays, but other print and nonprint kinds of experiences are texts as well. Movies are texts. Television shows and advertisements are texts. Pamphlets are texts. Even something like architecture can be a text.

Some have argued that all of our experience comes to us (or is shaped by us) in the form of narrative, or stories. And thus, almost anything can be a text under certain circumstances. Designating something as a text is really more a way to describe our approach to it than it is a description of the thing itself. If we approach something with the intent to read and understand it, to consider connections between it, ourselves, and other things in the world, we can say it's a text.

Following from this, we can just as easily rethink our common notions of what a writer is. Obviously writers produce books, essays, poems, and so forth—all the kinds of things we traditionally call texts. But writers, in the broad sense, also compose other kinds of texts as well. How is an architect a writer, for example?

Remember though that the "writer" of a text like an advertisement is not normally just one person in a room somewhere who sits down and makes a text. The making of texts never occurs in isolation (even if the person writing is alone). A text like an advertisement is often written by a complex association of people working on a project at various stages of the composition process and working with different kinds of goals and desires in mind. Part of reading nontraditional texts (just as part of reading traditional texts) thus involves considering who, or what, the writer of that text is and what kinds of influences come together in this new production. Remember to consider the position of any writer as one that is determined by a complex arrangement of goals, desires, and pressures.

In short, keep your mind open to what kinds of texts surround you every day, how those texts come into being, and how you can approach those texts as a critical, imaginative reader.

What is literature?

We generally think of literature as a group of books, plays, poems, and essays that form a literary canon. Canon, in this sense, derives from the Greek kanon, which suggests a measuring rod or guide rule. Literature (or the literary canon) is usually considered to be the best texts a certain nation or culture or civilization has produced. We often oppose literature with the merely popular. We can speak, for example, of the Western canon, which would include such works as Milton's Paradise Lost, Joyce's Ulysses, and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland. (Note that a canon can include various genres.)

Practice: Canonical works

Make a list of works that you would consider canonical. You don't have to have read the works. You just have to have heard of them as being important.

Ideas of eras and literature

When we speak of literary eras, or periods, we generally are trying to designate a certain time period in which a number of literary techniques or styles, and often social attitudes, were developed, shared, and practiced by a group of writers. For example, the Romantic Period in England designates a time somewhere between 1789 (the outbreak of the French Revolution and the publication of William Blake's Songs of Innocence) and 1832 (the passage of the Reform Bill by the English parliament) in which particular trends in writing are said to have developed and reached cultural prominence. Note, as in the Romantic era example, that the dates that we use to bracket the era do not necessarily designate just literary events.

Always remember that literary eras are created after the fact. (Romantic poets, for example, would not have called themselves the Romantics.) Often, there are as many exceptions to the rules as there are works that follow the rules we lay out to describe literary eras. Literary eras provide a convenient way to study broad spans of time and to get a sense of how ideas develop and change in general ways. However, to create the sense of a smooth framework of literary eras, we need to ignore certain books, ideas, and trends that don't, in fact, fit the framework.

In the same way, literature, or the canon, is in some ways the artificial creation of scholars and teachers who choose to teach certain works for certain reasons while ignoring others. What do you notice about the canonical authors listed above? At times, those scholars and teachers have their own, subjective reasons for praising certain works and not others. And sometimes those reasons stem from prejudice.

For much too long, many kinds of literature from many places were ignored because they did not measure up to the artificial standards put into place by culturally dominant groups who controlled education. Thus women and writers of color were simply ignored or marginalized until very recently in the study of literature because they were not in the tradition of white, male, European authors. As unbelievable as it may seem to us, the traditional canon is only now undergoing serious revision and investigation in order to include works from previously excluded voices.

Practice: Literary eras: Exceptions to the rule

If you have discussed certain trends particular to a literary era in class, try to find a work that falls, temporally, in that era, but that does not conform to your expectations.

Intertextuality

If texts are everywhere, then it makes sense to think of texts, in all their forms, as always involved with other texts. The word we use to describe this involvement is "intertextuality." That is, texts are commenting on or developing from other texts. Intertextuality is not just an instance of author X using the words of author Y. Intertextuality can be much more subtle than that.

With this in mind, we can think of "writing from literature" as an important creative act in which you can participate by examining and extending the arguments and patterns you find operating in what you read. Thus all of your work is intertextual, since it stems from your reading (and therefore requires attentive reading).

Since reading affects texts, texts are never finished. Obviously, if I am writing a novel, reach the end, and type "The End," the novel is, in one sense, finished. At least, it is out of my hands. But consider what happens every time someone reads my novel, whether they have to write something about it or not. With each reading, my "finished" novel is opened up once again to each reader's revisions, that is, each reader's take on the novel. Since my text is involved with lots of other texts, and since anybody reading my novel is creating new texts from that reading, we can see how texts are never completely finished, in that they remain always open to new kinds of intertextuality. That is, they are open to being connected to other texts in limitless ways.

Reading and Rereading effectively

  Roland Barthes once wrote:

Rereading, an operation contrary to the commercial and ideological habits of our society, which would have us "throw away" the story once it has been consumed (or "devoured"), so that we can then move on to another story, buy another book, and which is tolerated only in certain marginal categories of readers (children, old people, professors), rereading is here suggested at the outset, for it alone saves the text from repetition (those who fail to reread are obliged to read the same story everywhere). (Barthes, S/Z, 15–16)

For Barthes, it is not the reading, but the rereading, of a text that really matters. This does not mean exactly that you have to sit down and read everything twice, although that is never a bad idea. What Barthes is suggesting is that you have to read attentively, which usually means going back over a text many times, to get beyond the surface meanings and story. What patterns emerge below the surface? What subtexts are going on? Is there satire or parody happening? What kinds of echoes and resonances are happening, and between what kinds of things? Does the text push you in certain directions? And what happens if you go against those directions?

But if rereading doesn't mean just reading every word twice, then what does it mean, and what are the practical implications for you in an English class at college?

Taking notes in English class

Taking notes in an English class isn't exactly like taking notes in, say, a History class, in which there are likely more facts you need to remember, and in which evaluation is usually based on exams that require you to reproduce the facts you've memorized. Of course, there are often facts in an English class that are useful to know. They usually involve detail about historical context you need to know to imagine the various authors and works you are studying developing in relation to social and cultural conditions.

What is more important to note in most English classes, though, is the ideas and questions that you and your classmates and your teachers can generate from each of the texts you deal with. In most cases, you are taking notes in an English class with the goal of producing an essay from the class readings. So take notes toward that goal. Ask yourself questions that might lead to an essay if you developed a lengthy answer.

Here are some practical note-taking tips:

• Try starting your notes for each class meeting on a new page, but glance at the last page to see what kinds of discussions were going on.
• Make sure you put the date at the start of each page.
• Include a list of authors and works you have read for that day. That way, when you look over your notes, the questions or ideas you've written down will be connected with a class reading.
• Take it a step further and make note of actual page or line numbers if you can find them or if your instructor mentions them in connection with class discussion. (Use abbreviations like PL for Paradise Lost to make things easier on yourself. But remember to write that PL=Paradise Lost somewhere so you don't forget.)

Remember that notes for an English class will often appear incomplete, in that questions and general ideas will form the bulk of what you write. Remember that at the note-taking stage it is not necessary to answer every question or pursue every idea to its end point.

If you find yourself with lots of blank pages with nothing but dates at the top and an occasional doodle, then take it upon yourself to generate ideas and questions. Do not just sit and wait for your instructor to start giving you something to write down. Be an active, imaginative reader.

Annotating as you read

Take advantage of the blank spaces in the books you buy for class to make notes within the text. (DON'T WRITE IN LIBRARY BOOKS!!) Writing in your books is literal intertextuality, as you insert your words into the same space as someone else's. Be sure to mark patterns as you see them developing (e.g., every time the color green appears, if you think that is important; or every time a certain character appears; or every time a certain symbol appears).

Also, mark crucial points in narratives (e.g., moments of major change, of intense emotion, or of climactic action). Many students elect not to write in their books because they think it will hurt the resale value. Quite simply: if you are more concerned with resale value than with your education, then you perhaps need to rethink being at college in the first place.

Highlighting is effective, but it is not the same as writing your own words (or even making your own marks) in textbooks. Also, you may find that you end up highlighting so much, there is more text highlighted than not. This defeats the purpose. Actually writing in your books forces you to use language to make some statement in your own words that comments on, summarizes, or draws your attention to a particular passage.

Remember that your annotation can be of all types. You can simply summarize, you can comment, you can make a note to "see page 23," you can write WRONG!....

Practice: Taking notes

Go to http://www.opcit.org and find Jason Snart's article "Making Sense: A Call for Close Reading." Print and read through the article and take notes for yourself, including annotations.

Making-by-marking links

Since most English classes require you to read many different works, it is often helpful to make links between the texts you are reading. Do this in the pages of your books. In this way you can make-by-marking connections, and you can develop new ways of considering one text in light of others. Next to a poem by T.S. Eliot, for example, you might make a note to "see Rich, page 35." Perhaps these two authors agree or disagree, or have used imagery in similar ways. In making this one annotation, you've planted the seed for what might become a full essay.

Asking questions

Although most teachers will say this over and over again, it bears repeating: there are no dumb questions.

This is especially true in English classes, where insightful new ways of considering authors and works often come from asking what might otherwise seem obvious questions. On the other hand, students often feel they are reading too deeply into something (another form of the "dumb question" syndrome) and will therefore avoid asking questions or pursuing a line of interpretation. However, there is really no such thing as reading too deeply, there is only reading deeply. If you can cite evidence from a text to suggest or support why your interpretation can work, then there is no way you've read too deeply. Whether you think the author intended something or not is irrelevant. Once a work leaves the author's hands and gets into yours, interpretation is no longer controlled by the author; he or she really just becomes another reader of his or her own book. Even if an author tells you what her or his work means, there is nothing to say that the author is right, or that other meanings don't also exist.

Practice: Finding nontraditional texts

In an effort to expand what we normally consider as texts, find, in some aspect of your everyday life, a text that is nontraditional: i.e., not a book or poem or play. Think of nonprint sources. Think of sources away from school.