Brianna Cruz

April 27, 2017

English 203

Dr. Decker

Briannas Literary Timeline

While reflecting on my relationship with literature over the past twenty years, there are five

articles in Falling into Theory by David Richter that can chronologically outline my experiences

and emotions dealing with books. There is a time I can recall when listening to my parents read

me stories before bed, when the idea of me being able to pick books up on my own and read

them by myself was the most exciting thing to look forward to. Reading was a favorite pastime

of mine once I got better at it, and while still enjoyable, has turned from a leisurely activity to a

daily requirement. The articles that outline my relationship with literature describe the pleasant

experiences Ive had with books as well as the negative aspects of the relationship. The authors

of the text allowed me to reflect on moments in my life while reading and analyze how I have

grown as a reader over the course of my scholarly life.

Early on in my life I could identify with Disliking Books at an Early Age by Gerald Graff (p 40.)

I recall when my parents read me stories before bed and I was eager to be old enough to pick up

a book and read it on my own. I was very impatient while reading as a child and wanted to finish

the entire book before I had even finished reading the first page. I enjoyed being able to mentally

transport into a different world and let the authors words create a movie in my head. On page
42, as Graff describes when his fear of being bullied for reading had been replaced by his fear of

flunking college, I reflect on a time when I realized I too had to deal with books correctly. Like

Graff, I realized while reading a book for school, that I had enjoyed different aspects of literature

as well such as the techniques authors used and criticism by other scholarly writers. When this

realization hit me, I understood that I had caused reading to lose its attractiveness with my desire

to finish the books in a timely manner, without fully grasping the plot of the stories. It wasnt

until later in my life when I had slowed down that I began to enjoy reading leisurely.

I reflected on myself as a reader while reading A feeling for Books, Telling Our Story about

Teaching Literature by Alan Purves. While I have never actually taught a literature course, I

reflected on the many ways he had approached teaching literature and compared that to the many

ways I was taught literature throughout high school. While Shakespeares Julius Ceasear still

played a major role in my literature classes, my teachers found other means of teaching us

literature through comics, poems, and plays. For several weeks, we analyzed poems by Edgar

Allen Poe, which introduced me to the wide selection of poetic literature. It was during my

freshman year of high school when I discovered my favorite poetic authors which include Poe,

Dickinson, and Wordsworth. I began understanding that literature comes in more forms than a

two-hundred-page, soft cover book. This greatly expanded my knowledge on literature and my

interests in other forms of literature besides novels, bibliographies, and historical narratives. My

teachers taught me to slow down reading while learning about poetry because the complex

meanings and metaphors cannot simply be skimmed over.

Once I reached a point in my life where I enjoyed reading leisurely, I could identify with Janice

Radways Introduction to A Feeling for Books. While I had found joy by spending hours
discovering new books at the library, I couldnt enjoy literary classics with the same interest.

Like Radway, I questioned why it was necessary for these literary classics to impact myself as a

scholarly reader. This article causes me to reflect on the time in my life when I was in high

school and read lengthy chapter books for fun. Teachers and parents alike often addressed how I

read books as quickly and as lengthy as my fellow classmates. I often would explain that reading

for me was the equivalent of watching movies to my peers. I could read the words and create

images in my head which I would later learn is the authors way of effectively using literary

devices. Unfortunately, most of the books that turned into movies in my mind were not books I

needed to read for school or books that came from the canon. Many of the authors that filled

these days were Scott Westerfeld, Stephenie Meyer, and Chris Crutcher. Once I began my

sophomore year of high school, one quote by Radway accurately described myself as a reader.

One page 220 Radway writes, With grim determination I restricted this reading to late at night

just before bed and devoted long daylight hours to the business of learning to describe the

aesthetic complexities of true literature (p 200). I believed the books I was reading and the

books I needed to be reading belonged in two different categories. My view on myself as a

reader altered once I graduated high school and began college at Bloomsburg University of

Pennsylvania.

The next article that portrays my relationship with books once I became a college student is

Helen Vendlers What We Have Loved, Others Will Love. One quote from Vendlers essay

that expressed my relationship with literature is found on page 32, as she writes, Though the

state of reading, like that of listening to a piece of music, is one of intense attention, it is not one

of scholarly or critical reflection. It is a state in which the text works on us, not we on it. It was

while reading the books assigned for classes that I learned to not analyze the book as I read it but
to read and absorb the information being received from the author. When I read What We Have

Loved, Others Will Love by Vendler, I reflected to when I began my educational journey at

Bloomsburg University as a Secondary Education major with a concentration in English. I began

my journey with the hopes of sharing my knowledge and passion for literature with others and

molding them to admire the role of literature in history as I had come to admire it. Vendlers

essay describes the type of literature teacher I aspired to be like when I was an education major.

Now as a second-year English major, I am able to reflect on Elegiac Conclusion by Harold

Bloom. While reading the same story told with new characters, settings, and sentence structures,

I question how Literature can remain a prominent subject in secondary institutions. While I do

enjoy reading, I understand that it is not a favorite pastime for all my fellow classmates. The idea

of English classes becoming Cultural Studies did not seem like a farfetched idea to me while

reflecting on the text. While I understand, being an English major and a person fond of all forms

of literature, that comics, movies, and television are varying forms of literature, technological

advances in society today may alter the way literature is studied. We have become a generation

accustomed to skimming pages of text and looking for important images or charts. This may be

effective for some material, however I dont feel Shakespeares plays are texts that can be simply

skimmed over by readers, if one desires to grasp the full theme and message of the text.