Reading Response Prompts
 

These prompts are meant to get you thinking about what you have read, and to help focus your thoughts for your reading responses. You can respond to any one of them, or, if you have another idea you would rather explore, you are free to write about that instead. Do not, however, attempt to answer multiple prompts for any assignment. If you choose to pursue an idea of your own or are not writing a response that day, you should still spend at least a few minutes thinking about each of the prompts in preparation for class. For more information, review the listserv assignment.
 
Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading 54-93, 162-85

Manguel describes the changes in education over the centuries, from memorization, to a focus on the letter and grammar of the text, to a change through which the meaning or sense of the text became more important, to the cultural emphasis Ashkenazi Talmudic scholarship placed on questioning and glossing a text. But to be fair, one kind of education did not completely supplant another, and all of these forms of learning exist today. Are these forms of learning contradictory or complementary? How have they played — and how do they continue to play — a part in your own education?

Manguel traces the development of reading from a time during which the authority (note the root of the word) of a text was unquestioned to one in which our sense of the authority of a text has become much more fluid. Where does a text exist? On the physical page, in the reader’s mind, or in the interplay between the two? Do texts have rights, or may we do anything with them we wish? What or who determines whether a reader’s interpretation or even response to a text is legitimate?

Consider the metaphors of reading that Manguel relates here. In what sense do we read the word and consume a book? Manguel says that “the book and reader become one”? Consider the role of metaphor in reading and thinking: what does metaphor allow us to do, and what pitfalls does metaphor present?

 
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