Week One: Creative Reading

Introduction

All of the essays in The New Humanities Reader are challenging.  Some use specialized language; others address unfamiliar topics. None of the essays offers a reassuringly simple resolution to the complex situations presented. 

Instead, each essay is an exploration of an idea, event, or critical debate. As explorations, the essays represent multiple perspectives about a single subject.  A writer may propose an idea, criticize it in the next paragraph, offer another idea a few pages later, and then return to her initial concept at the end of the essay. By offering multiple paths of investigation, each writer engages in the creative process of making connections between other ways of thinking about and seeing the world. We believe that it is essential that the readers of these essays see themselves as engaged in a similarly creative process--creative reading.

What is creative reading?

At first, it might seem a little crazy to talk about reading as a creative process. After all, the reader's job is usually understood to involve the a more predictable and manageable set of skills: the ability to accurately represent the argument in the assigned reading; the ability to see the strengths and weaknesses in the assigned reading; and, more often than not, the ability to admire the finer points in the assigned reading. Thus, far from seeming a creative, reading at least as it is carried out in school, is primarily seen as a way to take in the ideas of others and accurately reproduce those ideas.

While we do think the ability to accurately represent the ideas of other writers is of central importance, we also think that reading is not just a way to better comprehend the ideas of others; reading can also be a creative process for developing and then better understanding your own ideas as they relate to the ideas of others. Creative readers make sure that they know what the author is saying while, at the same time, devoting their energies to actively constructing otherwise implicit relationships between ideas, events, and contexts. That is, creative reading involves imagining how and why different positions represented in the texts might be made to relate to each other. 

The connections that are made through the process of creative reading are not made explicitly by the writers; creative readers create these connections. So, when we ask you to read creatively, we are asking you to go beyond reading what the author has said and to focus your energies on thinking about the implications of what the author has said. There are many ways to do this kind of reading: you can consider connections between the author's ideas and your own experiences; you can think about how the author's ideas might work in another context; you can establish connections between a number of authors as a way of developing your own position. When you read and respond to what you have read in these ways, you turn the work of reading into a creative, self-directed process that helps you develop new ways of thinking about, responding to, and understanding the world.

Creative reading within the text

Creatively reading a single essay involves making connections between the various pieces of that essay. For example, in Jonathan Boyarin's "Waiting for a Jew," you need to imagine the connections among Boyarin's experiences as a child growing up in New Jersey, as a young anthropologist in Paris, and as a mature adult at a New York City synagogue.  A creative reading requires you to speculate about why Boyarin chose to share these different life events and to consider what these events have to do with the "marginal redemption" he mentions only in the title to his essay. By asking and answering questions about why the author presents certain ideas in support of his or her argument, and by questioning and testing the logic of those connections, you begin to establish your own ideas in relation to the text.

Creative reading between texts/between text and context

All of the essays we've included in The New Humanities Reader raise issues that are a part of larger debates within the public sphere about how best to understand the past and how best to prepare for the future. Thus, for creative readers, essays that at first seem unrelated can often be shown to be centrally concerned with similar issues.  For example, at first, it might appear that David Abram's essay on his experiences with shamans in Indonesia has nothing whatsoever to do with Marcia Angell's essay on the lawsuit over silicone breast implants. For the creative reader, though, this is the challenge: how are we to make sense of these two essays when read alongside one another?

To make a connection between these essays you need to imagine what both essays have in common. While they seem quite unrelated initially, after some thought it becomes possible to see that both Abram and Angell are concerned, in their own ways, with health and with health care. That they have very different ways of thinking about these issues is clear, but that, too, is a connection worth exploring. Why is it that they think about health in such different ways? What is it that counts as evidence for them?  How does determining what counts as scientific evidence affect who has the power to shape economic, social, and environmental policies? In creative reading, one connection leads to the next and larger questions emerge. This is what happens when the imagination is allowed to participate in the intellectual work of making sense of the world.

Creative reading also means using your own experience and knowledge of the world to critically examine the ideas presented in the essay.  For example, how does your own experience in your job or in your education compare to Peter Drucker's account of the knowledge worker in "The Age of Social Transformation"?  Does that experience make you consider Drucker's ideas from a different perspective?  Does your experience raise any questions that Drucker does not address?  By considering an author's ideas in a new context, you can find your own ways to develop your own contribution to the public debate in which these readings engage.

OK, that's how we define creative reading, but how do you actually go about doing creative reading?

To find out, continue on to the next page.

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