repracticing practical criticism

8/14/2019 Repracticing Practical Criticism

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Re-Practicing Practical Criticism

Gary D. Shank

M Cecil Smith

Department of Educational Psychology,Counseling and Special Education

Northern Illinois University

DeKalb, IL 60115

Paper presented at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research

Association, Atlanta, GA. April 12-16, 1993.


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The purpose of this paper is to revisit the psychological study of expertise in reading

from a semiotic perspective. There has been, over the past two decades, an abundance ofresearch within the framework of cognitive psychology which has investigated the nature

of expertise across a variety of domains, Including air traffic control (Means Ct al., 1988)

radiology (Lesgold, Rublnson, Feltovich, Glaser, Klopfer, & Wang, 1988), horse racehandicapping (Ceci & Liker, 1986), chess (Charness, 1981; Chase & Simon, 1973;

DeGroot, 1965), and electronics (Egan & Schwartz, 1979). A picture of expertise has

emerged which cuts across all of these activities and demonstrates that; 1) expertsperceive large, meaningful patterns in their domain, 2) have superior short- and long-term

memory for domain-relevant Information, 3) are faster and more efficient at performing

basic skills pertinent to their domain of expertise, 4) represent problems at a deep level of

understanding, 5) spend a good deal of time analyzing problems before attemptingsolutions, and 6) display superior self-monitoring skills (Glaser & Chi, 1988).

In particular, characteristics of expert adult readers have been examined in the

psychological literature. From the perspective of cognitive psychological research, expertadult readers are those persons who are strategic and can monitor their understanding of

text. Expert readers possess sufficient prior knowledge and appropriate strategies whichenable them to solve problems that they encounter In reading, such as breakdowns in

comprehension. As readers develop and elaborate their knowledge schemas more slots

are created so that incoming, relevant information is more easily learned or retrieved.

When a person possesses considerable knowledge of a particular domain, the acquisitionof new information is facilitated as the information is mapped onto ones existing

knowledge structures. Another characteristic of expert readers is that they display an

interest in the topic and appropriate attitudes towards the reading task(s). Finally, expertreaders ably pursue and accomplish personal goals in reading, such as wanting to know

about a topic or finding entertainment in leisure reading.

Research on expert reading has generally examined the skills of domain experts, such as

attorneys and law students (Lundeberg, 1987), professors (Pressley, Beard, & Brown,

1990), and physicists (Bazerman, 1985). It is, by now, widely accepted that extensiveprior knowledge of a topic or domain is the sine qua non of skilled reading (Bransford &

Johnson, 1972). There may be situations and contexts, however, in which expert-like

reading ability is demonstrated even when the reader lacks sufficient prior knowledge of

a domain. Scardamalia & Bereiter (1991) suggest a dialectical process occurring betweenthe readers textbase (i.e., a representation of what the text says) and their situation model

(I.e., the readers domain knowledge relevant to a text). The situation model is used for

making inferences necessary in constructing the textbase; comprehension of textpropositions, in turn, modifies the readers situation model. Expertise is characterized by

high levels of such back-and-forth activity, according to Scardamalia and Bereiter (1991).

In our study, we wanted to get beyond the idea that acquiring expertise in reading is

strictly a process of decoding and extracting information from an extensive prior

knowledge database, and acquiring appropriate strategic skills. We chose to augment the

standard cognitive theoretical approach with a more semiotic understanding. In particular,


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we focused on the work of Roland Barthes (1975). In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes

describes reading not so much as a cognitive experience as an erotic experience. Part of

the pleasure of the text, from Barthess perspective, is pushing the act of reading beyondits mundane ordinary boundaries.

As a consequence, then, we were interested in looking at expertise in people who pushthe boundaries of reading as part of their vocations. This entailed looking at how the

critic, broadly conceived, reads. Coupled with this task is the idea of asking critics to

reflect not only of their process of reading, but to develop pedagogical suggestions thatcould be used to help people improve their own styles and habits of reading.

One of the things we discovered quickly is that very little is known about the way that

critics read. Gevlnson (1991), for example, has suggested that the idea of readingexpertise in the field of literary criticism may be a dubious concept, at best. While there

has been a good amount of literature looking at how students interpret texts (Cox &

Many, 1991; Rogers, 1991; and Smith, 1992 are recent examples looking at the

interpretational skills of, respectively, elementary, secondary, and college age students),most of these studies have concentrated on determining the validity of reader response

theory as a mode for informing reading instruction. We feel that reader response theory,as exemplified by Rosenblatt (1979, 1982) is a valuable addition to the theoretical

domain of reading research and instruction, but we felt that our research needed to be

grounded In work that was more explicitly linked to the performance of criticism as a

day-to-day activity.

The obvious choice of a foundation for exploring the critical nature of reading was l.A.

Richardss (1929) classic work,Practical Criticism. In this book, Richards asked studentsto read and Interpret 13 poems of differing levels of quality. Richards then gathered and

synthesized these responses into a work that helped delineate the critical experience from

the perspective of a talented learner. Since then, others have built upon Richardss work.Kintgen (1983), for example, was able to re-do Richardss original project using the

more sophisticated analytical tools of reader response theory. But, to our knowledge, no

one has approached critics with the same task, at least with the goal of extending theboundaries of reading itself and using the results as a pedagogical tool.

One of the difficulties of our task was surmounting a number of logistical obstacles. As

we saw it, there were two main obstacles. First of all, we needed to recruit a number ofcritics from a diverse set of backgrounds, and second of all, we had to give them

something to critique that was new to all of them. The first obstacle was solved by taking

advantage of the tremendous power of electronic communication media. By accessing thefollowing discussion lists, we were able to assemble a dozen volunteers to read and

interpret a single text for us. Those lists were:Derrida-1, a discussion list on the works of

Jacques Derrida and deconstruction; Semios-1, a list dealing with visual and verbalsemiotics; Medtext1, a list dedicated to medieval codicology; Qualrs-l, a list on

qualitative research in the human sciences; and several other private lists on postmodern

thought. Out of our dozen volunteers, four actually submitted long and thoughtful

interpretations.


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In order to get a fresh work for critique, one of the authors commissioned a personal

friend, who is a published poet, to create a new poem for the task, and for the poet tofurther supply his own critique, theory of interpretation, and pedagogical plan. The text of

that poem follows:

repracticing practical criticism

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