myblogsucks.com
noonereadsmyblog.com

I think I've had about ten hits in the past week.

And today's topic? Reading comprehension. No really. It's a weakness of Prima's, and I've been reading a little bit about it. What's somewhat fascinating to me is what the research shows about "good" readers versus what my own academic training has been. I'm reading this book Mosaic of Thought, and there's a lot of stress on making connections from self to text, which is exactly the kind of thing I'd see in my 'shmen. I was always interested in reader response, the transaction b/w text and reader and what a roomful of readers would do when confronted w/the same text. Except instead of celebrating what I'd bring to the text, I was analyzing it: was that justified? What informed my associations?

Though some of the feminist criticism that delighted me most--Literary Women by Ellen Moers, for example--focused on exactly that. What she'd read, why she'd read it, how it had been (mis)read, how much depends on who's reading it. Or even books like Millett's Sexual Politics, which seemed positively quaint even when I was reading it in the late 1980's, except its kind of overtly subjective, politicized sometimes completely wrongheaded reading was exactly at my level.