The intimacy of reading, or: An argument for slowing down

Abstract

In March 2020, so many pieces of our lives suddenly stood still while at the same time, technology spun faster than ever. Our institutions hurled Jamboard, Flipgrid, Packback, Padlet, and Google at us, to pretend our way forward after the briefest of pauses. Amidst the technological ramp-up, our kids stagnated in disengagement with online learning. When I say “our kids,” I mean both the entire collegiate student body and my own children, who were in middle and high school when the lockdown hit. Over the next 18 months, when we all huddled before our respective screens at home, I watched my middle schooler, propped up in bed, shrink to the size of a 2 × 2 black square on her class Zoom screen while the teacher valiantly tried to reach her and the other 25 or so black squares. Down the hall, in my study over the garage, my own screen did not look much different, particularly in the large (45–50 students) general education course on memory culture that I teach every fall at Michigan State University.

In this bleak reality, two principles emerged as powerful tools for keeping my own and my students’ sanity: slowing down and reading deeply. These insights did not appear overnight but emerged gradually on the horizon as I spent a summer trying to figure out how best to translate the most meaningful aspects of that Gen Ed course into an online offering. Back in the physical classroom for two cycles now, I have purposefully maintained the pared-down memory culture syllabus, with its elongated focus on fewer primary texts. While most of my comments here reference a course taught in English outside of my own program, I have found the lessons I learned there to be relevant for my German courses as well. And while my primary examples concern literature, they can readily be expanded to any space of cultural expression that encourages us to engage in the kind of deep reflection that activates a connection between our own lives and other historically or geographically distant worlds. Regardless of teaching modality or lockdown level, I have become convinced that less truly is more and that taking the time to (re-)discover a love of slow, close reading can build resilience—both my students’ and my own.

Initially motivated by a sense of sheer overwhelm, I found myself trimming the class content significantly: one novel was jettisoned altogether, as were most of a documentary play and two of four Shoah excerpts. Doing this allowed me to nearly double our calendar time spent with the major texts that remained—Ruth Kluger's Still Alive and Art Spiegelman's Maus. What began as a pragmatic search for more time to accommodate the complexities of online teaching quickly merged with other, less immediately tangible concerns. If my students were going to remain physically isolated from me and from each other, they needed a better pathway toward connection with the deeper questions of the course than my disembodied head talking through the screen at them. In the absence of the social connection provided by the in-person classroom (not to mention the larger-scale disruptions of the social fabric by the pandemic, racial tensions, political divisiveness, and so much more), I reasoned, the unique interiority of the relationship between reader and text could be especially grounding and meaningful.

Deeper reading requires coupling the act of slowing down with more reflective tasks, and foregrounding ways for students to draw connections between the world of the text and their own or others’ experiences. Kluger's Holocaust memoir readily offers itself up for this sort of engagement, both in its own textuality and in its reflection upon the power of literature more broadly. Students in a required Gen Ed course may not relate to the written word in the way Kluger does, but she reaches out to grab them in multiple ways. The autobiographical narrator reflects compellingly on the importance of both reading and writing in the face of extreme hardship, not only in the camps but across the span of her life. As part of her direct address to an American readership in this second iteration of her life story (she penned a German-language version a decade earlier as Ruth Klüger), Kluger also introduces epigraphs between sections of the text (Kluger, 2001, pp. 6, 13, 61, 133, 171, 203). Dedicating class time to extemporize on these additional voices—from Emily Dickinson to Maya Angelou—students not only witness the author's own conversation with other authors but enter that conversation as explicitly welcomed partners. In this intentional space, I encourage students to accept Kluger's invitation to connect those quotes not only to the story she is sharing with us but also to their own personal or broader societal contexts. Resonances bubble up as students make connections from those other texts to their experiences of familial relationships, physical or emotional displacements, and more.

Teaching slowly means letting go, and letting students have more space for their own encounters with a text. Decluttering the syllabus frees space to become more alert to what is happening both in the text and in one's own mind. In their introduction to The Slow Professor, written before our recent moment of historical crisis, Maggie Berg and Barbara Seeber remind us that “[w]e need time to think, and so do our students. Time for reflection and open-ended inquiry is not a luxury but is crucial to what we do” (Berg & Seeber, 2016, p. x). What lies at the very heart of humanities scholarship and teaching is even more relevant in a time of major social disruption: the unhurried, deliberate intellectual effort of critical thinking, analysis, and reflection can be contextualized as an antidote to the psychic and physical immobilization brought about by the pandemic.

Beginning by offering shared class space to begin the reflection process, I purposefully prod students to slow down further by writing several informal, handwritten journal entries over the course of the semester. The simple act of writing by hand enforces slowness and encourages reflection—it is also something they do less all the time and in that sense has the potential to become a marked (rather than normative) practice. Linking low-stakes assignments (graded globally, and generously, on thoughtful completion alone) with the physicality of putting pen to paper is a tangible move toward more intimate explorations, particularly when they are offered open-ended prompts that ask them to craft a personally inflected response to what they have read. I find that students tend toward a writing voice in these reflections that poses new questions, expresses empathy, and focuses on concrete moments in the text, rather than the quick judgments or generalizations that surface more often in traditional essay writing. (Students upload the journals to the course management site for me to read whether the offering is online or in person; I find that this hybrid approach lowers the threshold for completion—if a student misses a day's class, they can still readily submit their journal and get quick feedback from me.) Valorizing the relationship of reader and text revives a core value of the humanities, particularly of languages and literature, back into the center of our collective endeavor.

There is a part of me that mourns the loss of items that were formerly included in the syllabus, but I think more all the time about the importance of creating a course that meets student and instructor needs on those levels outlined above. The old syllabus, the one that worried too much about “coverage” (Berg & Seeber, 2016, pp. 1–2), was driven by internalized notions of discipline and disciplinarity that perhaps say more about my own performance anxiety vis-à-vis colleagues, real or imagined than they do about how to engage students deeply enough to move their thinking. If the pandemic has taught us anything at an institutional level, it is the imperative of tending to our students as whole persons, and our teaching as more than content delivery.

Through Rilke's poem, we took time in class to think about time in our own lives and in the world of Marianne and Juliane, two sisters caught up in a time of great social and political upheaval. We talked about calls to action, available forms of resistance in their time and our own—and about the importance of cutting stuff from the last 5 weeks of our syllabus. While it would be foolhardy to equate shrinking a syllabus with political action, the effort toward self-awareness and social conscience modeled in the film provided a platform for talking about the importance of taking time from action to reflect on the forces at work in our lives and our broader contexts.

The pandemic and ensuing lockdown issued a call for all of us, all the time, not just to heed crisis dynamics but also to remind ourselves of how we do our most meaningful work, particularly in the era of the corporate university. The physical isolation of the pandemic shrank our students; the ongoing pressures of all our lives threaten to shrink us all in our sense of agency and of shared humanity. In our humanities work, we have the means and the responsibility to respond to these dynamics in impactful ways, to allow our students to grow by slowing down, taking time to get intimate with rich materials, and occasionally, stepping away from those omnipresent screens to put pen to paper.

It is time. There is time.