The Role of the Reader: Just in case you thought you didn’t have one
By: Ashley Lacognato
Tags: Literature, Literary, Issues

Let’s set the scene. You’re in your high school classroom and you’re reading another canonical novel. Your teacher is pulling out lines or sections of the book, asking your class to find a deeper meaning. They say, “What do you think the author is trying to say here?” and “What’s the point of using this metaphor?” At the time, maybe you didn’t care and maybe you were just trying to get to 7th-period lunch. Because of this, you didn’t see the importance of what they were trying to show you. This kind of critical reading is taught throughout secondary school and by the time you get to college, not much has changed. Why are schools asking these questions? Do we owe something to the author other than reading their book? In a word, yes. What do we owe them? Not much, but it can feel like it. Authors spend time writing, drafting, editing, erasing, walking away, coming back, and publishing their work all for readers. They (sometimes) spend years writing for their audiences, and the least we can do is respond. If not, we’re doing a disservice to both the author and ourselves. We’re not allowing ourselves to become active with the reading and with the author. We owe the author effort. We owe them an extra thought, another conversation, a response. Before we can think about the effort we have to put in after reading, we first have to look at our role as a reader.

Rules of The Read

When we open up a book, regardless of why we do it (for a class, for a book club, for pleasure), we are signing an invisible contract with the author. This contract has rules, also known as the “rights and responsibilities of readers.” Although written in 1980, the piece, “The Rights and Responsibilities of Readers and Writers: A Contractual Agreement” by Robert J. Tierney and Jill LaZansky could not be more relevant. Writers also have rights and responsibilities, as well, but that’s another article for another time. One of the first things this article mentions is, “a reader should assume that a writer communicates for a certain purpose(s) to a certain audience” (Tierney and LaZansky 608). What the authors are saying here is that it is our job as readers to think about why the writer is writing. We don’t have to crack the code and find out the exact reason they are writing, but we can think about the time period it was written in and consider why the author may have written it. If we don’t, we might be missing out on important context. For example, reading The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank, it is essential to know that it was written during the Nazi regime in Germany. Knowing this information, we can think more about the hardships of this time and why Frank’s journals were published. Context gives us a means of understanding. Without it, we can be lost and miss what is being thrown at us.

Frank, Otto H., 1986, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank, Contact Publishing, 1993, front cover.

Once we catch what is thrown at us, we then move on to another role; the meaning maker. Much like the responsibility above, this role wants the reader to become as involved as possible. Tierney and LaZansky write, “Whereas, it is the right of a reader to explore text for the purposes of generating meaning, as opposed to restricting interaction with text” (610). Once the reader understands the context of the book, then they can move onto meaning-making. Meaning-making is arguably one of the best parts of reading because it can be so interpretative, as there are thousands of ways to perceive one thing. A text that comes to mind is The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare. The ending of the play is highly discussed, with readers wondering what Katherine’s “taming” means. Did she truly change and learn to obey her husband? Or did she play a part–a part to make Petruchio think that he had taught his wife to obey? When we take on the reader’s responsibility, we can “explore the text,” as the article says, and think more deeply about the piece we’re working with. It asks the reader not just to create a meaning they think they should create, but asks them to think about why they have created their meaning.

Glaser, Milton. 1966, The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare, Signet Classic, 1966, front cover.

When reading, we should be as active as possible. This can mean different things for different people, but activity can be taking notes in the margins, highlighting, underlining, or pausing after finishing pages or chapters to think about what they’ve just read. As readers, it is our “right” to interact with the text and do as much as we can. We have the privilege of reading the book, so we should take advantage of it as much as we can. By restricting ourselves, we’re missing out on so much opportunity for involvement. We’re missing out on context-building, meaning-making — key points of reading.

Now, What Book To Read?

Often, we read books in our comfort zones. Because we’re used to reading certain genres, when we pick out our next book, it’s another familiar feeling. Although we can find some great reads this way, it is not the most helpful for personal growth. If we’re reading the same book, then we’re only getting the same single story. Many TEDTalks focus on this, including one by writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and how the same story told and read can lead to distorted outlooks on life. Elif Shafak, a fiction writer, dedicated her TEDTalk in 2010 to readers and the “politics of fiction.” She says, “We tend to form clusters based on similarity, and then we produce stereotypes about other clusters of people” (Shafak 00:03:47–00:04:08). She recognizes that if we continue to read the same books again and again, it won’t do us any good. She goes on to say, “Stories cannot demolish frontiers, but they can punch holes in our mental walls. And through those holes, we can get a glimpse of the other, and sometimes even like what we see.” If we read novels that are out of our comfort zones and out of familiar genres, we will uncover worlds we might not have known were there. As Shafak says, through these holes in our mental walls, we’ll be able to see how we can relate to these characters. This world is full of millions of different people from all areas of the world and we’d be foolish to only read about people that look like us.

Diving into a whole new genre of books we’re unfamiliar with can be daunting. So here’s a list of authors and recommended works that can get you started:

Tomi Adeyemi (rec: Children of Blood and Bone)

Tommy Orange (rec: There There)

Chimamanda Adichie Ngozi (rec: Americanah)

Sandra Cisneros (rec: The House on Mango Street)

Jean Kwok (rec: Girl in Translation)

Mohsin Hamid (rec: Exit West)

Meredith Russo (rec: If I Was Your Girl)

These are just a handful of authors that are perfect for readers exploring new topics. All of these authors address race, class, sexuality, gender, and expression in wonderful and differing ways. By reading about all kinds of people, we are breaking down barriers that will help us learn about others and become more educated.

Towards the end of Shafak’s TEDTalk, she reminds us of one of the most important parts of literature. She tells the audience, “Literature has to take us beyond. If it cannot take us there, it is not good literature” (00:15:44–00:15:47). I find this point one of the most crucial takeaways from her talk. Thinking back to my middle school days, I remember teachers telling us that reading is an escape and it can take us to other worlds. We don’t want to read a story about our own lives (where’s the fun in that?) we want to read a story that will take us to another place, the “beyond” Shafak is referring to. There are so many different routes books can take us in, but what is important is that they must take us somewhere. We must be reading these books–continuously opening our mind to areas of uncertainty, and learning more about the world.

Wait, There’s More?

The beyond that these books take us, should then instill the urge to also go beyond the book after reading it. I was curious to know what people thought about the responsibilities readers have. I talked to a friend, Hannah Bynum, that has no academic tie to English–both a nonmajor and nonminor. I asked her a series of questions (which you can find below) to see how others read books. I made sure to tell Hannah to answer as honestly as possible; I didn’t want her to think that her answers should be catered to me (ps: you can listen to the interview here or read the transcript here!). When asked about meaning-making, Hannah found it crucial. She said, “I feel like when you’re reading something, and just reading the pages on a book, it–it kind of defeats the purpose of actually reading. I feel like there’s hidden meanings between the lines of every book.” She went on to say, “…it could be written one way, but it could actually mean, another way or multiple ways for each individual.” When I asked her if readers owe anything to the author, she answered with, “I feel like when a writer or an author put something out there, I feel like they’re kind of opening themselves up to a vulnerability of being criticized for their writing, for their storytelling, for their accounts of what they’re writing, but I feel like it’s the reader’s responsibility to kind of make their own meaning of what the author is saying.” Hannah agrees that readers owe something to the writer. She never explicitly said what that means, but later when I mentioned telling people about the book you’ve read, whether it is in class or with friends, she replied with “Absolutely.” I think her not knowing is normal and I think many people might not know either. Responses don’t always mean a book report or a letter to the author (although that is definitely great); it’s more so doing what you can with what you have.

The Big Takeaway

Authors put in their own effort to write their pieces for us, so we owe them effort in return. As previously mentioned, the effort can come in a variety of ways–you can interpret effort in any way you see fit. If you read a book about a social issue and know that you can’t donate to the cause, or march down to their organization and volunteer, there are still ways that you can contribute to the conversation. So what can you do? Tell a friend about the book, post an article about it on your social media page, research more about the topic. Especially in this day and age with thousands of opinions running rampant, we want to make sure we have the facts and one of the ways we can do that is immersing ourselves in as much reading as possible. This might not seem like you’re doing much, but in the grand scheme of things, it really is. Educating yourself can, in turn, educate others. I’ll end this article with a quote from Elif Shafak’s talk, a quote that I’ll let you, the reader, make meaning of (See? Full circle!).

“The problem with today’s cultural ghettos is not lack of knowledge–we know a lot about each other, or so we think–but knowledge that takes us not beyond ourselves: it makes us elitist, distant and disconnected” (00:16:14–00:16:31).

Works Cited:

Frank, Otto H., 1986, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank, Contact Publishing, 1993, front cover.

Glaser, Milton. 1966, The Taming of the Shrew, William Shakespeare, Signet Classic, 1966, front cover.

Shafak, Elif. “The politics of fiction.” TED, July 2010, www.ted.com/talks/elif_shafak_the_politics_of_fiction?referrer=playlist-talks_for_lifelong_readers

Tierney, Robert J., and Jill LaZansky. “The Rights and Responsibilities of Readers and Writers: A Contractual Agreement.” Language Arts, vol. 57, no. 6, 1980, pp. 606–613. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41405009. Accessed 26 Apr. 2020.