Now we are analyzing one of Mrs. Mac's favorite
actions: rereading. I must say, before I was one of her students, I never
reread anything. (Harry Potter is the exception because everyone rereads Harry
Potter more than once. Right?) Now, after being one of her students for 3
years, I have learned the act of rereading does have a time and place. Classes
that contain difficult texts like The
Iliad are perfect examples of a time and place for rereading. So, yes,
rereading does help understand texts if they were not so easy to comprehend the
first go around. But rereading is not a tool of one function: it has many uses.
Rereading
certain parts of How to Read Literature
Like a Professor made me realize Foster references The Iliad (and every other part of Greek history for that matter)
more than any other text. Rereading allowed me to understand a part of the
author's personality that I may not have noticed before.
Rereading,
as weird as this may sound, is another way of saying, "Don't read with
your eyes." Foster emphasizes the importance of placing oneself in another
person's shoes. Say you’ve finally finished reading The Iliad. You know what happens in the book, but do you really know what happens in the book? Or even
why? If you are like me, you probably don't. I had to reread several parts of The Iliad over and over again. The first
time I could barely distinguish who was who. The second time I focused on
understanding the plot because it was often nearly impossible to follow. The
third time allowed me to analyze the rhetoric and language the text employed.
Every single time I reread a word, a line, or a page, I felt a new emotion,
understood a character's motivation, or was appalled by an action. If Foster's
book taught me anything, it was that every single line written in a book can,
and often does, stand for something else.
Stone,
ReplyDeleteI agree wholly with your assertion that rereading does not come easy. I dislike going over anything again because it seems that my first read was pointless, then. However, I have no had Mrs. Mac so this may change. Furthermore, I also agree that the idea of rereading sounds like a smart idea. After reading Foster's work, I did not understand some parts that he went off on a tangent about. I discovered that reading a work again could be beneficial at this point in time. I think it takes an intellectually-challenging book to require me to need the extra read. I think that rereading is like an extra set of eyes because on the first you are only just beginning to understand the text. Now that I review Foster's work it makes complete sense to analyze the work on your second read and not try to combine it with simply reading the text in your first read.
Stone, with the experience of also having Mrs. Mac previously, I've also discovered the importance of rereading texts and how it helps us understand more and more. Especially in our Latin experiences, The Iliad and Aeneid were a tad confusing to read at first but piecing them together and rereading them helps comprehend what Homer was actually saying. Without rereading it would've been tough to have the in class discussions and understand what was being said around me. Rereading is furthering your knowledge of what you previously had in the book and expanding on it. It recalls what is known and in some ways stretches it even further.
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