To Read or Not to Read: Perspective Shifts in Comprehensive Exam Reading

By Delaney Couri

“If you are not reading, you are not in my class.”

This is what I said on the first day of class this semester to a room full of thirty eager faces. To their credit, my students didn’t flinch when I said this, but just nodded, with some of them even going as far as to reassure me that I was not coming off as the “mean professor” on the first day. To my credit, I was not trying to be mean; I just wanted to emphasize the importance of reading for my class, which is based around reading, writing, and class discussions. My emphatic statement was not cruel, just a way to get across just how much value I find in the readings and my insistence that our conversations would not sparkle in the ways I wanted unless my students dedicated themselves to reading.

Granted, I should know the value of reading— I spent all summer tackling an eight page reading list with around seventy texts, including books, book chapters, academic articles, and forums. Ideally, all of this reading culminates with the writing of four papers over the span of ten days, papers that show off the knowledge I have consumed over the past three months. I have yet to write these papers, to start my formal comprehensive exam process, but like my students, I too understand that if I don’t do the reading ahead of time, I may as well not even show up on exam day.

Whether or not you have undertaken the comprehensive exam process or had a course stacked with as much reading as mine, you probably understand the value of reading. We read everyday, regardless of our self-proclaimed hatred or love of the medium. Books, newspapers, emails, financial documents, social media posts, blogs… words are all around us. (In fact, if you find yourself here, you too, are reading).

Reading is an active process in that it requires turning pages or scrolling, but it is active in other ways, too. After all, my students and I are not reading just to consume, but to produce. And as someone who has been grading thirty productions per class period, I can assure you that, although all of my students are reading the same text, none of them are reading it the same way. There is a gap between what we read and what we understand and this gap is not necessarily a bad thing. This gap, arguably an interpretation gap, is what gives life its variety
and allows multiple perspectives to thrive. In life, there is no “right answer,” in fact, if you walk into any store, watch any ad, or attend any religious gathering, I have a hunch that each would tell you a different way to grasp and understand “truth” — and each would also argue that they are the only “truth.”

Is capitalism an inevitable truth? What about the free market? Who has the edge on religion?

What, where, and how we absorb truth changes the way that we understand and argue our perspectives. This happens on a larger scale when we filter everyday life through our broader moral and ethical lenses, but also in our daily lives when we sit down to read a text. Think about it for a second; if you read a story about a beloved pet dying right after witnessing a dog viciously attacking your neighbor, how might you feel? What if you read the same story an hour after you had to put your own pet down? You may love pets and value the life of all creatures, this may be your moral stance. But does it not falter or shift, based upon what happens in your day?

Some days I can read news about what is happening around the country with a determined resolve, and some days, depending on conversations happening in my own life, I can hardly bear to read any news at all without fear of bursting into tears.

Currently, I am grappling with this interpretation gap in my own life, on a major and minor level. My broader worldview has always felt comfortable and firm, but through reading and conversations it has begun to shift as I realize it was built on sand, inherently unsteady. This feels like part of the reason for undergoing the comprehensive exam reading process; to understand and (re)make my sense of the world and my (scholarly) place within it. This interpretation gap is intentional — it is my professors challenging me to stretch the way I think.

But the small gap, between what I read yesterday and what I read today, is starting to grate on my academic nerves. How am I supposed to make a cohesive argument if yesterday my feminist text seemed to speak to me about intersectional liberation whereas today it seems to decry the pain of intergenerational misunderstandings? The same text, read by the same person, morphs every day because I change everyday.

My immediate surroundings are tumultuous and unless I read in a vacuum, there is no way I will ever be able to make an argument in one.

So, maybe instead of worrying about this gap, I need to lean into it. Maybe Judith Butler can mean many things to many people, and maybe Delaney yesterday needed to hear a consoling message of hope whereas Delaney tomorrow needs to be kicked in the butt and reminded that the fight is not over yet. I don’t quite know which Delaney is going to show up in the days I am writing, which version of myself will stick around long enough for me to eke out ten pages of cohesive communication. But fighting with myself is doing no good.

It seems like my only option is to practice what I preach in my classroom outside of the classroom, treating each Delaney like a student, full of wonderful, though often different, ideas and insights.

None of them are wrong just as I am not wrong. And, as I have discovered in the few weeks of teaching this course, if we all work together and allow multiple perspectives and voices to flourish, we have come to some sort of mutual understanding and agreement, seeing the text, our interactions with each other, and our relationship to ourselves as more nuanced, complex, and beautiful than we may have ever imagined.

This seems to me to be a great way to read— but an even better way to live.