Narrating place practices

Or, Things I really like about Aotearoa New Zealand

Now, those of you who know me are going to try to say that this is just me soap-boxing for energy efficiency. But those of you who know my family may recall that my mother has spent the majority of my lifetime lobbying for nice clotheslines. (I am happy to report, before I continue with the story of this particular clothesline, that my mother now has a very smart fold-out clothesline with a lovely view of its own.*) While it is true that this clothesline, the technology upon which I am currently drying my laundry and airing my bedding, has perhaps the best view of any clothesline I have ever seen,** what got me thinking about practices in place, or specifically place-based practices, was the way that the clothesline was introduced to me.

When we first set up house earlier this month for our writing and research sojourn here in Dunedin, our host warily explained, with fond gestures toward the line, that although they do have a clothes dryer, they don’t really use it. When we replied that we, also, had a clothes dryer but preferred to dry out clothes outside (although this sometimes means contending with frozen clothes in the winter), she seemed visibly relieved, and truncated what was clearly meant to be the foundation for a polite but thorough suggestion about the different ways of doing things here (i.e. more efficiently, with more reliance on a wee bit of effort, and less concession to convenience)—an explanation evidently set up against the expectation that we would be unfamiliar with how to do things in the sensible and orderly way.

If this was just a one-off thing, I might not have thought about it from a narrative perspective. But I have been met repeatedly with surprise that am able to carry out everyday skills with basic competence. Clearly, narratives attached to Americans, and perhaps also to academics, suggest we live high-consumption, low-skill lives, perhaps because we are not expected to be good with the physical world. (Our all-day writing also prompts some comments about real work.) But being able to balk these narratives opens up the possibility of being able to view much more explicitly some of the dangerous costs of delegitimazing certain kinds of practices we label as work.

In addition to the most crucial dynamic of being responsible for the work we rely on, rather than putting this labor into the hands of people we are not willing to pay well to do work we don’t want to have to think about, being able to engage with a range of everyday technologies in different places provides access to a realm of meaning making that is easily habituated into invisibility in our home environments. Without romanticizing (tasks such as clotheswashing ARE much easier when mechanized, and this is part of the promise of geographic and gender equity modernity has not delivered), I recognize that when I am able to wash and dry and mend my clothes, or procure and prepare food in different kinds of ways with different tools, I must tell myself more thorough stories about what I am doing, and how, and why. And having gained access to this story layer behind the veil of automaticity, I can take home this relationship with the practices that get me through my day, and my more richly experienced stories of them.

* And the beehives are moving down the generations to me and my brother, in part as a concession to their yellow-spotting interference with laundry hanging.

** You are here looking across Andersons Bay and the Musselburgh Rise toward the downtown and suburbs of Dunedin

Deep Reading

In his new book, The risk of reading, Robert Waxler argues that deep reading of the kind in which we engage when we read a novel, is not just a pass-time. It’s important. It enables us not only to understand the world, but to understand ourselves. Waxler is professor of English literature who, with a friend who was a judge, Robert Kane, started a program called Changing Lives Through Literature. The program, discussed in OnFiction in 2008 (click here) enables young offenders to be sentenced to probation rather than jail on condition that they attend a seminar on literature. With Jean Trounstein, Waxler wrote a book on the project called Finding a voice: The practice of changing lives through literature. 

In the first chapter of his new book, Waxler proposes that the risk we take when we engage with a novel is that we may find ourselves changing as we read. We may find ourselves reflecting on our life, and the lives of others. We may find ourselves setting off on a path towards a more democratic, more humane society. Waxler is also concerned with another risk, which is that the modern digital world lures us away from deep reading. The digital world, he says, is a world of images, seductive and immediate. They divert us from language. Without language, and in particular without narrative language, we can never understand the meaning of our lives, or the meaning of life in general. 

This is a serious argument. How can we evaluate it? It is true that new technologies can alter our engagement with ourselves and with language. Johannes Gutenberg’s introduction of the printing press to Europe, around 1440, was a first step towards universal literacy that everyone now agrees is the basis of education. In medieval times, when books had to be hand-copied, deep reading was available only to the very few, probably mostly monks. Literacy and printing made way for the novel, which flourished in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.The novel enabled many more people to read deeply. 

Many have, like Waxler, worried that the digital age means the end of the novel. I am not sure that this is happening. The main print-medium that has suffered from television and digital media has been the newspaper. Each year more fiction and non-fiction books are published than ever before. One could argue that because the digital world now makes book-shopping so much easier, and book-carrying so much lighter, that more people might read novels. But, of course, one knows what Waxler is worrying about. The internet gives us access to a world of snippets, small pieces of information. Might these come to occupy our attention? Reading a novel is a process of engagement in which the attention is directed to a single work over a long period. It enables not just use of pieces of information, but reflection.

Following his first chapter, Waxler has nine chapters in each of which he discusses a book that you might like to read, to open yourself to the kind of risk of deep reading that he has in mind. They include the Biblical creation story, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness, Ernest Hemingway’s The old man and the sea, and Julian Barnes’s The sense of an ending. I found myself engaged by his discussions of them. Following these chapters, Waxler has a closing chapter in which he reiterates his opening arguments and makes a plea. Keep on reading deeply, and keep on reading novels.

I don’t know Waxler, so to find out a bit more about him, I looked him up on that medium of digital snippets, the internet. One of the sites was “Rate my professors.” The I found that a student says: “Dr. Waxler is a great professor. His passion for literature in a book, not Ipad, is inspirational. His class is not only good for one's academic development, but also for one's soul.” 

Waxler’s new book enables us to take one of his classes. In the book his concern is for our souls.

Trounstine, J. R. & Waxler, R. (2005). Finding a voice: The practice of changing lives through literature. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

Waxler, R. P. (2014). The risk of reading: How literature helps us understand ourselves and the world. New York: Bloomsbury.

Research Bulletin: Do Women Prefer to Read about Female Characters?

There is a lay belief that men and women have different preferences when it come to fiction, specifically that each may prefer to read a story with a protagonist that shares their gender. Do women really prefer stories that feature women, and men prefer stories that feature men? In 2010, Dr. Marisa Bortolussi, Dr. Peter Dixon, and Dr. Paul Sopcak published a study investigating this very question. Dr. Bortolussi is a professor of modern languages who frequently collaborates with Dr. Dixon, a professor of psychology, on questions related to the psychology of fiction. This team of researchers from the University of Alberta produced a clever study in which 4 story excerpts were chosen, 2 with a male protagonist and 2 with a female protagonist, and these were altered to produce version that changed the gender of the main character. Participants then read either the original version or the altered version with the flipped gender, for all 4 excerpts. In this way, the actual story content was held constant across participants and the only thing that changed was the gender of the main character. The researchers also used two separate samples, one from Canada and one from Germany. What they found was that both men and women seemed to prefer the stories that featured male protagonists, regardless of whether the gender had been flipped or was as originally presented. Moreover, these results were observed for the Canadian participants and the German ones, indicating that this effect is not tied to one particular culture. By utilizing several different excerpts and samples from two different cultures, this study demonstrates that the effects observed are not likely to be tied to one particular type of story or one cultural context. This is another interesting example of how our lay beliefs about reading and reading preferences can benefit from scientific investigation and how collaborations between disciplines can often yield some very interesting studies. 

Bortolussi, M., Dixon, P., & Sopčák, P. (2010). Gender and reading. Poetics, 38, 299-318.

Research Bulletin: Reading Enjoyment and Academic Achievement

Students are asked to do a lot of reading, in the form of both storybooks as they learn to read as well as textbooks as they progress through the education system. There are many who feel that reading outside of this context, reading done on the student’s own time, may be an important factor in intrinsically-motivated learning. In other words, those who read for leisure may be most motivated to learn about the world and therefore likely to do well in school and subsequently do better in life. Recently, Dr. Suzanne Mol and Dr. Jelle Jolles investigated leisure reading among a large sample of Dutch adolescents. Over a thousand twelve and thirteen year-olds were polled with respect to their leisure reading habits, their enjoyment of reading, and their tendency to engage in mental imagery while reading, along with their grades in key courses. What they found was that relatively few of the children reported reading for leisure, about 20% of students in a lower academic track and about 33% in the higher academic track. Replicating past research, girls were more likely to engage in leisure reading than boys. What was interesting was that almost without fail, those that reported reading for leisure also reported visual imagery while they read, seeing what was happening in the story in their “mind’s eye.” Another interesting finding was that among those who did not report reading for leisure, a self-reported enjoyment of reading predicted better academic achievement. This association was consistently observed across groups, except for boys in the lower academic track. This latter difference highlights the importance of examining individual differences when investigating how reading predicts academic achievement. A great strength of this study is its large sample size and the relatively homogenous nature of this sample (i.e., all children of about the same age with mostly the same educational experiences), making it easier to detect associations among the variables of interest. Finding a way to foster a love for reading may be an important avenue for potentially improving academic achievement early on in a child’s life. 

Mol, S. E. & Jolles, J. (2014). Reading enjoyment amongst non-leisure readers can affect achievement in secondary school. Frontiers in Psychology, 5, article 1214.

Research Bulletin: Resisting Imagination

Imagination is a big part of fiction. Narratives provide us with a scaffold for structured imagining, often about people and places we wouldn’t have thought to contemplate on our own. But there are things that we often find difficult to imagine, such as the idea that morally reprehensible events are actually justifiable. This phenomenon, that some things are harder to imagine than others or that people seem unwilling or even unable to imagine certain things, is known as ‘imaginative resistance’ within philosophy. Dr. Shen-yi Liao, Dr. Nina Strohminger, and Dr. Chandra Sekhar Sripada conducted a set of empirical studies to examine this phenomenon. What they found was that people who found the morality of a Greek myth difficult to accept personally, also found it difficult to imagine, and struggled to agree with this morality being true even within the fictional world created. In other words, there was evidence that imaginative resistance does exist outside of the discussions philosophers have among themselves. One twist, however, was that people who were more familiar with Greek myths had less trouble imagining the morality portrayed within this myth. A second study largely confirmed these results. This paper is a good example of how empirical research into fiction can originate in all sorts of different disciplines, and an interdisciplinary approach to this topic is likely to benefit our attempts to better understand stories and our imagined experiences within them. 

Liao, S., Strohminger, N., & Sripada, C. S. (2014). Empirically investigating imaginative resistance. British Journal of Aesthetics, 54, 339-355.

Most impressively, Dr. Liao and his colleagues have made the data freely available to those interested.