Porter Abbott on Teaching and the University (Page 4)
From UCSB English Department Knowledge Base
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Professor H. Porter Abbott (Emeritus) discusses his 40+ years of experience teaching at UCSB.
[edit] Teaching Students to Read Closely
Ryan Boyd: "Since we've moved on to the subject of open discussion, I guess now would be the time to move towards teaching, your teaching experience. [...] You wanted to talk about the difference between [teaching] theoretical and critical texts and ["creative"] texts like novels and poems?"
Porter Abbott: "I mainly wanted to make one point that you've probably heard from others, too. It regards your question: do I teach theoretical texts differently from, say, a novel or a poem? And the answer is, not much."
RB: "Really?"
PA: "Yes. I think we're at great risk to the degree that we stray from our textual base, the kind of thing that is our distinction. Any one of us could describe his or her approach as almost anything: anthropological, sociological, psychological, philosophical – name any discipline. But what we bring to the table is the reading of texts: be they poetry, prose, film, drama, pulp fiction, TV sitcoms, comic books. This is our specialty, the transaction that happens between the reader/viewer/listener and the text. That's at the core of the field, and from there the field stretches out to include the entire known universe.
"So theory, if it is not to be circular and continually refer to itself, must always be enlivened by an interchange with practice.
"But there is a caution to be made at this point, and that is that there is almost always in the act of interpretation an act of taking charge. It is an act of mentally grasping the object under consideration. This means that there's a thin line between applying theory to a text and domesticating a text. In my class just the other day, I assigned among other things a rather brilliant Lacanian reading of Mulholland Drive. It was one of those wonderful readings that seemed to achieve dominion over every little piece of the film . . . "
RB: "But it didn't?"
PA: ". . . but it didn't! It was powerful, it was valuable, there was a lot of truth in it, but the film escaped it. I think there has to be some way of including this: the way in which the really interesting works--most works--escape the containment of theory.
"Sometimes it's a matter of looking at your motives. Is the motive achieving the sense of security that comes with mastering the text, anchoring my encounter with it? Or can I live with that margin of uncertainty that all really interesting texts have."
RB: "So close reading is always about being comfortable with aporia and ambiguity?"
PA: "It's another one of the differences between what we do and what our more physical-science-oriented and even social-science-oriented people do, and it's another point of vulnerability, and it's another thing that we have to defend. That's the hard part--defending this, and still getting paid to do it, and not being condescended to."
RB: "Since we're talking about the value of close reading, I wanted to ask you two connected things. One, have you seen a decline in that, in terms of the practice of teachers [...] and Two, have you seen any changes in students' abilities to do close reading, as our culture has become more saturated in digital and visual media? How has that changed things?"
PA: "In the area of narratology, narrative theory, which is weighted down with an enormous amount of abstract theory, especially given its structuralist roots, I'm impressed by the number of really interesting close textual readings that I see. Maybe close reading is coming back. Or maybe this is an innate feature of the field of narrative study, since without a narrative to talk about, there's no field. So it's a field in which theories are continually being tested in practice.
"As for a possible decline in students' abilities to read closely, I'm hard pressed on that. I no longer get, and haven't for ages, not for 35 years, a student who proves a point by citing the Bible, but I did get them the first few years I was here. In my view, the quality of students has steadily improved year after year. If there has been any general decline in the population at large, I haven't seen it that much among the students. It is true that reading seems more of a chore for them, but in every class I have had, there has been a significant handful of students who are really interesting, and who really like to read. I don't know whether we're lucky, teaching where we do, or if I've simply been dumb luck, but I don't think that the students I've taught at the undergraduate level have declined."
Page 4
Interview Date: February 18, 2008
Conducted by Ryan Boyd
