Week 8, Post 1: McCormick: What I Like About You (Mostly)

REACTIONS to McCormick: What do you like? What's don't you like? What seems problematic?

Though I found the reading itself often dense and exhausting, excavation yields some Mother Lode nuggets...followed by some head scratching...

Damn Stubborn
At first, her stubborn dismissal of Objectivist and Expressivist theories seemed unnecessarily pedantic; all of the "social conditioning" rhetoric sounded as if she were winding up to throw a Marxist curveball.  However, after some thought, I have to say, as a socio-cultural proponent, she makes complete sense.  That is, personal interpretation of a text is a fine beginning, but any reading without a social-cultural context would give an anemic viewpoint, at best.

On the other hand, this is nothing "new," per se, since most teachers follow this, I'm confident.  Who could imagine teaching Huck Finn without providing some historical/social/political context?  It wouldn't be nearly as interesting or fun.  How hollow it would be to read "The Yellow Wall-paper" without a discussion of the role of women in the Nineteenth Century.

Nicely Put
Her analysis of reader repertoire and textual repertoire, while not novel in concept, is stunning in its commonsense explanation of an interrelationship most of us have conceived of before, though no one, until now, has ennuciated so acutely, if at all.

All the Parts Fit
I especially enjoy the way all the parts fit when she notes the three different readings possible or, as she puts it, the three "intersections of repertoires" (87).  Again, they're not radically innovative, but they make sense: the repertoires can be a "match" a "mismatch," or there's "tension."  The second group denotes many readings I've had unsatisfactorily.  Looking back now, she's right: the reason for the lack of success (on my part or the author's) is that I likely didn't have enough social information to make sense of it.  The last catergory is most interesting in that it describes plenty of experiences I've had with modern works, such as Naked Lunch.  Even after several excellent lectures helped to digest it, it failed to resonate with me personally.

But Then...
It's a bit ironic.  After McCormick's lambasted the Objectivists for trying to pigeonhole students into coughing up the "the right reading," in the final analysis, McCormick and friends are so demanding of readers that it's unlikely any but the most educated can come close to becoming her ideal reader:

     ...to be a critically literate reader is to have the knowledge and ability to perceive the interconnectedness of social conditions and the reading and writing practices of a culture, to be able to analyse those conditions and practices, and to possess the critical and political awareness to take action within and against them (49).

One has to wonder if to be a student in McCormick's class means being, in the words of NPR, a "political junkie," or a failure.  The bar's been set so high, I wonder who can vault it.

And Then...
Quoting Kathleen Weiler on Freire, McCormick both credits him for his insight, and notes that without "clearly defined theories of the subjectivities of teacher and students" (50), it's possible to wind up oppressing students as much as the Objectivists do.  What the...?  Two issues: 1) I'm not sure what she means by "subjectivities," 2) From the preceding passage, it seems she's confessing that, while it's vital to avoid the "banking" method of the Objectivists, she's not really clear about the actual in-class, day-to-day execution of the non-"banking" method.  That's a sizable confession from someone who rejected the likes of Frank Smith because of the "holes" in this theory. 

But, hey, whadya want?  Like TDOC, it's a theory -- unlike, say, F, A & C, a real how-to manual.